On Bottlenecks

This winter break is almost over. It's been 4 and a half weeks so far, but from this end, it just flew by. I spent the last two weekends at conferences, which is good in that conferences are amazing, but bad in that I come back from them with a notebook of stuff I thought about and no time to re-read anything or collect my thoughts.
OIL was probably the longest conference i've been to thus far, and it was without question intense. I have a program booklet full of notes from seminary professors and a few more books I have to read. But one thing that one of the speakers said as an aside got written down on the back page:
"Just about every American leader went to college."

Think about that.
Almost every person of influence in our world went to a college of some sort.
We have created a culture that puts a great deal of emphasis on higher education, which is in most cases a good thing.

I did some searching for some numbers. Here's what I found.
There are about 24 million 18-24 year olds in the United States.
There are roughly 7,000 colleges in the United States.
College tuition is climbing at a freakily fast rate.
That's because everyone knows that in order to succeed in our world, you have to go to college. So since everyone goes to college, those 7,000 colleges get to charge lots of money for tuition. It's a bottleneck. Every leader in America has to pass through at least one (often more) of those 7,000 institutions.

Interesting fact I just learned from Wikipedia's article on the US's Demographics: There are about 7,000 Episcopal churches in america. That's one Episcopal church per college. There are hundreds of thousands of other churches in our country.

So... how does it make sense that people are capable of graduating college and going on to lead governments and organizations having not heard the Gospel?
There are plenty of churches. They're just not doing their jobs very well.

One thing I've learned so far as a college student is that the first month or so in the water sets a trajectory for the semester, the year, and for life. The first people that meet each other tend to stick around each other. And the company we keep sure affects everything about ourselves. People join frats, clubs, and study groups. The people in those groups are the people that hang around each other. It's an absolutely critical time.
And if you ask me, it seems like a really, really, incredibly easy time for evangelism. People go into college with "open minds", soft fertile soil for any idea and every idea. Might as well take advantage of it.

College campuses. You have thousands of young people concentrated in a teeny tiny area. There's no reason for UNH to be the 11th top party school in the USA when it could easily be the #1 churched school in the USA. How could the world be different if every year, a few thousand young adults graduated on fire for God instead of graduating mostly drunk? You can't fathom it. Don't even try.