Americans say the SATs are a "necessary evil"

Welcome to the 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll for April. After a very tough winter in much of the country, Americans will get an early spring bouquet of great sporting events. Major League Baseball kicks off its marathon season in many cities on April 1st (no fooling).

Speaking of marathons, the world's oldest annual race will take place in Boston on April 16th. CBS Sports will have a huge week broadcasting the NCAA Men's Basketball Semifinals and Finals on April 6th and 8th.

Right after a champion is crowned, it will be on to the Masters, golf's most prestigious event. Is a Tiger lurking around Amen Corner? All eyes will be on Augusta National to find out. April is also becoming known as "Judgment Month," when colleges send out rafts of acceptances and rejections. It is a time of excitement and anxiety, of exhilaration and crushing disappointment. And that's just for the parents! In honor of those anxious students the theme of this month's poll is centered around college life, past and present, a topic that holds endless fascination for many Americans. And now the results.

Eighty-six percent of Americans say they would not care either way if they found out that a friend or colleague had been a member of a fraternity or sorority in college. Seven percent said it would depend on which one while only five percent would think more or less of them. Years ago, it carried some cachet to be a member of such a brother or sisterhood, but nowadays it's all Greek to most Americans.

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A third of Americans were aware that the well-respected, but counter-intuitively named Northwestern University was located in Illinois and not the Northwestern United States. Seventeen percent guessed the state of Washington, 11 percent chose Michigan, six percent picked Oregon and three percent Montana. Twenty-nine percent wouldn't even give it the old college try and hazard a guess.

This was a tough one, but 12 percent went presidential and they correctly identified Calvin Coolidge as the only one on the list not to drop out of college. Silent Cal who is enjoying a spike in popularity from some factions for his less-is-more style of governance, graduated from prestigious Amherst College. The well-oiled John D. Rockefeller finished with 14 percent, followed by funny lady Ellen Degeneres with 12 percent.

Steve Jobs (eight percent) stopped putting Apples on teacher's desks before he could graduate and Mark Zuckerberg (five percent) gave up "face time" with his professors early as well. Ralph Lauren (five percent) also had designs on an early departure from college and David Geffen (two percent) produced an awful lot after his fade out. Forty percent of Americans "dropped out" of answering the question saying they did not know.

Three out of four Americans do not know the name of the current dean or president of their alma mater. Of those that graduated from college, 68 percent said that they could not name them and 32 percent said they could. This should be a wake up call to many institutions of higher learning. If their mission is to assist students and alumni in their ability to communicate well, they should start by doing a better job of communicating themselves.

Four out of 10 Americans would describe the Scholastic Aptitude Tests for prospective collegians as a necessary evil. It jumps up to 48 percent for those who have a child attending or about to attend college. Twenty-three percent call them a successful equalizer, 19 percent describe them as a waste of time and 14 percent characterize them as a failed ideal. Until they come up with a better idea, the SAT's will continue to be a standardized and somewhat subjective tool used in the American rite of passage known as the college admissions process.

If a college education was free, 23 percent of Americans said their lives would be most different because they would have gone to college. Nineteen percent said they would have pursued a more advanced degree if money was no object. Thirteen percent said they would have attended a different college (presumably due to no financial constraints). 12 percent said their lives would be most different because they wouldn't be in debt and 31 percent said their lives would be no different. That's more than two out of three Americans who might be leading different lives if higher education was free.

The last thing that the parents of half of all college freshmen would like to hear about their son or daughter is related to either pursuing or indulging in the illegal consumption of alcohol. Twenty-five percent would least like to be identified with an underage child who is a whiz at making fake IDs while 24 percent would quiver at hearing that their kid holds the record for most Jell-O shots consumed in one night. Twenty percent would be laid bare if they heard their offspring was hosting a Sex Ed class in their dorm room twice a week. All of which makes hearing your kid broke an ankle while streaking at the football game (10 percent) or is sharing a room with a farm animal (eight percent) seem tame by comparison.

Despite the fact that good jobs are harder than ever to find, 45 percent of American parents would advise their college juniors to turn down the dream job and stay in school. Twenty-seven percent would give no opinion and let their collegians make their own decision and 23 percent would encourage them to drop out of school and take the leap of faith. Dream jobs can work out very well or they can fizzle out quickly, but many parents have learned that a college degree lasts a lifetime.

Of those Americans that attended college, nearly half (48 percent) wish they had studied more. It's not hard to see why because 57 percent of those that wished they had studied more never graduated. Forty percent wish they had done more networking, their motto must be "it's not what you know, it's who you know." Four percent said they wish they had more sex during college (really, only four percent?). And get this, one percent said they wish they had done more drugs while they were in college. Guess how many of that group graduated?

Pizza and pasta tied with 21 percent each as foods that students consumed more of than at any other time in their lives during college. Now we know where the term "freshmen 15" came from. Next up were empty calories with fast food getting 18 percent and emptier calories with junk food getting 13 percent. Beer drew 11 percent and Red Bull three percent, are they really food?

You don't have to be a genius from MIT, or a movie reviewer, to wish that your college experience resembled "Good Will Hunting" (25 percent), but it wouldn't hurt. And you don't have to be a brilliant Harvard drop out to want to emulate "The Social Network" (21 percent), and it didn't hurt Bill Gates either.

Another Harvard story, "Legally Blonde" got 11 percent and so did "Animal House" (admit it, you always wanted to go to a Toga Party and be put on double secret probation). Only seven percent would have liked to reenact "The Revenge of the Nerds" at college and 25 percent didn't know which film about college life they would have most liked their experience to resemble.