The Previously Dynamic College Experience

What has the college experience become? It was originally a place where students asked questions, a place where they wanted to learn. It was also a place where professors came to teach these enthusiastic young minds, not just filling them with answers but helping them raise new questions—big questions. The continued existence of these big questions is the topic of the bloggingheads video, and while they do a good job shining light on the issue, they don't come to a solid answer. The answer that they need to conclude with is that colleges have stopped asking these questions almost entirely, and have actually profited from this. Now, the debate is over who is to blame, the institutions or the students.

The learning process at colleges and universities is called 'higher education.' In elementary and middle schools students are the bucket part of the 'filling the bucket versus lighting the fire' metaphor. We are there to be prepared, to become proper receptacles for this higher education, or just to gain the basic assumed skills that society requires of us, like reading and writing. The original idea was that those students who decided to go to college loved learning and wanted to continue to do so to the farthest extent possible. Colleges served this purpose very well and encouraged the questioning of society as well as being, as one of the bloggingheads vloggers mentioned, “largely philanthropic organizations.” Thus the institution was able to “light the fire” among these very flammable minds. Colleges had this better purpose and thus warranted their higher education moniker.

Of course, we live in a very capitalist society, and money was soon to enter the fray. Students who enjoy creative writing and choose to pursue an English major often find that this is a dead end financially. And while we all want to do something that we love for the rest of our lives, we need to make money before we can do that—it's just the way our society works. So students have turned to business degrees and medical degrees and engineering degrees as sure ways to make money, and while some of the students find this to be the oxygen that their flame survives on, most find their fire snuffed out. Going to college is no longer about learning but has become yet another hoop to jump through so that students are prepared for the 'real world,' and so that they can say to that world 'I meet all of your demands, you owe me a job' and be confident that they will get that job. In the video, the vloggers talk about leaders versus thinkers. Thinkers were the buckets and leaders are the flames. Thinkers wanted to learn, they wanted to know who, what, why, when, how and where. They had questions that they would seek answers to and that was their priority. Leaders climb the system's pre-built ladder one rung at a time, and it is they who are rewarded. Leaders cause no systemic change, good or bad, and because it is they who exist today, our academic and societal systems will continue to be unchanged and to support them.

So it is partly the fault of the students, who have lost the courage to pursue their favorite subject in exchange for security. However, the colleges also exist within this society and are subject to its monetary motivation. Colleges with big endowments live comfortably and are able to fulfill all of their functions and even expand. In the case of private schools, a small part of those endowments come from the government, but the majority comes from alumni donations. These private institutions are the ones that should especially be encouraging the growth of thinkers. Instead they have found that, in order to thrive and expand, they need money, and it is not thinkers who bring in the cash but the leaders. Thus it is in their interest to foster the development of these leaders and thus they do and they certainly profit from it—Princeton's endowment is in the billions. Because of this, however, we are missing the questions that the thinkers had and their ability to change the system now that everyone is consumed with trying to advance along its beaten path where every other student has tread before. So it is partly the fault of the institutions who have lost the motivation to cultivate skepticism in exchange for prestige and expansion.

The bloggingheads contributors touched on all of this, and much of my argument parallels theirs. However, where they were just having a discussion, it should have been an attack. The questions that the thinkers asked were necessary to advancing the purpose of the universities and how they run, and hopefully bringing those same advances to society. The age of the thinker is over, and we need to recognize that this is a great loss and that it needs to be reversed. We as students have our share of the blame, and with that comes a responsibility to help fix the situation that we have created. If everyone is a leader, then who are they leading?