Everyone seems to be criticizing higher education right now. I am not going to argue that we should not be thinking very critically about college, but my sense from most of what I have read in various newspapers and magazines is that many people really have no idea what college is for in the first place. In this post I will work to answer a basic, but tricky question, What is college actually for?

Do you imagine yourself sitting in this room? Let's talk about that.
Image source: Flikr

This is the second post in a series I launched a couple of weeks ago with Why College? An Honest Insider's Guide for Students and Parents. In that post I highlighted:

• 8 significant problems I currently see in higher education
• 4 issues that I believe must be considered by anyone thinking of investing in college, and
• 3 problems I experience every day in the classroom regarding students and their reluctance to make the most of their investment of time and/or money

I believe that in order to really answer the question, "Why college," or "Is college right for me?" it is important to first understand what college is actually for.

I have to admit this is an ambitious undertaking, and it will take some work to unravel what I see as a fairly complex mess. Just getting this second post in my proposed series completed took more work than I expected. But given I have been teaching college courses for almost 30 years, I truly believe this is the most valuable information I can offer the general public based on what has, essentially, become my life's work. I also like to write about communication, the subject I teach, but at the same time, that's why I teach, and not necessarily why I blog, or at least that's what I am figuring out. I offer this series as a genuine attempt to help students and parents navigate higher education with greater insight and logic, quite frankly, because I see a lot of people making some big mistakes and wasting a lot of time, energy, and perhaps most important, money.

Trying to decide the next topic to address after my introduction to the series has been a challenge in itself. There is no chronological order to this. However, I do think it might be good to build a foundation, and that is why I arrived here at this post. There are other topics that I think are more pressing, and perhaps even more fun to pick apart (like tips on how to manipulate professors into giving you better grades than you probably deserve, or alternatives to traditional higher ed), but I think this next topic is essential to address before going too far.

The Fundamental Purpose of College

The fundamental purpose of college is to deliver theoretical knowledge to students who are actively interested in specific, real world subjects.

I am not referencing any sources when I make this statement as it is my best attempt to explain the purpose and role of college based on my own experience inside higher education. I admit I may be biased, as my perspective has roots in the liberal arts segment of higher ed, but by recognizing this potential bias, I am also attempting to compensate for it. So the above statement is, in my opinion, the most all-inclusive and general explanation of what happens in college.

In an ideal situation, students don't arrive at college until they have enough life experience that they are actively seeking new knowledge. In such an ideal situation there is heartfelt motivation on the part of the student, and there is clear purpose in the choice to attend college and seek a degree in a certain major. Although this may seem like a wacky example, imagine someone becoming a drug dealer, getting busted, going to prison, suffering through the rigged justice system, and upon being released from prison, deciding to go to law school. (It actually happens, so not really a wacky example.) Other examples of life experience might be going into a trade and then realizing an interest in starting a business, or doing a couple years of volunteer work after high school and then deciding to be a teacher or social worker.

I probably don't need to go to any great length to explain the breakdown of the ideal, but for the sake of clarity I will unpack it a bit. Here's a true story to illustrate:

I know a woman who grew up on a farm in Montana. Her father, the oldest son, grew up on the farm. Times were good, so after he graduated from high school he was sent to college. But this was the 1950s, and my friend's father was not sent to college because that was just what everyone did, and he certainly didn't go for the social aspects. Nope. He was representing the family, and he was sent to college to solve problems that the family faced on a perennial basis in their humble business. He was sharp, and he majored in engineering along with agriculture, and he ended up learning enough to invent an entirely new type of irrigation system. His invention was so novel that the US Government offered him a job, but that would have required leaving the farm, and since he was the oldest son it was his job to take it over from his father.

Image source

The key to the story is that even though this person went to college as a young man, straight out of high school, he already had several years of raw experience behind him. To hear him speak of it, he appreciated being able to go to college, simply as an alternative to the hard work he experienced as a kid, but also because he was genuinely interested in learning about agriculture on a higher level. In college he learned that he had the aptitude to do well in math and science classes, and the engineering degree was something he grew into. The experience, along with the degree, opened up huge new possibilities for him to radically transform his life. But he ultimately chose to remain on the farm, where he eventually raised his own family, and operated a successful dairy operation. He never seemed like a man who regretted a single decision, and I would guess part of that was due to the fact that he had options, and knew he simply chose one of them.

