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William Deresiewicz

What Is College For?

William Deresiewicz is an author, essayist, and literary critic. Born in 1964 in Englewood, New Jersey, Deresiewicz attended Columbia University and taught English at Yale University from 1998 to 2008. He is a contributing writer for the Nation, and has had articles published in the American Scholar, the New Republic, and the New York Times. Deresiewicz gained high praise for his book Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life (2014). His essays include “Leadership: The West Point Lecture,” “The Death of Friendship,” and “What the Ivy League Won’t Teach You.” In the following excerpt from Excellent Sheep, Deresiewicz explores the benefits of a college education.

AS YOU READ: What are the real benefits of a college education as outlined by the author?

1

“Return on investment”: that’s the phrase you often hear today when people talk about college. How much money will you get out of doing it, in other words, relative to the amount that you have to put in. What no one seems to ask is what the “return” that college is supposed to give you is. Is it just about earning more money? Is the only purpose of an education to enable you to get a job? What, in short, is college for?

2

We talk, in the overheated conversation we’ve been having about higher education lately, about soaring tuition, rising student debt, and the daunting labor market for new graduates. We talk about the future of the university: budget squeezes, distance learning,° massive open online courses, and whether college in its present form is even necessary. We talk about national competitiveness, the twenty-first-century labor force, technology and engineering, and the outlook for our future prosperity. But we never talk about the premises that underlie this conversation, as if what makes for a happy life and a good society were simply self-evident, and as if in either case the exclusive answer were more money.

3

Of course money matters: jobs matter, financial security matters, national prosperity matters. The question is, are they the only things that matter? Life is more than a job; jobs are more than a paycheck; and a country is more than its wealth. Education is more than the acquisition of marketable skills, and you are more than your ability to contribute to your employer’s bottom line or the nation’s GDP, no matter what the rhetoric of politicians or executives would have you think. To ask what college is for is to ask what life is for, what society is for—what people are for.

4

Do students ever hear this? What they hear is a constant drumbeat, in the public discourse,° that seeks to march them in the opposite direction. When policy makers talk about higher education, from the president all the way down, they talk exclusively in terms of math and science. Journalists and pundits—some of whom were humanities majors and none of whom are nurses or engineers—never tire of lecturing the young about the necessity of thinking prudently when choosing a course of study, the naïveté of wanting to learn things just because you’re curious about them. “Top Ten Majors” means the most employable, not the most interesting. “Top Ten Fields” means average income, not job satisfaction. “What are you going to do with that?” the inevitable sneering question goes. “Liberal arts” has become a put-down, and “English major” a punch line.

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5

I’m not sure what the practicality police are so concerned about. It’s not as if our students were clamoring to get into classes on Milton or Kant. The dreaded English major is now the choice of all of 3 percent. Business, at 21 percent, accounts for more than half again as many majors as all of the arts and humanities combined. In 1971, 73 percent of incoming freshmen said that it is essential or very important to “develop a meaningful philosophy of life,” 37 percent to be “very well-off financially” (not well-off, note, but very well-off). By 2011, the numbers were almost reversed, 47 percent and 80 percent, respectively. For well over thirty years, we’ve been loudly announcing that happiness is money, with a side order of fame. No wonder students have come to believe that college is all about getting a job. . . .

6

Anyone who tells you that the sole purpose of education is the acquisition of negotiable skills is attempting to reduce you to a productive employee at work, a gullible° consumer in the market, and a docile subject of the state. What’s at stake, when we ask what college is for, is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human.

7

The first thing that college is for is to teach you to think. That’s a cliché, but it does actually mean something, and a great deal more than what is usually intended. It doesn’t simply mean developing the mental skills particular to individual disciplines—how to solve an equation or construct a study or analyze a text—or even acquiring the ability to work across the disciplines. It means developing the habit of skepticism and the capacity to put it into practice. It means learning not to take things for granted, so you can reach your own conclusions.

8

Before you can learn, you have to unlearn. You don’t arrive in college a blank slate; you arrive having already been inscribed with all the ways of thinking and feeling that the world has been instilling in you from the moment you were born: the myths, the narratives, the pieties,° the assumptions, the values, the sacred words. Your soul, in the words of Allan Bloom,° is a mirror of what is around you. I always noticed, as a teacher of freshmen, that my students could be counted on to produce an opinion about any given subject the moment that I brought it up. It was not that they had necessarily considered the matter before. It was that their minds were like a chemical bath of conventional attitudes that would instantly precipitate out of solution and coat whatever object you introduced. (I’ve also noticed the phenomenon is not confined to eighteen-year-olds.)

