At its best, college should aim to produce graduates with a reasonable background in a subject, a willingness to continue learning for the rest of their lives, and an ability to assume roles as capable citizens. Instead, for many people college has become, in the words of a graduate of a well-known party school in California, “those magical seven years between high school and your first warehouse job.” College is no longer a passage to educated maturity and instead is only a delaying tactic against the onset of adulthood—in some cases, for the faculty as well as for the students. Part of the problem is that there are too many students, a fair number of whom simply don’t belong in college. The new culture of education in the United States is that everyone should, and must, go to college. This cultural change is important to the death of expertise, because as programs proliferate to meet demand, schools become diploma mills whose actual degrees are indicative less of education than of training, two distinctly different concepts that are increasingly conflated in the public mind. In the worst cases, degrees affirm neither education nor training, but attendance. At the barest minimum, they certify only the timely payment of tuition. This is one of those things professors are not supposed to say in polite company, but it’s true. Young people who might have done better in a trade sign up for college without a lot of thought given to how to graduate, or what they’ll do when it all ends. Four years turns into five, and increasingly six or more. A limited course of study eventually turns into repeated visits to an expensive educational buffet laden mostly with intellectual junk food, with very little adult supervision to ensure that the students choose nutrition over nonsense. The most competitive and elite colleges and universities have fewer concerns in this regard, as they can pick and choose from applicants as they wish and fill their incoming classes with generally excellent students. Their students will get a full education, or close to it, and then usually go on to profitable employment. Other institutions, however, end up in a race to the bottom. All these children, after all, are going to go to college somewhere, and so schools that are otherwise indistinguishable on the level of intellectual quality compete to offer better pizza in the food court, plushier dorms, and more activities besides the boring grind of actually going to class.
College is probably seen as the “magic pill” that would create a group of highly educated and critical thinkers with a passion for lifelong learning. Instead, it has failed to accomplish this lofty objective and has not helped stem the tide in people unnecessarily going against experts without having a good grasp on the issues.
For me, its always a thin line between having no mind of your own (“being a sheep”) or learning to accept that there are others who see a broader perspective. It has always been a delicate balancing act. Having more education might also just get us to double down on our confirmation biases as well.
This excerpt also reminds me of how the main purpose for most of us going into higher education is about getting ahead in the job market. For most of us, signalling that we are intelligent and capable members for the workforce via academic results comes before the actual passion of learning. Its not wrong, and its also probably asking too much to expect some 19-20 year olds to figure out their existential purpose for entering higher education.
P.s I have been super busy in my day life and its been tough trying to keep churning out content on a daily basis. I have also been trying to be more thoughtful about the excerpts I share, and the time taken for each post has increased. Alternative day postings seem to be much more likely going forward.
Also, feel free to share any interesting books that you might have read and I’ll add it into my upcoming list.
