Friday, September 19, 2025

What is the True Purpose of a College Education?

How to Think, Not What to Think
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/teach-students-how-think-not-what-think/684271/
College is not just about transmitting knowledge—but learning and practicing the skills that connect us to one another.


College in the Post-Educational Age
https://www.wsj.com/opinion/college-in-the-post-educational-age-669f4fcc
Students lose something vital when they go to school in search of careers, not learning. 


This Is Who’s Really Driving the Decline in Interest in Liberal Arts Education
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/liberal-arts-college-students-administration.html

What Does It Really Mean to Learn?
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/open-questions/what-does-it-really-mean-to-learn
Joshua Rothman
Valiant says that he tries not to use the word “intelligent” to describe people (in fact, he is “sometimes taken aback” when he hears others use it); instead, he is drawn to “valuable abilities that somehow involve learning and are not well captured by conventional notions of IQ.” An educable mind, he writes, can learn from books, lectures, conversations, experiences, and Zen koans—from anything, really—and notice when relevant aspects of almost forgotten knowledge reveal themselves. We admire aspects of someone’s educability when we say that they are a quick study, or identify them as “coachable,” but what really makes them educable is that they apply insights “for purposes not foreseen at the time of the study or the coaching”; educability is something like “street smarts”—a term which connotes the “uncanny ability to negotiate the practicalities of life”—and is closely related to having common sense. When people strike us as particularly “well-educated,” this might mean that they’ve had lots of school, Valiant writes, but it could also mean that they’re exceptionally educable, with the ability to “take good advantage of whatever educational opportunities arise, whether formal or informal.”

An Infantilizing Double Standard for American College Students

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/03/opinion/college-students-adulting.html

If universities today won’t hold students responsible for their bad behavior, they also won’t leave them alone when they do nothing wrong. Administrators send out position statements after major national and international political events to convey the approved response, micromanage campus parties and social events, dictate scripts for sexual interactions, extract allegiance to boutique theories of power and herd undergraduates into mandatory dormitories where their daily lives can be more comprehensively monitored and shaped. This is increasingly true across institutions — public and private, small and large — but the more elite the school, the more acute the problem.


Jonathan Malesic notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/04/opinion/college-students-school-work.html
College is a unique time in your life to discover just how much your mind can do. Capacities like an ear for poetry, a grasp of geometry or a keen moral imagination may not “pay off” financially (though you never know), but they are part of who you are. That makes them worth cultivating. Doing so requires a community of teachers and fellow learners. Above all, it requires time: time to allow your mind to branch out, grow and blossom.

Molly Worthen, Historian at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, notes:
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/25/opinion/college-students-monks-mental-health-smart-phones.html
Students are hungry for a low-tech, introspective experience — and not just students in the Ivy League. Research suggests that underprivileged young people have far fewer opportunities to think for unbroken stretches of time, so they may need even more space in college to develop what social scientists call cognitive endurance...
Most important, students need head space to think about their ultimate values. Contemplation and marathon reading are not ends in themselves or mere vacations from real life but are among the best ways to figure out your own answer to the question of what a human being is for — a question that is all the more pressing at a time when the robots soon may be coming for the white-collar jobs in medicine, law and finance that the secular intelligentsia treats as shorthand for personal fulfillment. To use the trendy pedagogical jargon, here are the student learning outcomes universities should focus on: cognitive endurance and existential clarity.  

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