Learning to learn or learning to earn? Elite college admission and the real purpose of higher ed

Applying to college seemed to mark a critical juncture in my life: a clear opportunity to choose who I wanted to be in the world. It was my one real shot to write my own plot twist, to escape the shackles of an upbringing mired in conflict, guilt, and alienation.

High-achieving, hyper involved, and secretly proud to be the senior most often mistaken for a teacher, I found myself irritated and unsettled by the ideological chasm between the disillusioned, under-resourced teachers I loved and the spoiled, superficial kids I sat next to in class. I wanted to wander the depths of my mind AND become qualified to navigate political, economic and cultural systems of power. I longed for that romantic and obsolete world in which educators were worshiped and knowledge equaled power. I was intoxicated by the chimera of dusty library shelves and radical student activism. So, as most of my peers began shopping for sorority recruitment at SEC state universities and those few above me in the pecking order deposited at Ivies, I cheerfully enrolled in a liberal arts university.

Unbeknownst to me, I was walking into a minefield. The liberal arts college was a relic, a dying niche in the higher education market, an intellectual playground for the affluent. The economy had tanked and the liberal arts college was a dead end for any young thinker interested in someday holding a job. At my own university, the president, in a move designed to boost donations and his own image as a public intellectual in one fell swoop, began a campaign to reinvigorate the reputation of the liberal arts college as a breeding ground for superb thinkers and exceptional members of the future workforce.

Liberal arts graduates, as the story goes, are taught *how to learn*. We have cultivated nimble critical thinking skills and have developed capacities for seeking, consuming, and synthesizing complex information. We have deep and constantly evolving understandings of complex social and political issues. We appreciate aesthetics and we challenge conventional wisdom. We are sophisticated, clever, and independent. We are, apparently, the absolute most employable candidates for virtually any job we might apply for.

That’s the turn in the argument where I get lost, and it demands that we have a far more fundamental conversation, one about the real purpose of higher ed in the first place: is education meant to develop well-informed and socially-conscious citizens or obedient and efficient workers?

Our university president narrates the tug of war between vocational training and liberal education in his recent book and other writing, including his Huffington Post blog. He commented recently on William Deresiewicz’s best-selling book Excellent Sheep, which implicates a high-pressure college admission culture that rewards ambition, assimilation, and mindless ladder-climbing. Kids are entering college determined to win — to build their resumes, compete with peers, earn high salaries — but have lost sight of the meaning of everything they do.

Roth writes that he’s relieved that “there aren’t any sheep here” at our idyllic little liberal arts school, where students and professors take pleasure in engaging in the sort of deep interdisciplinary thinking that Deresiewicz believes we’ve lost sight of. But what Roth fails to recognize is that his own liberal-arts pitch totally undermines the joyful learning that students here barely manage to eke out. Roth says that a liberal arts education is practical (I know because one of the supplement prompts on our application asks students to explain why that statement, attributed to Roth, is true) because everyone knows the best thinkers and problem-solvers come from liberal arts schools. Deresiewicz falls prey to this argument too. He writes that no matter what your field, being a liberal arts graduate makes you a highly desirable candidate because you’ve learned how to learn rather than learning a specific trade.

In the end, they both overlook their own championing of learning for the sake of learning and agree that the purpose of an education — a liberal arts education, if you’re lucky — is to get a good job and make a name for yourself. There’s no glory in being a community organizer, a volunteer, a teacher, a social worker, a small business owner, or a parent. More accurately maybe — there’s very little return in store for universities that churn out socially responsible citizens who live simple, honest, ethical modest-income lives.

Last week, Frank Bruni wrote in the New York Times about the total bedlam of the college admission process. The emotional roller coaster of applying to college — the anxiety, scrutiny, rejection, self-consciousness — puts undue pressure on kids and obscures the real meaning of education (which Deresiewicz, so troubled by the lack of *meaning* in kids’ choices and aspirations, would certainly agree with). Success, Bruni writes, has nothing to do with the college you attend and where it falls in the nonsense ratings on newsstands every fall. Self-worth is not measured in the average salaries of alumni, acres of practice fields, or number of internships listed in the career center database.

Elite universities presidents, I think, ought to not comment on the topic of college admission mania. The college application process is reductive and depressing and competitive and cruel, to be sure, and it’s based on a cultural understanding of success that’s linked to credentialism and earning potential. Kids who rise to the top in the admission process are those who have “won” high school: their grades are highest, their lists of accomplishments and activities are longest, and their recommendations are glowingest. No wonder those same kids, four years later, are measuring success in the quality of their LinkedIn profiles. That’s what’s supposed to happen — the universities depend on it. Wealthy and successful alumni sustain the university with donations, networks, and bragging rights. No matter how you slice it, the university is a business, and it depends on the *success* of its alumni.

I’m sure I’m not alone in wishing that wasn’t the case. My college experience WAS filled with the ephemera of academia and intellectualism: the secret radical feminist group that met secretly in the forbidden tunnels, the long lunches spent discussing my thesis with favorite professors, the moments of eureka and euphoria as I encountered new ideas and ways of thinking. I loved every minute of it.

But today, as I have begun to settle here on the precipice overlooking what is sure to be my future, I wonder. What is it all about? What have I earned by completing my bachelor’s degree? What am I qualified to do? What responsibility do I have? How can I best utilize my skills and talents, continue to educate myself, engage in and contribute to my community, make the world a better place, AND pay the bills?

I feel pressured by the very phenomenon that Deresiewicz, Roth, and Bruni each lambast: leader syndrome. I’m supposed to be a leader. My LinkedIn profile is supposed to be robust and intimidating. I’m supposed to rise to the top of any ladder I step onto. But I don’t think I want it.

Bruni writes that the frenzy of admission results in “a perversion of higher education’s purpose and potential.” I want to un-pervert the real meaning of education. I want to be a public servant, and I am acutely aware of the paternalism of ladder-climbing and leader syndrome in public servant. I want to carry with me all of the knowledge and experience I have encoded in my last four years in all of my endeavors. As I contemplate my professional and intellectual future, I want to think carefully about where my energy and skills will be most effective.

I want to be an activist, idealist, and global citizen, not a CEO or a president, not newsworthy or highly-acclaimed, and I hope that someday, in an age of more a secure endowment, perhaps, my university will be proud of alumni like me.