Letter to the Editor. Illustration by Sarah FaulknerMatt King, Ph.D. - Assistant Professor of Philosophymattking@uab.edu
Dear Students,
What’s the main purpose of a college education? Increasingly, we hear that it is to help you get a job. While no doubt securing a bachelor’s degree helps one on the job market, this thinking is dangerous. If we allow that the value of a degree lies primarily in what the credentials will get you, it suggests that fields of undergraduate study that don’t contribute directly to employment outcomes for its students should be scrapped. It means that we should tie the value of departments and programs directly to how their students fare on the job market.
What’s so dangerous about this idea is that it grants control over what is worth learning to the wrong people. Your college teachers are there to show you the intrinsic value in reading Shakespeare, in discussing what justice requires in the allotment of transplant organs, or in learning about the way in which political treaties precipitated the First World War. You shouldn’t cede control over what is worth learning to what your future employers tell you is worth learning. Your future employers certainly don’t need to have a vested interest in you developing into a well-educated person. Your average employer requires someone who has the skills that are necessary to the role they have carved out for that position—no more, no less. If we turn the main function of college into job training, we adopt the wrong priorities.
Of course, you will need money for survival. Basic necessities do not come free. So I do not advocate you devote yourself to idle fancy to the exclusion of all other pursuits or deny that some professions are tougher to make a living in than others. Nor will you err in adopting a degree of pragmatism in your long-term plans for life. The mistake is in thinking that what college should do, what college is for, is to serve the desires of those that will employ you.
In my view, that is not at all what college should be about. College is for exploring new ideas while getting grounded in a range of diverse disciplines that have shaped our collective human endeavor. It should be equal parts curiosity and understanding. It should nurture you to ask bold questions and equip you with the skills needed to pursue them. This should be the case whether your major is astrophysics or accounting. In each field, there are new thoughts to think, and the point of a college education is to help you think them.
