culture, higher education, and moral meaning

Quote from Tom Wolfe's new novel I am Charlotte Simmons,
"I guess what I really mean is college is like this four-year period you have when you can try anything--everything--and if it goes wrong, there's no consequences? You know what I mean? Nobody's keeping score? You can do things that if you tried them before you got to college, your family would be crying and pulling their hair out and giving you these now-see-what-you've-gone-and-done looks?...--and if you tried these things after you left college and you're working, everybody's gonna f***ing blow a fuse, and your boss will call you in for a--...--little talk, he'll call it, or if you have a boyfriend or a husband, he's gonna totally freak out or crawl off like a dog, which would be just as bad, because it'd make you feel guilty?...College is the only time in your life, or your adult life anyway, when you can really experiment, and at a certain point, when you graduate or whatever, everybody's memory like evaporates. You tried this and this and this and this, and you learned a lot about how things are, but nobody's gonna remember it? It's like amnesia, totally, and there's no record, and you leave college exactly the way you came in, pure as rainwater."

Is this what our culture thinks about college? If so, it is an awfully sad view of education and the good life.