What is College for?

mackinaw
Fri, 15 Dec 2017 11:38:18 +0000

I think many students attend college mainly because it’s expected of them. They’re motivated by their parents and peers, they hope to discover their true career interests, and they want to have a good time while doing it. But they may soon discover that that college is like working in a coal mine. “You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” And for those students college is work above all. The goal is survival and a credential.

But while they may well be loading coal a lot – following a curriculum of courses that don’t have much intrinsic interest to them – they ought to value acquiring skills, using new tools, and experimenting and discovering things they didn’t know. The biggest payoff may be in discovering things they didn’t know they didn’t know, but that they come to realize they should know. This happened to my daughter, who went to college to study art but partly by chance discovered in some elective courses that she was interested in environmental studies, environmental design. Now that’s what she teaches and what she promotes. (And they pay her to do this.)

If students can do this – figure out what they should know that they don’t know – they can get a lot out of college. A good general curriculum will offer them a chance to make such discoveries, as well as a way to follow up. Sometimes they can graduate in four years with some new intellectual tools, and have a way to market themselves. Sometimes they will see that they need advanced or specialized education – and enroll in a masters program, perhaps part-time while employed.