What is College For? (NYTimes)

In What is College For? the author makes some important points to remember about the point of college- it's not only about learning, but about learning how to learn and become a lifelong learner.

Is college worth it? he asks and cites in the affirmative a Pew research survey this year that found 74% of graduates from four-year colleges who say their education was “very useful in helping them grow intellectually;” 69% that “it was very useful in helping them grow and mature as a person;” and 55% that “it was very useful in helping prepare them for a job or career.”  86% think “college has been a good investment for them personally.”

There has been however much discussion recently about the “failure” of higher education. Criticisms include it’s too expensive, admissions policies are unfair, the drop-out rate is too high. The article continues, "There are serious concerns about the quality of this experience.  In particular, the university curriculum leaves students disengaged from the material they are supposed to be learning." Students perceive most of their courses as intrinsically “boring” and spend on average only about 12-14 hours a week studying. "Professors have ceased to expect genuine engagement from students and often give good grades (B or better) to work that is at best minimally adequate."

*****

This lack of academic engagement is real, even among schools with the best students and the best teachers, and it increases dramatically as the quality of the school decreases.  But it results from a basic misunderstanding — by both students and teachers — of what colleges are for.

First of all, they are not simply for the education of students.  This is an essential function, but the raison d’être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture; that is, a world of ideas, dedicated to what we can know scientifically, understand humanistically, or express artistically.  In our society, this world is mainly populated by members of college faculties: scientists, humanists, social scientists (who straddle the humanities and the sciences properly speaking), and those who study the fine arts. Law, medicine and engineering are included to the extent that they are still understood as “learned professions,” deploying practical skills that are nonetheless deeply rooted in scientific knowledge or humanistic understanding.  When, as is often the case in business education and teacher training, practical skills far outweigh theoretical understanding, we are moving beyond the intellectual culture that defines higher education.

Our support for higher education makes sense only if we regard this intellectual culture as essential to our society.  Otherwise, we could provide job-training and basic social and moral formation for young adults far more efficiently and cheaply, through, say, a combination of professional and trade schools, and public service programs.  There would be no need to support, at great expense, the highly specialized interests of, for example, physicists, philosophers, anthropologists and art historians.  Colleges and universities have no point if we do not value the knowledge and understanding to which their faculties are dedicated.

This has important consequences for how we regard what goes on in college classrooms.  Teachers need to see themselves as, first of all, intellectuals, dedicated to understanding poetry, history, human psychology, physics, biology — or whatever is the focus of their discipline.  But they also need to realize that this dedication expresses not just their idiosyncratic interest in certain questions but a conviction that those questions have general human significance, even apart from immediately practical applications.  This is why a discipline requires not just research but also teaching.  Non-experts need access to what experts have learned, and experts need to make sure that their research remains in contact with general human concerns. The classroom is the primary locus of such contact.

Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding.  Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting.  It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have.   Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting.

Students readily accept the alleged wisdom that their most important learning at college takes place outside the classroom.  Many faculty members — thinking of their labs, libraries or studies — would agree.  But the truth is that, for both students and faculty members, the classroom is precisely where the most important learning occurs.