Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.
A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.
I have been paying for my lack of foresight ever since. In the 20 years following my college graduation, I have earned very little money. Of course, it’s hardly philosophy’s fault. I know plenty of philosophy majors who have gone on to quite lucrative careers. To the question of what I’ve “done with a philosophy degree,” the answer is this: lived my life, made good decisions and bad decisions, pursued various interests, and accumulated occasional regrets. What that has to do with philosophy is mostly beyond me, except that as I was living my life, I did so with a store of philosophical reference points that I used to coordinate the events of my days and my understanding of them. In other words, it has enriched my inner life — just as it did for me back when I was so busy not thinking about my financial future.
I do not regret studying philosophy. However straight a line can be drawn between college and “career,” wealth is not the only value a life may be measured by (despite the preoccupation with wealth we are so often encouraged to maintain).
Everyone knows this in theory, of course. And yet, from my student years all the way through to my current position as a university instructor, the only answer to the question of what education is for that I have reliably heard given to students is vocational: Education is preparation for the job market.
Students will go on to have careers, of course, but the notion that they will have these careers ‘because of’ their college educations is dubious.
Sometimes the promise of a career track is made directly; often it is made indirectly by vague allusions to “transferable skills.” Within the humanities, few of the people making this promise, I suspect, believe it with much confidence, but on they go saying it. It is, after all, a thing they’ve heard before and a thing they still hear, and if academic types are good at anything, it’s having an instinct for saying what is in fashion and likely to be well received by their peers. And so common sense emerges.
Students will go on to have careers, of course, but the notion that they will have these careers “because of” their college educations is dubious. (And, by the way, isn’t it funny how the academics who make this promise are themselves advertisements against its ultimate fulfillment? Who is taking career advice from a university employee?)
Where has the vocational case gotten us? Enrollment rates have been falling, many who attend college are not finishing, and there is real skepticism as to the value of a degree. Students are disengaged and tend increasingly toward a transactional view of college — they are there to network and get hired. The precipitous decline of enrollment rates in the humanities supports this interpretation: The expected ROI on a humanities degree simply doesn’t match that of a STEM degree. And because students are rational economic actors, the rest follows. The cost of college is becoming increasingly prohibitive vis-à-vis future returns.
But wait! We assume students are — and should be — rational economic actors? This attitude begs the very questions an education is supposed to ask. What do we value? What should we value? Why? If students come to college (or don’t) because it is (or isn’t) a means of achieving wealth, they do so because they have absorbed the only values they have been offered. They have been failed long before they ever matriculate on our campuses.
Thinking of education as a means toward career ends turns our educational institutions into prestigious (or semi-prestigious) credentialing outfits. The attendees (formerly known as students, now more accurately known as “consumers of education”) pay for the good they desire. Education is an investment not in themselves as much as in their portfolios. And instead of educators, we come to know ourselves as service providers. The syllabus becomes a contract that students interpret in their favor with the intensity of seasoned lawyers. (If we teach them nothing else, we teach them how to fight for every quantitative good that could possibly be theirs.)
In the classroom we of course ignore the transactional reality of “education.” The whole charade of the arrangement depends on it. But when students give their closest readings to syllabi rather than class texts, looking for loopholes they can exploit to the advantage of their grade; when they are unembarrassed to send an email explaining why and how badly they need a certain grade; when they fail, again and again, to show up to office hours — then it becomes increasingly difficult to look ourselves in the mirror and maintain eye contact.
What happened to inspiring students to a lifetime of learning and self-reflection? What happened to encouraging them to think critically and creatively about the world they live in and their places in it? What happened to helping them interrogate what it means to be human? Maybe we still are doing these things. But not as much as we could be. Not as much as we hoped to when we started teaching in the first place.
We have only ourselves to blame for this. We ceded the debate about the values of education long ago when we adopted the vocabulary of the marketplace and began “incentivizing” students to obtain “proficiency” within certain “skills sets.” We should have known better. We should have resisted the forces seeking to reduce and standardize our students according to quantifiable and easily compared measures. We should have fought harder on behalf of the human being as a multitudinous creature. We should have said that poetry is important not because it might lead by some circuitous route to a career in copywriting, but because it enriches the quality of human life, because it is a means by which we can know and deepen ourselves, because it may infuse life with beauty and meaning. We should have been embarrassed to speak of philosophy as training for law school and unembarrassed to speak of philosophy as Aristotle did — as the activity most suited to human nature. We seek an education when one is available to us because it is available to us. It is a luxury to be educated, a privilege if ever there was one, and nothing to be frittered away on the likes of wealth maximization.
This is not to withhold sympathy for those students who look around at the economic landscape and — maybe after pausing to estimate the payments they will have to make on the debt they are accruing — quickly beat a path toward the computer-science office. Given the precarious nature of my finances, I occasionally entertain such fantasies myself. But my final calculation continues to be this: I don’t know much about what the future holds. There may be political instability, economic hardship, social unrest, or plague ahead. One thing I am certain of is my eventual death. And it is in that context that I consider my life and define the good. I want to flourish according to values I would endorse from beyond the grave.
Around the same time, Rose Horowitch reported in The Atlantic that arriving college students aren’t able to read books because they’ve never been expected to. Their teachers have instead taught them how to process “informational passages” with an aim toward efficiency and comprehension of the “main idea.” You can almost feel the standardized test taking itself by the pathway of their minds. And you can bet that they haven’t been expected to read the former staples of high-school education (Macbeth, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Song of Solomon, to name a few from my junior year of high school), but that they have been expected to prepare themselves for internships. As Horowitch reports something that should be apparent to every college professor: “Students today are far more concerned about their job prospects than they were in the past.”
The only reason to go to college should be that you care about education as such. The intrinsic good of education is what matters, not the extrinsic rewards.
This reality is understandable, though lamentable. But this uninspired realism risks being upended by the emergence of AI, which exposes the vacuity of education as vocational training. How do you prepare yourself for a job market that can carry on more efficiently without you? If the goal of education has been to produce workers with the skills necessary to do high-quality work, and automation makes the cost of such human labor prohibitively expensive, what becomes the purpose of education? The coming AI reality should have no special bearing on how we approach education except to clarify its virtues. The education we should pursue in this new context is the education we should have been pursuing all along.
If the point of an education is to think better — and, perhaps, eventually think well — then, simple and difficult as that is, education has a lot more in common with music and sports than it does with factory workers producing widgets to take to market. We play piano as we play soccer as we play chess as children simply play, because doing so is (or at least can become) its own reward. It is, in a word, fun. That these activities often enrich our lives is incidental to our pursuit of them. Our object is engagement, absorption, concentration, delight. Education — true education — is no different. The instrumental rewards that attend to it are ancillary to its essence. Some of us may be individuals in pursuit of niche careers; all of us are students of the human condition. This is where we reside: reflecting on the nature of things from as many vantages as can be made available to us.
If we don’t produce a forceful articulation of what it is we do and why, we will continue to be subject to that old complaint: “When am I ever going to use this?” Instead of making the case that the skills we teach students are transferable across a multitude of career fields, we should be saying something much stronger: The skills we are teaching bypass all career fields and move directly to the core of who we are and what we do. Our area is the human being in the broadest-possible scope.
The only reason to go to college should be that you care about education as such. The intrinsic good of education is what matters, not the extrinsic rewards. The failure to make this distinction — or, worse, to invert it — lies at the heart of what ails us.