How does this story compare to how most young people end up at college today? With very little concrete experience beyond anything other than school, extra-curricular activities, and maybe some volunteer service, "kids" go to college because they grow up in environments that have come to push it as the only acceptable option. President Obama made it one of his feel-good statements early in his first term that everyone should go to college, and that capped off a long decline of vocational-technical education that began in the 1970s. Today, students with no actual curiosity or desire to gain essential new information to solve real problems they've experienced first-hand are being pushed into college in droves.

But perhaps I am just old-fashioned and I simply need to give up some antiquated notion of the purpose of college. The institutions themselves, or at least the administrations that run them, would certainly make that argument. There is no possible way that more colleges can keep filling more seats in more classrooms without convincing parents that anything other than college after high school is certain to doom their child to an unhappy life. Across the board, colleges and universities have invested heavily, and perhaps irresponsibly, in services and facilities that have little or nothing to do with academics or the pursuit of theoretical knowledge, in order to sell themselves as year-round camps that will deliver everything an 18 to 22-year old could hope to experience in his first years away from home.

Everyone is complaining about the spiraling costs of higher education, while criticizing the relevance of what is gained, yet they keep sending those tuition checks anyway. Why would the institutions do anything different? The college experience, now designed for young people with no concrete experience, and little to no genuine curiosity, is what explains the out-of-control inflation in higher ed. Of course, many administrations will blame the fact that faculty keep demanding raises, but in a twisted way this makes sense from their perspective -- students don't choose colleges for the great professors. They base their choice on things like fitness centers and football stadiums, and how deep a school's team made it into the NCAA tournament. (This is definitely an over-generalization, and I personally know high school students who are motivated to learn, but the seem few and far between.)

In all fairness, colleges and universities also keep adding some very helpful programs to support students. Many of these programs, offices, and salaried positions are well-intentioned and effective ways to address things like retention of students that are more statistically likely to drop out, or to provide services for things from specialized tutoring to legal assistance. I do not think that college administrations want to degrade the primary purpose of higher education, but at a certain point business is business, and if seats are not filled then institutions shut down. Innovative programs can address problems, enhance education, and help sell the institution to potential students.

But within all the bells and whistles, the original purpose still remains. You go to college to learn theory.

What This Means for Students

The problem with learning theory is that it is abstract. You apply a theory to a concrete reality. For most traditional college students this is immediately problematic, because it is a challenge to be interested in theory when you do not have lived experience in the reality to which it applies. This is why it is very challenging to teach history to 5th graders. An 11-year old wants to be experiencing reality, not talking about it, or reflecting on it. Have you ever tried asking a kid what they did in school that day? It can be excruciating, although my son seems to have more trouble with it than my daughter.

This is one reason I have always felt very lucky that my chosen field is communication. Teaching communication courses, I assume, is considerably easier than teaching math or most sciences, because my students bring at least 18 years of raw life experience to the classroom about the subjects we discuss. It is getting more difficult, and I will talk about why in a future post, but for the most part I can walk into a classroom on the first day and begin selling the course to students by helping them see that what we will be learning is immediately relevant to their lives. In contrast, math teachers will always be struggling to explain exactly why it is necessary to learn calculus. "Hello class. Today we are going to learn about effective listening," vs "Hello class. Today we are going to learn about indefinite integrals."

Infinity. A real life example of calculus.
Image source: Chris 73, Wikimedia Commons

The Student's Responsibility

In order for the basic purpose of college to work, students have to accept that this is what they signed on for. They have agreed to a contract, which is more or less that they will follow a professor's best effort to deliver theory in a way that assures the student's success. This obviously requires work on the student's part, along with a certain level of intelligence depending on the subject. The teacher is not required to link the theory to real life. Better teachers will, depending on time and other variables, but most students will have some teachers who do nothing extra to make the subjects of their courses more interesting or relate-able. Because of this, some students simply are not going to succeed in college because they do not have the cognitive ability to make sense of either the situation or the need to rise above the need for information to be concrete and practical. At the same time, finding the right major can play a roll, and I am fairly certain it is why I settled on human communication as a major as an undergraduate. I have also had many students who are struggling to get their parents to understand that medical school just ain't in the equation for them.

