What's the point of college?

I teach college. I'm relatively new at it, and I've noticed that a lot of smart people have conflicting ideas about what it's supposed to do.

One idea is what I call the selection hypothesis. College is supposed to separate people who are smart, motivated, or some combination of the two from people who aren't. For example, I once asked my stepfather, a vice-president who frequently makes final decisions on hiring, what he expected from college graduates, and he said, "College shows me someone was able to show up every day for four years and do their work." For him, college selects between people who can do shit and people who can't.

A competing idea is the transformation hypothesis. College is a transformational experience where students learn to interact with the world in better ways. In a previous thread Lizard King gave the best argument I've seen in its support:

Recently, I was reading an article by my favorite blogger who, while discussing the issue of college graduates on food stamps, argued for what I call the fuck-this-shit hypothesis:

The society that taught people to want a defective college degree is, unfortunately, going to be expected to support those that bought it, it's still under warranty. At the very minimum, it owes them their money back, and if they don't pay you should sue for breach of contract. "At the conclusion of this course, students will show a proficiency in...." The plaintiff rests.

"They should have studied more." Agreed. But then you shouldn't have admitted them, you shouldn't have passed them. Inflate the grade, Gresham's Law the society.

All along you've said "you need to go to college so you can get a good job" but the system was not designed to raise producers, it was designed to raise consumers. Well, here we are. Why are you surprised that they need consumer stamps? Why are you surprised they moved back in with you? "We did the best we could." No you did not, I was there, I saw it. You borrowed against their future, and they can't pay it back. And now you're yelling at them."

Or in other words, whatever college is supposed to be doing, it sucks at it, and it needs to be doing something else. Given that the author is anonymous, it would be easy to dismiss him or her as a random loon, but the assessment joke in the first paragraph and the author's other writings on the subject lead me to believe that this is criticism from someone else who has taught college.

There have been a lot of good discussions on education here. The School Thread alone is better than anything I've ever found on a dedicated education form. It's a nice mix of students and teachers with thoughtful opinions. So what do you people think the purpose of college should be?

It depends on whether you want an 'ideal' answer or a 'bare-minimum' answer. For the bare-minimum, college should instruct you in the basic knowledge constructs of a given academic field and tools to think critically about said constructs. I was a biology major in college, and I think every bio major should be able to proficiently converse about ecology, molecular biology and genetics. Ideally, college should do the bare-minimum AND prepare you to think critically about the future of your field. Ideally, I would want every bio major to be able to talk/think about the issues like genetically modified food, the powers and limitations of genomics, and how to converse with creationists about evolution and molecular biology.

The critical thinking skills and techniques that get you to those goals should help you in any job.

This essay changed my perspective substantially on what I plan to tell my (still-young) kids when they get to college age. Moral: the humanities are a shitty career.

How does that affect college? Simple: college can be a great place to learn stuff, but what stuff you choose to learn has a lot to do with whether you are going to need to move back home or not afterwards.

And then there's the question of whether college is actually effective at educating kids, period. The Gates Foundation is pushing the idea that "college" as narrowly defined by ivy-covered walls and four years of full-time classes may be an inadequate concept altogether, and that it should really describe all post-secondary-school education.

I hate agreeing with the Gates Foundation. But I do in this instance. A four-year institution is not the only (and often not the best) answer for a student. Too often, I hear the idea that a student of mine wants to go to college "to get a good job." My question is always "which job?" A five-year plan is always better than a four-year one.

I do have a question, though. How do the two theories described in the OP (the "selection theory" and the "transformation theory") actually conflict? One is from the perspective of an employer, and I know many people who apply to jobs outside of the field of their BA (most humanities majors have to do this to pay the bills -- myself included). The other is from the perspective of a teacher, and describes what he hopes to accomplish with his students. These views seem almost reinforcing ("if you do your work, you can interact rationally with society" and "if you can interact rationally with society, you must have done your work") rather than conflicting.

- To learn how to learn, rather than to be taught.

I'll admit to a certain rage when I hear "college is not for everyone, you know" in recent years; I think it's because I see it as both a tacit admission on the part of the elder generation that they royally fucked up, and as a censure that we didn't know better, regardless. If I wanted to be a plumber, I would have gone to trade school. I went to college because I wanted to go to college, and the useless generalizing about too many people getting a college education seems to combine the worst parts of traditionalism and luddite...ism. That cat's out of the bag, at least for the next few years, and acting as if making critical thought and inquiry have more value when rationed are mind-boggling. Seriously, the mind boggles.

