I am 21 years old and will graduate college in May of 2015. Right now, I am in the middle of the standard uncertain phase which comes alongside having to make substantive, consequential choices about the rest of my life. For almost my entire life, going to college was non-negotiable. My life was pretty well planned out up to this point. However, now is the time for me to make choices which lay the groundwork for what I will do for the rest of my life. I learned a great deal over the past three and a half years, a great deal about structural functionalism and how strain theory explains criminal activity. I learned how to read Marx and Weber and how to critically write about them and apply their theories to everyday phenomena. What I did not learn as well was how to think for myself and how to make fulfilling and gratifying choices regarding life after college.
To be sure, college is a great experience. Many people whose college years are in the rearview say their four years in college were some of the best moments of their lives, usually second only to weddings and births of children. For the most part, I agree with this statement. During my years at Mississippi State University, I built some of the relationships I cherish most in this world. While my experiences have been spectacular, I am not so sure my experience has been complete. On the doorstep of choices about whether to go to graduate school or go to work, whether to enter to Peace Corps or take a year off, I realize just how ill-prepared I am to make these decisions.
College, for many, is just another step in achieving white-collar ambitions, argues William Deresiewicz, former Yale professor. Deresiewicz notices this problem running rampant even in America’s Ivy League institutions. In a recent essay for “The New Republic,” Deresiewicz says, “Like so many kids today, I went off to college like a sleepwalker. You chose the most prestigious place that let you in; up ahead were vaguely understood objectives: status, wealth — ‘success.’ What it meant to actually get an education and why you might want one — all of this was off the table.”
Most students who set foot on a college campus their freshman year have meticulously planned dreams of post-graduate education; I myself have had plans of graduate school since even before I started undergraduate study. These ambitions are not inherently bad by any means at all. My concern, as I contemplate my experience here during the twilight of my degree, is in step with the concern of Deresiewicz – our college years were spent preparing simply for the next step, the next school, the next job in our lives and not investing in our life experience.
To contrast Deresiewicz, Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker asserts knowledge and a general education are the products of a college education, which should be the chief concern of students. According to Pinker’s recent piece in “The New Republic,” refining one’s soul and one’s self “isn’t taught in graduate school, and in the hundreds of faculty appointments and promotions I have participated in, we’ve never evaluated a candidate on how well he or she could accomplish it. I submit that if ‘building a self’ is the goal of a university education, you’re going to be reading anguished articles about how the universities are failing at it for a long, long time.”
It is certainly hard to argue with Pinker. Throughout college, the point of one’s college education is to gain knowledge and to cultivate the educational appetite. Pinker’s assertion is certainly correct; it seems implausible to quantify the development of self during college, or even at any other time. However, perhaps the ideal college experience is more than cognitive, quantifiable knowledge. Maybe it includes the knowledge Deresiewicz references – knowledge of the soul and knowledge of the self and knowledge as David Brooks of The New York Times says.
“Elite universities are strong at delivering their commercial mission. They are pretty strong in developing their cognitive mission. But when it comes to the sort of growth Deresiewicz is talking about, everyone is on their own,” Brooks said.
But perhaps this is part of obtaining the life experience and practical knowledge related to life in general. Maybe part of this learning process, in the absence of a formal one, is of the trial-and-error type. Maybe we, as young adults, learn more about proverbial real-life experiences through succeeding at some things and failing at others. As Brooks notes, when it comes to a formal process of learning about our own selves and souls, we may be on our own. But maybe, just maybe, this is a good thing.