In order to learn theory, it is almost always essential that one read. A lot. This is the next big problem for a lot of students today. I once let a textbook representative in my office during a moment of weakness, and after she started her sales pitch into an exciting new, video-based text by saying, "Let's be real - today's students just don't read," I politely showed her the door. I know there are professors who have abandoned reading assignments or textbooks because such a high percentage of students have demonstrated that they simply are not going to read, but I have preferred to look for innovations that take a new approach to teaching students why reading is essential. It is a struggle, but there are ways. For example, I now use an online textbook program that guides students through readings in highly intuitive and efficient ways while also quizzing them throughout the process. The end result is that students who at least try the program show up to class informed, and some of them get quite excited when they realize they are able to hold their own in interesting discussions based on a given topic. The available technology actually improves the whole purpose of reading for class, something that is completely lost on my Luddite colleagues.

But my point is that reading is essential. The reason reading is essential is because it is the primary way we learn the language, and then the theory, of any given subject. I used to take it for granted that students understood this, but in hind-sight, I didn't even really understand its significance.

The Significance of Language Acquisition

This is such a fundamental part of the primary purpose of college that it needs a little more explanation. The easiest way for me to explain it is through a story about when I lived in Seattle, Washington. I arrived in the Pacific Northwest assuming it would be rainy all the time, but I didn't know that it is more or less one big rain forest, and quite temperate. I soon learned it is hard to live in that region without becoming a gardener, because, well, plants are just growing like crazy everywhere, and in the spring it is the most colorful place I have ever lived. Low and behold, I ended up working in a garden store/nursery. It began as a part-time job selling Christmas Trees to the likes of Courtney Love (serious), and ended up as a full time job as a buyer. Part of working this store involved endless people coming in with bits of plants, or photos, or vague descriptions, and then having to look them up in a catalogue and then try to find the plant in our alphabetized nursery. In the beginning it was a nightmare, but after a few weeks I was amazed at how knowledgeable I became. One day, driving home from work on a street that I could probably navigate with my eyes closed, I suddenly saw something different. Instead of seeing swaths of color on both sides of the road, splashing across too cute front yards, I instead saw . . . Delphiniums! And peonies, and euphorbia, and salvia!

What happened? In a nutshell, I learned a new language. Wait, what? One might argue that I learned to identify plants, which is true, but I had seen the plants for years, my whole life really. But I really just saw color in various shapes. Learning the names of plants, the words that identify specific species, suddenly had a massive impact on my perception of reality. The words, the language of horticulture, allowed me to see the parts of the garden, not just the garden.Words are the key to discriminating between the parts of a whole.

It struck me then, as I was also teaching part time, that this is what was happening in school. I was teaching my students the words that refer to theories about how humans interact, and by learning those words they would begin to see the parts that make the whole. For example, we often know when we have just had a fight with someone, but without some basic theory and language on power and conflict, it can be almost impossible to see how the conflict emerged, much less how to resolve it. (This is why parents of traditional aged students hate when they come home from breaks after taking courses like interpersonal communication -- they start to see all the dysfunction, or worse, start to call people out about it!)

I often use the example of dissecting a frog in biology to explain this to my students. The teacher gives each student a dead frog, and then hands each one a sledge hammer, right? I mean, why not get the job done efficiently? One quick swing of the sledge hammer, job done, analyze the parts of the frog now that they are spread out on the walls of the classroom! No, of course not. We use scalpels to dissect the frog, so that we can slowly separate tissues to see the inner workings. We separate the various organs so that we can see their relationships to each other. In this metaphor, the scalpels are the concepts that we learn in any textbook. The concepts are what make up the theories, and the theories give us new insight into some reality. The scalpel/concept helps us separate parts, like the subtle back ad forth of verbal and nonverbal messages between two people as they negotiate conflict, or the way numbers relate to each other in calculus. I sometimes then jump to a completely different metaphor of fixing a bike they will no longer stop when you squeeze the breaks. An informed person will have no clue how to fix the bike because all they see is a bike. But someone with a little experience/knowledge of bikes will quickly troubleshoot the problem by inspecting the parts. When they see the problem it will be obvious that the relationship between part A and part B has been broken, and getting back on the road will require mending that relationship.