My solution is to take both sides seriously. Encourage students to specialize and find a usable skill - in a sense, this could be as simple as taking a certain set of classes, but if I was king of the world I would implement an effective shadowing/observation program for most jobs, so we could have a formal system where people actually get a chance to learn what they might want to do! At the same time, there is a wide, wide inherent value in learning and inquiry as a cultured sense of personality. Right now, I'm applying for grad school in what would be considered a professional field, after getting a humanities degree. I'm laughing out the other side of my face at the personal statements and general quality of the other students I'm competing with - at best, they have specialized knowledge that I don't, but categorically I find myself to be more receptive to new information, more able to process and analyze what I have learned, and the best in class at drawing conclusions. You know, the things I was taught to do by humanities, and are a damned sight useful in any fucking occupation, anywhere.

There were so many complete dumbasses who got passed through the same program I took and got the same degree I got that I cannot fathom my piece of paper can honestly mean more than just checking off a box to any prospective employer. My experience on the other side of the fence also makes me wonder what the hell some of these people "learned" in their college studies, because in some cases it's not just critical thinking or inquiry, it's general thinking or even basic problem solving that these people lack. I can only assume they figured out how to put pants on from rote memorization drilled into them as children.

I don't have much sympathy with the "College, what is it good for?" level of polemic education criticism. Certainly the undergrad/grad/degree system is all hilariously antiquated and the humanities - the stuff I love - are sort of jury rigged as a functional kindergarten for law or other box-ticking career paths while simultaneously being "the academy" wherein, say, the best historical research in the world gets done. Weird setup if one stops to think of things functionally.

But while it's a mess - and I suspect it's an unsustainable one - for whatever reason I can't be bothered to get angry about it. In terms of "what should kids do," the question'd depend so much on the kid. A serious humanities education is a terrific way to invest four years and emerge with a better mind and a bulked up store of useful and edifying knowledge and experience.

But as a career move it's suboptimal unless it's part of some strapped-down master plan these days. But I'm guessing we all know this.

What college is good for from the perspective of most employers is a first-sort filter where either anyone who didn't graduate college is immediately either thrown out or anyone who ever intends to go to college is thrown out.

Neither of those is a thing that makes me particularly happy, but I can see the rationale behind both positions.

This is pretty much it. I can speak intelligently on the general details of a variety of topics such as fluid dynamics, heat transfer, quantum physics, and electromagnetism, but none of that is really good for anything other than my own interest and a good foundation for learning more about said subjects. While I don't feel particularly more knowledgeable or particularly skilled, the difference in my general intelligence in terms of critical thinking, ability to design, and ability to learn new concepts or processes extremely quickly is quite frankly astonishing to me.

I am a hell of a lot smarter than I was 4 years ago, and while maybe other people could have trained themselves independently with similar success, this is not a mental transformation that I would have been capable of without college providing educational structure and interactions with some damn smart professors. Going into my first year I would not in a million years have predicted that I would be smart enough to follow up my undergraduate with an engineering masters degree, nor did I think I would want to. Granted I am not officially in yet, I just have secured a professor to take me on, but still.

My own education experience is somewhat unusual, and has worked out rather well for me, but I would not endorse it as a sound life plan for current students. The short version is that I have an Associate's (two-year) degree from a community college, despite which I've managed to get a job as a Software Engineer at a major SF Bay Area technology company.

If you really know what you're doing in a particular field, you might be able to get a job doing it. But actually earning a degree in that field, in addition to whatever practical knowledge you might have, cannot but help.

That said, programming, particularly in the Bay Area, may be an unusual field in this respect. I work with a number of people with only a high school education, for instance. There is no degree in actually knowing how to write software or be a system administrator. A Computer Science degree provides a useful academic background, but broadly speaking is mostly a degree in a really weird branch of mathematics. Actually constructing a software project in collaboration with a number of other people is an almost totally disjoint skill-set. It is entirely possible for someone to earn a CS degree while not actually being a very good coder, but this is not an argument against earning a CS degree if you want to get a job in this field.

I expect the situation is analogous in other fields, to a greater or lesser degree.

Some of you have said that college did actually teach you lots of things. And it's true; college can and does do that. But it can't do that if you're not committed to learning things, and there aren't too many incentives for (most) colleges to try to make you be committed to learning things.

I'm similar to MightyMooquack, except I lack even a 2 year degree (dropped out while majoring in Computer Science), and as my profile mentions I work at Microsoft. I would not recommend this as a life plan, but hardwork and good work ethic can open a lot of doors.

I'm kind of at a loss as to what college taught me - how to drink beer I guess?

That's the point shurely? It is the transition from being at school to, well, the rest of your life.

