Just about any Pomona student will tell you that they truly enjoyed their college experience. And it’s not just the free booze that makes Pomona one of the happiest colleges in the country. It helps, but the booze alone couldn’t make everyone so darn genuinely happy, day in and day out. After all, some people don’t even drink, and they seem just as happy as everyone else. It’s not the location either. The classes are good, and the professors are great, and that certainly plays its part, and it’s an open, friendly campus, which is nice. But there is some other factor which makes people like this place so much. There are some people who were dead set on hating it. Why, you might wonder, did they go in the first place? One reason was parental pressure. Another was students, who by the end, had to grudgingly admit that they had enjoyed themselves. They might still claim that they don’t have an affectionate place in their heart for their alma mater, but they can’t deny that the experience was worthwhile.
The question is, “Why are Pomona students so unabashedly jolly?” There are only two feasible answers. One, they drug the water here. Unlikely, perhaps, but maybe Pomona is the site of a modern day governmental experiment in mass mind control. Barring that, it must be that people here just really like the people they go to college with. Are Pomona students better people than other selective liberal arts college students? Probably not. However, Pomona puts a great deal of stress on allowing people space to find their own way of doing things, both socially and academically. Sometimes, this is frustrating, sometimes people pine after the lost structure of high school and family life, but in the end, with the amount of freedom students are granted, they end up somewhere they want to be. Now if only everyone could get jobs.