Because learning from the mistakes of the past is so five minutes ago, spoiled young Americans nationwide have yet to understand that racing to get rich is really a very horrible, unwise thing to do with one's life. This as many of their parents struggle to make this semester's tuition payments. What little brats we're rearing.

To wit, many college students, instead of going abroad to study foreign art or interesting cultures, are choosing to spend a semester in the exciting and unique locale of Los Angeles, California, boning up on how to make money in the clustered vampire pit that is Hollywood.

A growing number of U.S. colleges and universities, mostly from the East Coast and the South, are making something close to that pitch for what are in effect study-abroad programs in the Los Angeles area. And while programs in Italy often emphasize art and those in England literature, the focus here is squarely on the entertainment industry and on internships that might jump-start a Hollywood career.

Emerson College in Boston, the University of Texas at Austin, Boston University and Ithaca College in New York are among those that sponsor year-round or summer programs that bring students to Southern California. Others include Columbia College in Chicago, Temple University in Philadelphia, Elon University in North Carolina and a national consortium of Christian colleges.

Some students come because Los Angeles' dirty strip malls and overcrowded beaches are foreign to them – "'We joke that we are in a foreign country here,' said Bill Linsman, who heads Boston University's 6-year-old Los Angeles Internship Program – others come because they chose their undergraduate school poorly – "It would be silly of me to study four years of communications in upstate New York, cut off from the rest of the world" – and still others come because they're cowards that can't do things by themselves – "A writing major, he says the L.A. semester is a good way to 'dip your toe in the water' of the entertainment industry without the risk of going it alone." Regardless of the reason, it's safe to say all of them are used as common slave laborers before being sent home jaded and thinner.

And what, you wonder, do these programs offer that students' mother schools do not? Glad you asked:

Upstairs, the Emerson program's executive director, Jim Lane was screening 'A Clockwork Orange,' the controversial 1971 movie, for 19 students in his course about American films of the '70s. Later, Lane lectured about director Stanley Kubrick's bold cinematic style and detailed the film's themes of violent youth and untrustworthy authorities.

Because no other film schools in the world offer classes about the genius of Kubrick.