>If you don't go to college, moving out of the house and becoming financially independent does the same thing. You get hit with the real world and suddenly discover first-hand what's important in life. You discover the cliques and petty rivalries of high school just don't work.

Whether they work or not isn't entirely relevant. Cliques and petty rivalries certainly do exist in "the real world", and touch the lives even of those most would consider "mature" and "successful". Office politics and keeping-up-with-the-Jonesing happens everywhere. It doesn't stop when we get our diplomas and degrees, and it doesn't necessarily halt anybody's progress unless they break out of it.

>It happens most dramatically for the popular snobs in high school. They get to college, discover the showboating that's always worked for them falls flat, and have to rethink their social behavior. Some never do, but enough do that college environments tend to be so dramatically different from what you find in high school.

It seems to me that this "real world" stuff is largely overblown. The people I know here at college getting the hotshot corporate jobs are exactly the sort of glad-handling, back-stabbing "shallow" people we all know from high school who are getting slammed in this thread. The people who come back to the college to talk at job fairs and whatnot about their hotshot corporate jobs are the same types of people. This sort of social behavior seems to have little correlation with success, so far as I can tell.

The "real world" is not in-and-of-itself going to just magically change people. People will stop being backstabbing jagoffs when they get backstabbed themselves one too many times. They won't do it because they're suddenly in the real world and the car payment's due next week. Some people will get very far being shallow and maniuplative. Others won't. The "real world", as I sort of argued in the post I made responding to Ria elsewhere in this thread, isn't as different from the educational world as we like to think it is. It's different, but if one can figure out how to beat the social system when they're 15, they'll figure it out when they're 25, too.

Basically, my point is that there is no such thing as karma, and these people aren't just going to get their come-uppances (to use a phrase my karma-loving roommate enjoys spouting). A lot of them will do perfectly fine in life, despite being absolute jerks that you and I would refuse to hang around. *That's* the real world.

TOM