There are times I think people over 40 miss college more than I enjoy being in it.
Almost every conversation I’ve had with a family member about school goes like this: They get really excited that I’m at UCLA, tell me an anecdote about their undergraduate experience and then give me some general piece of advice like “work hard and it’ll make your life a hell of a lot easier after graduation.”
These conversations tend to feature empty cliches about what you can expect out of a university like, “College is the time of your life” or “College is where you find yourself.” Beneath the cliche, though, lies an assumption about what you should be looking for when you arrive at a university. Sometimes they want you to discover your future career and others hope you “discover who you are.”
This summer, William Deresiewicz, a former Yale professor, joined the discussion when he published an article in The New Republic telling students not to attend Ivy League schools. He tries to explain that the system of elite education produces students who are “anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose.” Instead, he suggests the purpose of a real education is to teach students “how to build a self” and “how to think.”
On the opposite side of the “let me tell you the purpose of college” spectrum, Harvard professor Steven Pinker, responding to Deresiewicz, argues that students spend too much time doing extracurriculars just because they’ve been conditioned to. Instead of looking for the most well-rounded students, Pinker argues, admissions should only focus on objective measures of intellectual aptitude, like SAT scores. So, the moral development of Deresiewicz gets replaced by a strong focus on what’s happening in the classroom.
The problem, though, for Ivy League professors far removed from their own undergraduate experiences and, probably more importantly, from the experiences of their students, is that these attempts to locate a primary set of goals to achieve in college miss the point. They hide patronizing paternalism behind lofty rhetoric about how students should interpret their own experience.
Rather than there being some hegemonic standard for what students should be going to school for, students should be able to create and sustain their own narrative of what a university means to them.
The idea that you’re supposed to “build a self” and learn how to think in college is consistent with many UCLA students’ experiences. The university offers mountains of clubs, sports teams, activists groups and many other types of extracurricular activities, and many students choose to complement their education with these meaningful forms of campus participation. They make choices about what it means to “build a self,” and the type of meaning they find during that process can’t be generalized.
This stereotyping spills in to his analysis of high school students as well, where Deresiewicz says that the race to get into a top-level school turns students into zombies who are “great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.”
I teach high school and middle school debate for a pipeline to the elite universities that Deresiewicz criticizes, The Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles. Deresiewicz would have you believe that these students are so caught up in the “rat race” that they can’t think for themselves or have any idea why the material they’re learning is important.
On the contrary, these students are able to not only argue with each other, but also engage dense philosophical material, research public policies and articulate and defend a position on a topic throughout a debate round. If this doesn’t constitute learning how to think, I’m not sure what does. Even if some of the students sign up for debate just for something to put on a resume, that doesn’t deny the valuable skills the activity teaches. And more importantly, it doesn’t mean you can’t do something both because it looks good and because you find it meaningful. They’re not mutually exclusive.
The problem, then, is when people try to paint an entire student body or type of student as looking for one thing. Articles that try to offer some cliche catch-all to sum up a university’s purpose like “teach you how to think” are either too vague or come with condescending undertones that imply college students don’t know how to figure this out for themselves.
The point is that yes, elite education can breed ambition without the self-awareness to realize the value of what you’re doing. But it doesn’t have to, and more often than not, ambition pushes students to think more.
Of course universities have to serve a purpose. But there’s a distinction between that and a paternalism that tells students what they should be trying to accomplish while at a university.
Even if that mission is something as ambiguous as “build a self,” deciding what that actually means should be open to interpretation. We should recognize that to generalize students’ experiences is to exclude the value of some students’ perspectives.
The incredible thing I’ve taken from college isn’t some moral development or new intelligence. More than anything, it’s been an exposure to people from every walk of life, each trying to experience the university on their own terms, whatever that means for them.