The College Problem

A brick-and-mortar campus is increasingly obsolete. The physical infrastructure of the college used to make sense for three reasons. First, a good library was essential to higher learning, and only a college faculty and student body provided the economies of scale that made good libraries affordable. Second, scholarship flourishes through colleagueships, and the college campus made it possible to put scholars in physical proximity to each other. Third, the best teaching requires interaction between teachers and students, and physical proximity was the only way to get it. All three rationales for the brick-and-mortar campus are fading fast.

--Charles Murray, "Are Too Many People Going to College?", The American Enterprise Institute

It struck me on a pitch-dark snowy afternoon last year that the university system is badly broken. For a long time I've been meaning to write a post about it, but it's frankly too scary to ponder. Thankfully Charles Murray hits most of the points I'd thought of, and some I hadn't, in the article I quoted above. Please have a look, unless you're on the verge of a wintry-midtermy existential crisis already, in which case you should go have a hot bath and not read any more. But the problems he identifies are practical; mine are spiritual. And if there are are spiritual problems with university, we should make ourselves wary--for college is not only our jobs; it is our lives.

Since 1958, US college enrolment has increased more than fourfold--by nearly ten million--and outstripped population growth during the same period two and a half to one. In 1958, about eight percent of Americans over 25 had completed four or more years of college (and only ten percent of white males, before you ask) Today it's more like 30. And in the wealthy, urban, white or Asian corners of society, going to university after high school has become the rule. Those who have the grades but aren't funnelled into the higher-education system are--well, kind of bohemian. For practical reasons, as Murray shows, these numbers constitute downward pressure on the quality and the value of a university education: though it's contentious to say so, higher education is an inherently undemocratic game and works best when people think of it that way. But I want to consider a more personal consequence of the normalization of the university track: the increasing number of students who find ourselves in university without the faintest idea what we think we're doing here.

Now, there are surely some of us who choose university deliberately, deciding as rational consumers (or self-actualizing free humans, if your terminological inclinations run that way) that we need four years of training for some task or another--as preparation for more academic specialization; or in order to accommodate employers who acquired the leverage decades ago to demand that job applicants train themselves; or to network for business; or to revel in the boundlessness of independence; or to indulge a love of knowledge. Even the student who makes his peace with goal-lessness is, for all intents and purposes, embracing the goal of exploration. For this deliberate student, a goal is always in mind or at least close at hand. And so although his day-to-day may be taxing or exasperating, he will never be forced to ask--"Why?". The answer, unwavering, is his goal; and if his goal is shaken, then he must change his education or he loses his claim to deliberateness. For him, a professor is a resource which he has made deliberate sacrifices to access; not a babysitter, an arbitrary taskmaster, or a vexatious guardian of an elusive degree. A class is either a transfer of desired information or at least a necessary evil, maybe boring but never pointless.

The active student wanders through a rich orchard, reaching to grasp the fruit of knowledge; but the passive student imagines himself as a jar on an assembly belt, waiting to be filled, labelled, and shipped out to bigger and better things. For those with goals close at hand, the orchard is deep and winding and wonderful. For though the most luscious fruit grows on tall trees that resist the climb and deep in the dark hearts of winding vines, every hard-fought jewel of knowledge is a triumph and another precious step toward the goal. But for the rest of us the story is quite different.

The societal normalization of college means that in many circles, postsecondary education is not a path--it is the path, barring intellectual, financial, or familial impossibility. Increasingly, amazingly, it is those who have plans--to travel, to study a trade, to start work--who spurn university and those without plans who end up here. That means hordes of students, pressured by their families or peers to take the college route without specific goals in mind, wander in and--drift. Without a conception of their experience as a deliberate quest for training or knowledge, we drifting students inevitably find ourselves swept up in the mindless grind of readings, lectures, exams, all with no real purpose; and in the vacuum another conception forms: the student, instead of an active seeker of education, begins to think of himself as a passive vessel into which education is placed. He sees education as something done to him; his responsibility is only to show up, not too hung-over, and the rest is the responsibility of the institution. After all, that's what he's paying for! In the absence of any reason to subject himself to this other than the willful self-deception that "a job", a mythic talisman capable of bestowing maturity and meaning even to a person in whom both drives have atrophied, lies waiting to be amazed by the degree program he managed not to fail out of, the only reasonable course is to have as much fun as possible--while he can. The duration of the average bachelor's degree is thus transformed from a means to an end into a means to avoiding an end: it constitutes an absurdly costly pause button, a replacement for the time in the army or the workforce that has become the object of societal disdain. And as if the fact that this attitude guarantees his inability to actually learn anything except by accident wasn't bad enough, in the absence of purpose or ambition, he is left pink and defenceless against the question the arbitrariness, meanness, and difficulty of university life demands of each of us: "Why?"