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9

Society is a conspiracy to keep itself from the truth. We pass our lives submerged in propaganda: advertising messages; political rhetoric; the journalistic affirmation of the status quo; the platitudes of popular culture; the axioms of party, sect, and class; the bromides° we exchange every day on Facebook; the comforting lies our parents tell us and the sociable ones our friends do; the steady stream of falsehoods that we each tell ourselves all the time, to stave off the threat of self-knowledge. Plato called this doxa, opinion, and it is as powerful a force among progressives as among conservatives, in Massachusetts as in Mississippi, for atheists as for fundamentalists. The first purpose of a real education (a “liberal arts” education) is to liberate us from doxa by teaching us to recognize it, to question it, and to think our way around it.

10

In Teacher, Mark Edmundson describes the man who played this role for him when he was seventeen and thereby saved him from the life of thoughtless labor that appeared to be his fate. His teacher’s methods were the same as those of Socrates, the teacher of Plato himself: he echoed your opinions back to you or forced you to articulate them for yourself. By dragging them into the light, asking you to defend them or just acknowledge having them, he began to break them down, to expose them to the operations of the critical intelligence—and thus to develop that intelligence in the first place. The point was not to replace his students’ opinions with his own. The point was to bring his charges into the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and endlessly fertile condition of doubt. He was teaching them not what to think but how.

11

Why college? College, after all, as those who like to denigrate it often say, is “not the real world.” But that is precisely its strength. College is an opportunity to stand outside the world for a few years, between the orthodoxy of your family and the exigencies of career, and contemplate things from a distance. It offers students “the precious chance,” as Andrew Delbanco has put it, “to think and reflect before life engulfs them.” You can start to learn to think in high school, as Edmundson did—you’re certainly old enough by then—but your parents are still breathing down your neck, and your teachers are still teaching to the test, in one respect or another. College should be different: an interval of freedom at the start of adulthood, a pause before it all begins. Is this a privilege that most young people in the world can only dream of? Absolutely. But you won’t absolve° yourself by throwing it away. Better, at least, to get some good from it.

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12

College also offers you professors. Yes, it is theoretically possible to learn how to think on your own, but the chances are not good. Professors can let in some air, show you approaches that wouldn’t have occurred to you and put you on to things you wouldn’t have encountered by yourself. Autodidacts° tend to be cranks, obtuse and self-enclosed. A professor’s most important role is to make you think with rigor: precisely, patiently, responsibly, remorselessly, and not only about your “deepest ingrained presuppositions,” as my own mentor, Karl Kroeber, once wrote, but also about your “most exhilarating new insights, most of which turn out to be fallacious.” You want some people in your life whose job it is to tell you when you’re wrong.

13

College also gives you peers with whom to question and debate the ideas you encounter in the classroom. “Late-night bull sessions”° is another one of those phrases people like to throw at the college experience, a way of shaming students out of their intellectual appetites. But the classroom and the dorm room are two ends of the same stick. The first puts ideas into your head; the second makes them part of your soul. The first requires stringency; the second offers freedom. The first is normative; the second is subversive. “Most of what I learned at Yale,” writes Lewis Lapham, “I learned in what I now remember as one long, wayward conversation in the only all-night restaurant on Chapel Street. The topics under discussion—God, man, existence, Alfred Prufrock’s peach—were borrowed from the same anthology of large abstraction that supplied the texts for English 10 or Philosophy 116.” The classroom is the grain of sand; it’s up to you to make the pearl.

14

College is not the only chance to learn to think. It is not the first; it is not the last; but it is the best. One thing is certain: if you haven’t started by the time you finish your BA, there’s little likelihood you’ll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted. The purpose of college is to enable you to live more alertly, more responsibly, more freely: more fully. I was talking with a couple of seniors during a visit to Bryn Mawr. One of them said, “The question I leave Bryn Mawr with is how to put my feminist ideals into practice as I go forward.” I liked “ideals,” but I loved the first part. A real education sends you into the world bearing questions, not résumés.

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