“What is your major?” is a mantra (and undoubtedly a pick-up
line too) on college campuses. In giving students some exposure to a variety of
academic disciplines, distribution requirements are meant in part to help
students make more informed decisions of what to major in. According to an
analysis of twelve randomly-chosen American colleges and universities in 2015,
an increasing percentage of students since the recession of 2009 were circumventing
this help by declaring their respective majors during their freshman year.[1]
The reason, according to the business newspaper, is pragmatism, student
debt-loads, and a difficult job market. “In 2012, nearly half of college
graduates between the ages of 22 and 27 were unemployed or had jobs that didn’t
use their degrees.”[2]
In response, a higher proportion of students were going to college to get a
job. Although The Wall Street Journal lauds the reduction of education to
vocation, even more striking is how even academic administrators
mischaracterize the intellectual mission of colleges and universities.
The associate vice president for enrollment and marketing at
DePaul, for example, told the journal, “People don’t go to college anymore to
be fulfilled or to gain life perspective; they go to get a great job. . . . There’s been a shift from hippie culture
to corporate culture.”[3]
In overgeneralizing becoming knowledgeable through formal learning being “fulfilled,”
the administrator makes the benefits seem so vague they could be gained in
other ways.
To claim that gaining knowledge in, say, chemistry or
mathematics gives a person “life perspective” treats a distant byproduct as if
it were the main point. A survey of freshman at American colleges and universities
in 2014 found that 45% of them believed that “an essential or very important
objective of college was to develop a meaningful life philosophy.”[4]
In 1971, 73% had that belief. Those students who cited the belief got higher
education wrong because they missed the obvious point that an education makes a
person knowledgeable whether or not he or she uses the knowledge to develop a
life philosophy.
Were higher education primarily to give students a
meaningful life philosophy, the benefit would hardly be worth the cost in
student loans alone. It is no surprise, given this “understanding” of the
purpose of a liberal arts and science education, that 82% of the surveyed
freshman in 2014 said college is essential to being very well off financially.
In 1971, 37% thought so, and in 2006 the percent was up to 73.[5]
In other words, shortchanging the real benefits of being knowledgeable as distinct
from being skilled has facilitated the shift to declaring a major in one of the
professional schools early.
Of course, studying chemistry, for example, can result in a
job. In fact, the higher-order analytical and synthetic thinking that goes
beyond the critical thinking (skills-training and problem-solving) in
professional schools can actually be extremely valuable on the job as well as
in virtually any domain in life. A student might major in accounting, for
example, only to find that he is bored to death on audits. Having used his
electives for business classes so he could graduate on time—having switched
majors after his sophomore year from biology—he would have had no inkling that
his mind was most suited to philosophy. Meanwhile, he would never use the
skills he had learned in all the accounting courses he took.
I submit that resisting the temptation to reduce a college
education to vocational training at least until the student has had some
exposure to a variety of academic fields through distribution requirements is
not “hippie culture.” As the assistant dean for academic advising and career
counseling at UT-Austin puts the problem, “How do you know that you don’t want
to major in say, anthropology, if you’ve never taken an anthropology class?”[6]
He points out that students who choose a major during their freshman year are
likely to switch, and this can delay their graduation date or make it more
likely they will drop out.
In fact, the hippies of the late 1960s trivialized knowledge
by presuming that they could teach themselves in “teach-ins.” These were not
only a pragmatic part of the Vietnam-War protests on college campuses such as
UC-Berkeley and UW-Madison; rather, the egalitarians decided that being
well-learned is not a prerequisite for teaching the knowledge. Such an attitude
toward knowledge is perhaps even more dismissive than that of the job-oriented
freshmen who view academic knowledge as worthwhile only or primarily for
developing a life perspective.
1 Douglas Belkin, “Freshman Are Picking Their Majors Earlier,” The Wall Street Journal, March 20, 2015.
2 A
2014 paper by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Quote taken from Belkin, “Freshman.”
3 Belkin, “Freshman.”
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