True, but are people mature enough at the typical college student's age to handle it that way? The evidence seems to suggest that they are not. Deep intellectual interests are also the exception, rather than the rule, so I think it's no surprise that at the level of action, most students behave as if they are interested primarily in the signalling effect of the diploma and not in knowledge of the field. Now, the school can align those two things by maintaining high standards, but usually only at great cost--hence why I say that they don't have many incentives to do so.

What college should be is a place to learn advanced subjects in your chosen field of interest, imo. And to learn how to actually figure shit out on your own, but that seems to wait until grad school from my point of view (looking from the outside in, most college students I know are still on tight schedules and being taught specific shit, and only in grad school do they need to learn how to actually figure shit out)

What it IS right now is a checkbox on HR forms that is used to simply auto screen the potential employee base. And that's a terrible thing. I had a long confusing argument with an HR rep who put "Must have college degree" on one of our job postings because I wanted to know why they didn't care if the degree was in a related field. I get "Hey, we need a comp sci major" or even engineering in a pinch. But quite frankly if you think an English degree makes you innately more qualified for a programming job than no degree, you're simply using the presence of a degree to pre-screen.

[much of this rant brought to you by a college dropout who managed in the tech field, but had some frustrating experiences with things like "Fire Alarm Installer" job postings requiring a Master's Degree in Anything.]

If we as a nation think that High School is not enough education for a workforce, we need to just make College mandatory and tuitionless and be done with it.

That was always my reasoning.
Also there are alot of fields requiring specialized knowledge, like engineering.

As someone training to be an accountant, school is there to teach me how to do my job. There's pretty much a correct way and an incorrect way of doing things, and school tries to grind it in our heads that the incorrect way comes with hidden extras like fines and/or prison.

Of course, when the dean has to go on a rant about how he had to kick someone out for cheating on an ethics exam, not sure how well its all sinking in.

The other thing you get out of college is a network of people who you know and like who are in similar fields. Among our majors one of the biggest things they learn is who else among them is good at what they do. Contacts are nothing to be sneezed at.

See, when I say it, I actually mean it. Because it certainly was not for me. I have tried to get a degree multiple times, and have failed multiple times. I'm not actually stupid. But college gives me absolutely nothing, I can tell it's a giant waste of time and money for me, and I give up. And this is ignoring the fact that if a kid says, "Hey, I want to be a plumber," most parents I know would say no you absolutely will not, and ship them off to college anyway, if it's even remotely possible financially. No one, NO ONE I went to high school with were encouraged to go to a trade school. Trade school is for the stupids, was the message, and you don't want to be a stupid, right?

AND there are jobs now that don't REALLY need a college degree that you "need" to have them anyway, because shut up, that's why. It's ridiculous. I don't think college needs to be rationed, but I do think the hard-on for college degrees has gotten to the point where it's like Kildorn said: either make it mandatory and free, or knock it the fuck off.

Also, obligatory SMBC comic.

I see college as 20% useful knowledge and 80% maintaining the status quo. I don't buy into the racket that "college shows that you can show up and work hard every day" - you know what else shows that? A job. There are a lot of specialized technical careers and fields that need courses of certified instruction. A college diploma does not tell you that a job applicant is skilled in their field - it tells you nothing more than the fact that they have a college diploma. I agree with Kildorn and Sjofn - if you're going to subscribe to the superstition that college is mandatory, then it needs to be made universally accessible and thus free. But then again, I'm in favor of federalizing the entire education system, outlawing private and parochial schools, and making every educator in the system a federal employee with a GS-based pay scale and government benefits. So I'm a wee bit of an iconoclast there.

What's the point of college?

To get laid. I thought everyone knew that?

They sure didn't teach how to get laid at my college. I would have put down real money if they had.

The thing that pisses me off most about college is how we as a culture hammer into our young peoples' heads that they must go to college and know what profession they're going to enter and work at and where and when they're going to upgrade to a master's or an MBA so that they can get into management and what their target year for an officer title and FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

We (rightfully) don't trust 18-year-olds to wipe their own asses. Why do we expect them to have a plan for their whole damn lives before they can legally buy a girl a drink?

They did, you just weren't paying attention.

You have a point there, I was probably too stoned

I posted a link to the same essay a few weeks ago. But there's a huge difference between majoring in something and attempting to build a career around it. The humanities get shit on all the time, but if I was an employer I'd take a Philosophy, Classics, or English major over a Business or Communications major every time.

