I enjoyed your post and find it to be aspirational rather than descriptive of higher education. If the word “should” is inserted it would be a worthy objective for this institution to pursue.
Higher education, for the most part, does not educate or prepare students for anything. The only exception would be those subjects that fall into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). But I would insist that those few students who pursue a STEM education are already “learners” who would find a way to discover the knowledge they need to move forward to pursue their careers.
In other areas, any education achieved is purely accidental (and more likely the accomplishment of individual students).
What is college for? The short answer is it is for only the very few objective learners who would find alternative forms of education without college. But for most non-STEM students, college is a dream that has turned into a nightmare.
Sorry, you are in dreamworld. This debate was over by the early 1990s: the overriding, dominant reason students go deeply in debt and take years of their lives getting a degree is to position themselves to succceed in the job market. Period. Yeah, all those other reasons are nice, but if you take away the ticket to the job market incentive, enrollment would decline by about 80-90%... you really think the average student of today would go an average of 30K in debt for "knowledge"? Please.
Faculty, too. The great majority of them are there for tenure and the benefits that go with it. Their pusuit of "knowledge" will conform to that end.
The modern American university is little more than a trade school with a climbing wall. And not a very good one at that, given the mismatch between what it offers and what the job market wants.
In addition to all these excellent purposes you’ve discussed, I believe college is good for building community within a peer group as they move from teen to adult. That community, in turn, allows each individual student to learn more about themselves. For many 18-year-olds, it is the first time they stand wholly on their own, apart from family. They can recreate themselves with greater freedom. They have four years to figure out if they do better waking up with the sunlight or working late into the wee hours of the morning. They learn to make choices about class times and study places that bring out their best. Along the way, they see that there isn’t one right way to approach learning (or life) because they’re immersed in a community where diversity is embraced.
I enjoyed your post and find it to be aspirational rather than descriptive of higher education. If the word “should” is inserted it would be a worthy objective for this institution to pursue.
Higher education, for the most part, does not educate or prepare students for anything. The only exception would be those subjects that fall into STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). But I would insist that those few students who pursue a STEM education are already “learners” who would find a way to discover the knowledge they need to move forward to pursue their careers.
In other areas, any education achieved is purely accidental (and more likely the accomplishment of individual students).
What is college for? The short answer is it is for only the very few objective learners who would find alternative forms of education without college. But for most non-STEM students, college is a dream that has turned into a nightmare.
Sorry, you are in dreamworld. This debate was over by the early 1990s: the overriding, dominant reason students go deeply in debt and take years of their lives getting a degree is to position themselves to succceed in the job market. Period. Yeah, all those other reasons are nice, but if you take away the ticket to the job market incentive, enrollment would decline by about 80-90%... you really think the average student of today would go an average of 30K in debt for "knowledge"? Please.
Faculty, too. The great majority of them are there for tenure and the benefits that go with it. Their pusuit of "knowledge" will conform to that end.
The modern American university is little more than a trade school with a climbing wall. And not a very good one at that, given the mismatch between what it offers and what the job market wants.
In addition to all these excellent purposes you’ve discussed, I believe college is good for building community within a peer group as they move from teen to adult. That community, in turn, allows each individual student to learn more about themselves. For many 18-year-olds, it is the first time they stand wholly on their own, apart from family. They can recreate themselves with greater freedom. They have four years to figure out if they do better waking up with the sunlight or working late into the wee hours of the morning. They learn to make choices about class times and study places that bring out their best. Along the way, they see that there isn’t one right way to approach learning (or life) because they’re immersed in a community where diversity is embraced.