Re: Is it worth going to college?
This is a response to a post I read on a person’s blog I found via 9rules.
I can understand your argument in that it is now easier than ever to learn in today’s society with the variety of resources at hand like bookstores, libraries and the Internet. One of the things some people fail to realize is that universities offer a lot more than just a piece of paper.
The availability and quantities of the books in their libraries is vast as is the variety and specialty of said books – one of a kind, out of print and limited published ones. A lot of universities also offer subscriptions to several scholarly journals and article resources that offer specialized, in depth content for a multitude of subject areas. The average person may not be able to access unless they wanted to pay a high premium for them.
Also, since intellectual prowess is a very relative and subjective matter, it can become very difficult and inefficient for employers to assess how competent a person is without a standard rubric for comparison. You would have to take an applicants word for it. Plus, you learn so much more when you’re surrounded by and competing with people of similar or higher intellectual levels. You share ideas. You learn from one another. It’s the same concept of playing tennis with someone that is better than you to get better.
This is why there is such a high demand to matriculate into today’s leading universities – the Ivies, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, etc. These universities have a history of admitting the best and brightest, so even if you performed moderately to poorly at these places, some companies will turn a blind eye to your GPA because they know it probably took a lot of effort just to get in. Either that or money.
Plus, learning and competency is more than just reading. It’s more comprehensive than that. It’s reading and application. It’s books and hands-on education. I doubt every university has a linear particle accelerator. Or a genomics lab. And even if you were considering fields other than the sciences and engineering, many of the professors are experts and leaders in their respective fields. It’s very interesting to take a class where the book you learn from is written by the professor lecturing right in front of you. This leads me to my last claim.
College is an experience. You get to meet people from different parts of the globe with a variety of interests and cultures all in one place. You get to share ideas. You get to debate over issues – engage in dialogue. And because of this, you get to meet some pretty amazing people. I met one of the civil engineers of the World Trade Center give an open lecture about why skyscrapers can’t be built to sustain airplane impact. I heard Bill Gates talk about the Internet and technology’s role in the future. I heard Merryl Streep talk about acting and heard Steve Martin read some of his prose. I even saw Sarah Silverman do some pretty funny standup.
It is sad, at least for American universities, that a lot of colleges have turned into very expensive daycares for twenty-somethings. Alcohol, drugs and apathy have flooded the college system. And a lot of the lower branches of public universities as well as some of the technical/community colleges spend half of their time teaching remedial education rather than college level. But it’s not always like this. Not if you know where to look (attend).
This is my argument for why college is still viable and ultimately worth it. If you still think otherwise, if you feel that my description of a university isn’t the description of yours or what you feel it is, then maybe you should have tried harder in public/private secondary school so that you could have been accepted to and attended a good university. Sorry if this contradicts your feelings towards “the establishment” and notions of conformity but, to me, those are just excuses for not trying and laziness. If you really want create change, bring the establishment down from the inside.
Pretty good post. I think you’re off base about access to books: anyone can walk in off the street and make use of journals and the cost of membership with a university library is not all that expensive. But on the whole I think you’re right. The value of a university education is in being socialised into the elective aristocracy — banging against people who are unusually able or otherwise likely to be successful and picking up what you can from them and learning — not knowledge but know-how, culture, manners, a way of working with books and data — from professors who are in the middle of things in their respective disciplines.
Great job on relaying the values university learning bring to today’s valueless society. Very intelligent argument.
All in all, thanks for reading my post, chadai. Glad to know you liked it. Also, let me clarify on some things I was thinking about while writing this entry.
When I talked about the journal/article bit, I was thinking more along the lines of the online articles and indexing, like JSTOR, Lexus Nexus, OmniFile, EBSCO, etc. Sure, anyone can buy them, but do you really want to pay the yearly fee for each one? Also, some university libraries have strict policies on check-outs and walk-ins, in which they won’t even let you in unless you have a university ID, no matter how much money you have. And sure, some college students may have been elected, I’ll give you that. But we’re not all aristocratic, at least in an economic sense. I am far from being upper-class or part of hereditary nobility and wealth. My parents never went to college. My dad’s a firefigther for goodness sakes.
Library access is pretty simple and inexpensive where I’m from (the west coast of Canada) but I agree that it’s not always. (I’m living in East Asia now and it’s a pain to get books.)
By ‘elected aristocracy’ I didn’t mean to point to people who are elected (in the political sense), nor the wealthy even.
Here the aristocrats are, wealth and power aside, people who are sharp, sensitive, skilful, sophisticated, informed, worldly, imaginative.
I called this aristocracy ‘elective’ because, although wealthy and powerful people tend to be well educated, it is not a matter of birth but of choice.
(I don’t mean to suggest that anyone who wants to join can but that anyone who is able to can, although sometimes this means serious financial commitment or a lot of hard work.)
And joining is not, primarily, a matter of acquiring knowledge. (Knowledge you can get without going to college.) It is a matter of rubbing up against books and people who have the virtues I listed above already.