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From: Scott Carlson
Subject: The Edge: How students’ ‘weird’ interests can lead to a sense of purpose (and jobs!)
I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week, we’re introducing a new segment of The Edge.
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I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week, we’re introducing a new segment of The Edge.
For some time now, The Edge has had a biweekly run — every other week, I have been offering an analysis about some corner of higher education, a pace that has given me enough time to research and ruminate on a topic before tapping out my thoughts.
Maintaining a weekly column of this scale would be an intimidating prospect: One has to come up with something well-considered and thought-provoking once a week, and I marvel at the people who can do that well.
Nevertheless, I want to more regularly highlight various resources and readings about higher education, particularly in this crucial time. So from now on, The Edge will appear once a week, but with a caveat: Every other week will take a shorter form — perhaps a report from a compelling conference session, or a quick take on a recent news story or thoughtful social-media post. In other words, a lighter edition that offers room for something meatier the following week.
This week, for example, I’m reflecting on my interactions with students at Central Michigan University and pointing to a few more items in the news.
Ned Laff and I went to Central Michigan University last week, where we gave an evening public lecture to an audience of administrators, faculty, and students, discussing some of the themes in our new book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does. The next day, we visited a few classes — in French, composition, and philosophy — and followed up with students who were trying to figure out what to do with their undergraduate journey.
The students seemed to resonate with our message about how college really works, and how they can connect it to their interests. They spoke up, talking to us about their goals, asking how they find a path in college matching their “hidden intellectualism” or “vocational purpose” with the vast world of “hidden jobs” out there. One student we met approached us later and said that her father had been pushing her to figure out what to do with her academic interests in philosophy and religion. So, I asked her if she could identify “that thing,” that wicked problem she often finds herself thinking about solving.
She hesitated for a moment. This might sound weird, she said, but she had an interest in death: how people die, how they cope with death, near-death experiences and what comes after. There it is: that amorphous but animating obsession that typically isn’t a major, but is certainly relevant to college and potential careers.
“Have you ever heard of Stephen Jenkinson?” I said, calling up some articles and videos on Google. Jenkinson is a Canadian philosopher, a former palliative-care specialist, and a “death guru” talking about how people cope with (or, more often, avoid) the Big Questions around dying and grief.
In that moment, I saw something that I had seen in our other interactions with students at CMU and elsewhere: She grinned euphorically as she discovered that her “weird” interest was real. More Google searches opened up a hidden world of jobs on the subject of death — and not just in palliative care, but involving neuroscience researchers who study near-death experience and brain activity in the final moments, in therapists using psychedelics to help people with terminal illness accept their diagnoses, in musicians who perform for the dying, and even in associations and organizations that study the parapsychological phenomena around death.
Elated, she jotted down a bunch of names and notes to research, and later wrote an email to say she was grateful to have run into us. (As we point out in Hacking College, these clarifying moments for students often happen serendipitously — or not at all.)
One of higher education’s biggest challenges rests on getting students to have these moments. To do that, you have to help students see past the conditioning of their years in K-12 schooling, which taught them to believe that college is just another hoop to jump through. As Ned said in Michigan: College is like FAO Schwarz, the iconic toy store. Help students see all the goodies and fun within the college curriculum.
If you would like to learn more about upcoming appearances or want us to show up at your school or college, please reach out.
Closing the Ed Department: After President Trump signed an executive order to take “all necessary steps to facilitate the closure of the Department of Education,” Kevin Carey at New America called the order “short, weak, and substance-free” and “doomed to fail” — although observers noted that the number of employees at the agency had already been cut dramatically (and dozens of staffers were reportedly quietly rehired). A number of outlets pondered what the order would mean to, say, Kentucky or New Hampshire, or how it could harm low-income students and introduce more ideological content in schools. (Once again, perhaps, The Simpsons predicts the future.) The Guardian contended that dismantling the department would lead to more fraud among predatory colleges.
Beauty schools and broken dreams: New America has a fantastic new report about cosmetology schools and their exploitative practices, and it proposes changes to the industry. Even as a history of one narrow slice of higher education, it’s valuable background on the rise of these for-profit institutions — how they formed one of the first postsecondary-ed lobbying groups, profited from the federal-aid system (once grants and loans could cover cosmetology, that drove up costs for students), and how the industry locked all this down with licensure requirements. This is an apt read for the moment, given the favorable treatment given to for-profit colleges in the first Trump administration and the likelihood that they will get more support in the current one (although, you never know).
Libraries become a target: Libraries are popular destinations on college campuses and within communities; the Trump administration issued an executive order disbanding the Institute of Museum and Library Services, which supports library services across the country. Trump also appointed an acting director of the agency who pledged to “restore focus on patriotism” at the institute. The American Library Association has put out a fact sheet detailing what the order requires and how to support libraries in response.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at scott.carlson@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. Follow me on LinkedIn.