To make matters worse, most of these accidental scholars opt to study as broadly, cursorily, and noncommittally as they can, spilling into the aisles in lectures on things which should, by rights, only be of interest to a proud and peculiar few: political science, anthropology, Greek mythology. (This point may or may not apply in the sciences; I don't know. But at McGill the arts faculty is twice the size of the next largest one, and I believe drifters are the reason.) The idea that a B. A. can "teach you to think critically" may be true but more likely it is a cooperative, consensual delusion whereby faculty, corporate HR staff, and students can justify an untenable and irresponsible misuse of resources and lives--either way, the average accidental B. A. student will find he never learns to do anything that might enable him to create, to contribute, to support himself--in other words, to work. I believe there is dignity in work, not just waking up early and the joy of getting paid; and the ability to work is a critical component of self-actualization and of being human.

So he drifts.

This drift is the abysmal failure of higher education in our time. Our society's understanding of higher education, and its relationship thereto, is hopelessly muddled, and its result is nothing any less than tens of thousands of disaffected, alienated, half-formed men and women with degrees and nothing else but a strong sense of entitlement and a faint resentment for institutional education and intellectualism. Lacking in productive skills, hopelessly entitled, habituated to think of themselves as passengers in their lives, and clutching a diploma which lacks the job-commanding power they expected, this kind of graduate finds himself at a loss.

Many will opt for graduate school, and it, too, absurdly, is beginning to undergo normalization; they gamble years of their lives on the hunch that in the tradition of grade school, high school, and their undergraduate studies, some unseen institutional hand is guiding them toward productivity, wealth, satisfaction, true knowledge. And this should not be a surprise. We are trained from early childhood to expect this system. But there is of course a crucial difference between public and higher education! Public schooling is mandated--and paid for--by governments. It is controlled by an unseen institutional hand! It is designed to guide us! And though it requires at least some hard work, it is meant to be done to us. But in universities, only the market decides the curricula. No one is responsible in, or concerned by, our education except us. Before graduating from high school, the school is part of a machine that intends to teach us in order to achieve certain social goals--but university is not part of that machine, and it has divested itself of the responsibility to form us. Because in public school we are children: in university we are consumers.

But at some point, we must accept responsibility for our lives. That the mechanism that has created this problem is societal is not to say that the solution is not personal. On the contrary: the recognition of ourselves as the sole beneficiaries of, and stakeholders in, our education is the only solution. Instead of imagining that education will happen whether we like it or not, we should acknowledge the truth: it is the easiest thing in the world to graduate without learning a thing. If you don't want to learn, or if you wait to be forced to do so, you will find it easy. It's not hard even to get As without truly learning--provided you ensure you don't ever analyze and interpret the class material in the context of your own beliefs and the rest of your knowledge. But it is foolish.

To get anything at all out of our so-called education, we drifters must endeavour to see this time in our lives as much too fast, classes much too simplistic, and degrees offered much too easily. We should work harder than we need to, read more than we are required to, and above all think more than we are asked to, in order to catch even the most fleeting glances of real knowledge as we barrel through this stillborn system like a passengers on an express train ploughing through a wonderful museum. We must seize this opportunity by the throat, instead of waiting to be handed something to care about. If we want to get anything out of this life at all, we need to do away with the rotten, insidious idea that life begins after graduation.

Frankly--it's about time we grew up.