The True Value of College
On any news site, it is easy to find articles that villainize college for being too expensive with too little return and others that talk about the “best degrees to make money.” As college replaces high school as the ticket to a career, commentary from pundits and lawmakers on college has increased. However, this increased commentary has been naïve and misleading.
People now talk about college as if it’s a commodity, something that can be evaluated in purely economic terms. What is an English major’s average starting salary from college X? What is the average debt of college Y’s alumni? How much does it cost to attend college Z, and is it worth it? These questions have created a whole industry of ranking systems that put these superficial questions above actual academic quality.
Even on purely economic grounds, such questions, while not useless, begin with a false assumption. If we are going to treat college as a commodity, and an expensive one at that, we should at least understand that it works differently than other commodities. A car’s quality is dependent on the manufacturer. College, however, requires the “buyer” to do most of the work to obtain its value. The value of a degree depends more on the student's input than on the college’s curriculum. Not every earth-shaker comes from Harvard or Princeton, or even Exeter, and not every Yale and Dartmouth graduate goes on to change the world. The courses the student decides to take, and not to take, the amount of work the student does, their intellectual curiosity, their participation in class and their focus and determination—all contribute far more to their educational “outcome” than the college’s overall curriculum, much less its amenities and social life. But most public discussions talk about students receiving their diplomas the same way a person receives a Christmas present.
This new attitude about college has been destructive. Governors and legislators, as well as the media, treat colleges like sellers, students as consumers and degrees as products. This has created an atmosphere of entitlement where students can feel privileged to classes that don’t push them, to high grades and to material that does not challenge their assumptions or make them uncomfortable. Colleges too often cater to student demands for trigger warnings, “safe rooms” and canceled commencement speakers. When rating colleges, as everyone from the president to weekly magazines insist on doing nowadays, people use performance measures such as graduation rates and time to degree as if though those figures depend entirely upon the colleges and not at all upon the students.
This point is made succinctly by a story about a university president who said this to new freshmen each year: “For those of you who have come here in order to get a degree, congratulations, I have good news for you. I am giving you your degree today and you can go home now. For those who came to get an education, welcome to four great years of learning at this university.”
It’s time to realize that college is not a commodity. It’s a challenging engagement in which both the students and professors have to take an active and risk-taking role if its potential value is to be realized. As we Exonians should know, the professor is meant to inspire, to prod, to irritate, to create engaging environments that enable learning to take place in a way can’t happen simply from reading books or watching films or surfing the Web. As said by former Emory University president Bill Chace, good teachers “supply oxygen” to their classrooms; they do not merely supply answers or facts. And good colleges provide lots of help to students who face challenges completing their degrees in a reasonable amount of time.
This commitment is a two-way road; students have to take the wheel and have the passion to learn and take advantage of their institution. They owe this not only to their professors but also to their parents and themselves. After all, the decision to go to college is a decision to make an investment in their future, an investment of time and money. And for many, a college education is expensive. It’s the student’s job to in making sure it’s money well spent.
Students need to apply themselves to the daunting task of using their minds, a much harder challenge than most of them realize. To write a thoughtful, persuasive argument requires hard thinking and clear, cogent rhetoric. To research any moderately complex topic requires one to formulate good questions, critically examine lots of evidence, analyze one’s data and finally one must present one’s findings in succinct prose or scientific formulas.
The ultimate value of college doesn’t come from each individual class: it doesn’t necessarily matter if a student remembers everything from a chemistry class. The true value of college is the discovery that you can use your mind to make your own arguments and even your own contributions to your knowledge. It’s that discovery that is life-changing.
To create what is, for most of us, that “new sensation,” you need a professor who provokes and a student who stops slumbering. It is the responsibility of colleges and universities to place students in environments that provide these opportunities. It is the responsibility of students to seize them. In the words of Hunter Rawlings, “genuine education is not a commodity: it is the awakening of a human being.” ♥