Carlos: Help! I’m anxious to hear from you. I’ll be in my room and won’t leave it until I hear from you. Tomorrow is the last day for...
　　Carlos: I left town because I started 1)bugging out again. I stayed up all night to finish a take-home make-up exam and am typing it to hand in on the 10th. It was due on the 5th. P.S. I’m going to the dentist. Pain is pretty bad.
　　Carlos: Here follows 2)a tale of woe. I went home this weekend, had to help my Mom, and caught a fever, so didn’t have much time to study. My professor…
　　Who are these wretched supplicants,
　　scribbling notes so 3)laden with anxiety, seeking such miracles of postponement and 4)balm? They are men and women who belong to 5)Branford College, one of the twelve 6)residential colleges at 7)Yale University, and the messages are just a few of the hundreds that they left for their dean, Carlos Hortas—often slipped under his door at 4 a.m.—last year.
　　Nobody could doubt that the notes are real. In their urgency and their 8)gallows humor they are 9)authentic voices of a generation that is panicky to succeed.
　　My own connection with the message writers is that I am 10)Master of Branford College. I live in its 11)Gothic 12)quadrangle and know the students well. I am 13)privy to their hopes and fears—and also to their stereo music and their piercing cries in the dead of night.
　　Mainly I try to remind them that the road ahead is a long one and that it will have more unexpected turns than they think. There will be plenty of time to change jobs, change careers, change whole attitudes and approaches. However, they just want a map—right now—that they can follow 14)unswervingly to career security, financial security and social security.
　　What I wish, for all students, is some release from the 15)clammy grip of the future. I wish them a chance to savor each segment of their education as an experience in itself and not as a 16)grim preparation for the next step. I wish them the right to experiment, to 17)trip and fall, to learn that defeat is as instructive as victory and is not the end of the world.
　　I see four kinds of pressure working on college students today: economic pressure, parental pressure, peer pressure, and 18)self-induced pressure. It is easy to look around for 19)villains—to blame the colleges for charging too much money, the professors for assigning too much work, the parents for pushing their children too far, the students for driving themselves too hard. But there are no villains, only victims.
　　
　　First, they live in a brutal economy. Tuition, room, and 20)board at most private colleges now comes to at least $7,000, not counting books and fees. Tuition covers only 60% of what it costs to
　　educate a student, and ordinarily the remainder comes from what colleges receive in 21)endowments, 22)grants, and gifts. Now the remainder keeps being swallowed by the cruel costs—higher every year—of just opening the doors. Everything is up.
　　

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