07

The most active thread yesterday was the same one that was the most active the day before. That was the thread about the husband who revealed his college roommate's affair in retaliation for the roommate suggesting that the original poster's daughter was fat. I'll skip that thread and go to the next one which was titled, "Overcrowding/Overenrollment Issues at top tier schools" and posted in the "College and University Discussion" forum. The original poster cites two anecdotes involving two different popular universties that suggest those schools are experiencing overcrowding and wants to know which other universities have such issues and how that can be found out. The DCUM college forum has increasingly become one of our more popular forums. Moreover, the caliber of the threads is often quite high with quite a bit of useful information being shared. This thread, unfortunately, is not one of those. Rather, this thread gets bogged down in some of the worst divisions that plague the forum. Many of the forum's participants are obsessed with college rankings and, therefore, it was no surprise that a debate broke out about whether the two universities named by the original poster were really "top tier" schools. The same happened with other colleges named by posters. There was also a debate about whether this was solely an issue with public universities and could be avoided by choosing private colleges. Posters quickly broke into two camps, each defending its favorite type of school and attacking the other. Schools in the University of California system received particularly harsh criticism with a number of extreme allegations about them being made. Those schools also had their defenders, who denied a number of the claims. I had to laugh at one exchange that began after a poster insisted that overcrowding issues were limited to public universities. Another poster provided an anecdote involving Boston University in which the dorms were so crowded that students were housed in hotels. Rather than acknowledge that overcrowding apparently did impact private schools, a poster argued that "being in a hotel in Boston is almost like (or even better than) being in a dorm". But the biggest issue with this thread was the sparsity of substantive data to back up the claims being made. Posters routinely made claims about schools that appeared more likely to be urban legends than reality. When asked to support their allegations, they often turned to sources such as Reddit, provoking incredulity. The discussion in this thread is scattered and goes all over the place with a number of separate topics being discussed. It might have some usefulness for anyone considering University of California schools, but otherwise it is hard to separate fact from fiction.