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Notes -
How does college make it so "you are still surrounded by the same set of people every day, forced into constant, recurring proximity"?
Certainly there are many easy socialization opportunities in college but those are very self selected, at least after the very beginning. Hell, I barely even bothered attending classes after the first semester (except for a few mandatory ones and those related to my later masters studies specialization). In comparison in high school the course selection is much more limited, there are at most a couple of different tracks and you have to actually be there every day.
Dorm living (for students from out-of-town at least) isn't very self-selected, and manages constant, recurring proximity pretty well, for colleges with a high enough percentage of students living on campus. I think my college had around 75% of undergrads living on campus at any one time, nearly 100% living on campus at some point - probably nothing of this applies to "commuter colleges". Most importantly, dorm life forces students into constant, recurring proximity in their free time after class, which makes it a lot easier to turn proximity into friendship than the few minutes of free time in between high school classes or whatever opportunities a teacher provides for kids to socialize in classes.
Thinking back: of my top 11 friends in college, I may only ever have had a class with 2 of them. 7 of them (and IIRC one of those 2, too) were people I met in the dorm. I only actually lived in a dorm for 2 out of 4 years, too, but even during the other years I'd be pulled into proximity with dorm residents whenever I'd visit friends or a girlfriend there.
I think this might be a stronger claim. I made something like half of those friends in my first month at college, when the (non-local, which was most of us) freshmen were all in "must make new friends now" mode while the upperclassmen were in "must be nice to the nervous new freshmen" mode. Miss that window somehow and you'll probably at least need to keep your ear to the ground for opportunities to go to clubs and study groups and public parties and such easy-to-enter quasi-social circles.
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Er... by doing just that? That is exactly what my college experience was like, I'm very confused by this question. I saw the same people every day, whether that was guys in the dorm or people in classes. And the people in classes were fairly consistent from term to term because the fellow students in my major were taking many of the same classes as me.
Something tells me that this is a very unusual college experience. At any rate it is completely dissimilar to mine. If one cared about learning (to be fair I didn't cause I was young and stupid), you aren't going to learn without going to class. And if you care about passing, you are still going to miss out on participation points (often a significant chunk of my grades!) if you don't go to class.
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I have the same question. The social situation where college fills this role but high school doesn't seems to be rather peculiar.
I didn't say high school didn't fill that role. As it happens it didn't (I was home schooled), but you definitely read something that wasn't there into my post on that front. For the rest, see my reply to SkoomaDentist.
It makes sense then.
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