To clarify, the selection hypothesis advocates I've talked to think college selects for some measure of IQ, perseverance, or both, and that the actual things taught in college are largely irrelevant. To be honest, I'm not a huge fan of this model. If it were true, the best measure of IQ would be an IQ test, and the best measure of perseverance would be any rite of passage hunter-gatherer societies came up with in the last five-thousand years. If you want both, then giving someone an IQ test followed by seeing how long they could hold out under this would save them four years and a ton of student loans.

And this is where I'm inclined to agree with the selection crowd. College was a transformational experience for me, but a lot of my students are only interested in getting a credential. Earlier this semester, someone complained about an assignment where they read one of nine books and wrote an essay on it. She was so dedicated to reading as little as possible that she researched the page length of every book, chose the shortest one, and complained to me that it was too big at 250 pages long. I honestly don't know what I can do to help someone like that. If books are your enemy, then college will always be a hostile and alien land.

Unfuck our primary and secondary system and businesses won't discriminate against people with just a GED.

You can tell them to suck it up. I do this all the time with my students. It usually works. Not without complaints, but I realize that it comes with the territory.

Why would that change anything? If employers need more skills they could just pay to train people.

Employers get away with fighting over the college pool and selectively picking the non-college pool. Why, it's almost like the labor market isn't clearing. I can't think of anything that would cause that.

Cheap ones.

What's the primary point of college? Connections. That's the thing it gives you that is most difficult to find elsewhere, doubly so now that free quality online education is on the rise.

Which isn't to say that you can't also learn things in college of course! Nor do I mean to say what you learn in college is without merit -- just that you could also get that elsewhere.

Yeah, but now that college is becoming less and less like an exclusive club, the quality of those connections keeps going down.

Not in my experience. It's not the "old boys club" bit that's so important (which has only ever been a factor for a few schools anyway), but simply making friends across a wide range of backgrounds.

It's much easier to get a job via people you know than by resume spamming. Similarly it's commonplace for people to wind up marrying someone they met in college.

Some people are better at meeting people than others, so again, your mileage may vary. But most people's social circle size is more a function of their preferences than it is of their potential social circle size, and what I see happen is that a lot of them (somewhat ironically) use the multitude of options in meeting people to gather a social circle of people who are fairly similar to them. So, they end up having to resume spam. Also, what I mean by connections isn't that different from what you mean. It used to be that the people you met in college were (almost by definition) going to be the movers and shakers of the years to come. The very fact that we're having a discussion about whether college gets you anything is proof that that's no longer automatically the case.

I mean, there's a theme here: college has tons to offer people. The question is whether they know how to use it.

Clearly the solution is going to a school that teaches you how to go to college. Then you'll get the most out of college, which teaches you how to go to life.

IT ALL MAKES SENSE NOW!

Being someone who is both in college and old enough to approach it productively, here is what I think:
1) you can get a lot out of college. Skill / technical stuff is one obvious area if you pursue it. So is softer stuff like critical thinking skills, written communication skills, etc. these are things that, for the most part, don't develop on their own. You get better at them by practicing; and college assignments force you to practice. I bitch about my writing class (see the School Thread) , but I do think overall it's a good class for almost all of the students in it, who are almost all bad writers. I don't mean bad in the sense that they're not meeting some monocle popping standard of great writing, I mean bad as in cant coherently construct a paragraph, and in some cases, can't coherently construct sentences.

2) you'll get out precisely what you put in. I attended college for a year when I was eighteen. I wasn't at all prepared for it; I basically fucked off, didn't hand in assignments, didn't go to class. I didn't get anything out of the experience except shitty grades and major grief from my parents, who flushed quite a bit of money down the drain on a fancy pants private school. This one kind of sucks because I see a lot of college students around me today who are like me when I was eighteen: basically not ready to put anything into college. That's mostly a function of maturity with a side helping of the fact that in university you pretty much have to 100% self drive, which is almost a complete reversal of my high school experience. I'm 33 now and basically relentlessly pursuing maintaining a 4.0 GPA while sucking up to every professor I can find (see below). I guarantee I'm going to look back on my Rutgers experience and say I got a lot out of it, but that's mostly because of reasonable expectations on my part and a great deal of effort on my part.

3) networking is great, less so with students. This may be my bias but I don't envision myself getting jobs from my fellow students. My professors, on the other hand? Many professors have industry contacts coming out their ass, make friends with them and you'll be well set up.

I do think there's a bit of a disservice done in terms of guiding students toward productive majors (with productive being necessarily a fuzzy term). It's true that an undergrad degree in the humanities does almost nothing for you in the job market, and I'm not certain that fact is communicated effectively to students. I also think that expecting students to make important life decisions at age 18-21 vis a vis major, etc is rather silly, the only thing people in that age bracket do well is make poor decisions.