What Is College For?

A few days ago I was again watching the PBS TV program called "Moyers & Company," which is an interview program. That episode's guest was a man called Junot Diaz, who is an author and teaches Creative Writing at MIT. Aside from much of interest in the man's background or personal story, my attention was caught by a (perhaps somewhat incidental) observation he made about a change he has observed in college students over the course of the 20 years he has been teaching.

He said that students today all seem like MBA students; that they are working for a piece of paper like one that would gain them admission to a medieval guild.

In other words (and as he himself said), parents who send their kids to school today are not doing it to build character or maturity or wisdom, or for the sake of any such changes between their temples that might be looked for. Rather, they are there just to be able to get a better job. I, let it be said immediately, am a firm believer in "liberal education." (Does one even hear that term anymore?) That is, I am of the school (no pun) that believes that what education is about is things like learning how to think logically and critically, gaining an appreciation of thousands of years of human cultural advances, and so forth. That is, gaining what once were called "humane values."

If I had the opportunity to talk to Mr. Diaz myself, I would have had to chime in with the fact (or opinion) that it's not just a phenomenon of the last 20 years. When I first taught in a collegiate institution, I found the same thing—and that was 45 years ago!

So I would agree that there definitely has been a change in our society's view of college and in its expectations of college. But I have some ideas as to the cause.

First: In the 1960s and into the 70s, in the era of the "counter-culture," student protests against the Vietnam War, and so forth, students were (among other things) fighting for "relevance" in their education. That evidently meant no more "dead poets"; no more history. We want to learn about today's world, we have no interest in (or respect for) the past—including both history and writers of past ages.

Then again, there has been a big change in who goes to college. It's not just the children of well-to-do families, who might be sent to college to acquire a bit of culture before going into the family business or becoming doctors or lawyers. More students—including very many of the young people I was teaching—were the first in their families to go to college. The parents of these young people were sending their kids to college so that they would earn more money. A BA equals dollars: it's that simple.

You put the two factors together, and what you've got is, students from working-class or lower-middle-class families go to some school beyond high school and they want to become system engineers (whatever that is) or network managers—to get a good job in IT or some such field where no one cares about your pedigree. So—don't teach me history. Don't teach me literature. Just the courses directly relevant to my future career. Anything else is a waste of time.

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Stein