Science Sucks

I will never forget a lecture I attended at Seattle Central Community College many years ago. A friend of mine was going to school to be a marine biologist, and one of her professors was offering the public lecture so she invited me. The title of his lecture was "Science Sucks," and it was all based on the idea that sucking is a more common dynamic in many different situations than pushing, and he proceeded to demonstrate several very fun experiments to prove this. The funny thing is, I only recall one experiment because it was ridiculous, and not really one that proved the point of the lecture, but I did remember the concept. Years later my memory had a major payoff. I owned a classic 1963 Volkswagen Beetle that required near constant maintenance to keep running in tip top shape. The gas gauge ceased working before I took ownership, and the only time this burned me was late one night driving home from work. I ran out of gas on a steep bridge, but luckily only a short walk from a gas station. A friendly police officer agreed to park his cruiser behind the Bug with his flashers on while bought the gas, returned, and filled her up. But when I turned the key, the engine cranked but the engine just wouldn't start. The police officer was getting antsy and offered to call a tow truck. I stalled for a minute, probably mumbling obscenities, but then it hit me. I asked the police officer if he just spare a few more minutes while I tried something I was certain would work, and he reluctantly obliged. I actually had no idea if it would work, but I had a theory. Science sucks. The gas tank was now full, and all the mechanical parts were working including the fuel pump, but the fuel pump really doesn't actually push the gas into the carburetor, but rather it just keeps enough pressure on the fuel line so that the carburetor can suck the gas into it. I disconnected the fuel line, had the cop turn the key while I pushed gas into a cup. Then I poured some gas into the fuel line from the pump to the carburetor, and the rest right into the carburetor. I said a little prayer, as I had learned over the years that air-cooled VWs seemed to respond to that, and my little June-Bug started up immediately. When I waled back to the engine compartment the cop was just staring at me with the funnest expression. He said, "How did you know to do that?" And of course, I replied, "Because science sucks." But understanding theory is life-changing.

Life Experience Used to Come Before Learning Theory

If we can imagine the origins of colleges and universities around the world at different points in history, it makes sense that in the very beginning of any institution's existence, life experience predated higher learning. What I mean is, like my friend's father on the farm, the first college students likely worked before going to college. Not only that, but they probably decided to go to college because of some question they wanted to answer. This is overly simplistic, as I am sure there have also always been spoiled, rich kids who were sent to college by their parents, but play along with me here. The original notion of college had to be to provide theory on top of prior experience. A kid grows up on a farm, learning all the concrete realities of raising animals, growing food, etc, and then ends up going to college to learn new theory on how to do those things more efficiently. I begin with this idea, because it is the fundamental flaw in higher education today -- people now come to college in droves with little or no experience, choose majors in subjects they can only imagine doing in real life, and spend four years learning theory that will supposedly, hopefully, apply to something real in the future. Wouldn't it make more sense to go into a field for a few years, and then go to college with specific questions in mind? Or a genuine need for more knowledge in order to take the career to a higher level? As much sense as that might make, it is no longer practical.

Today, You Go to College to Get More Sophisticated

So given the ways we have changed as a society, and how the very notion of college has changed culturally, we have to look at the basic purpose of college through a different lens. I can't really expect my kids to go out into the world, work for a while, and then go to college seeking answers to new questions. (Or can I?) For the most part, we are stuck with things for the time being. Parents will keep sending their late-teen kids to college before they gain any significant life experience. If we accept this model, it is not the end of the world, at least not if we are very honest about what purpose college is left to serve.

Today, in my humble opinion, the main reason to go to college is to become a more sophisticated person. Sophisticated is a bit of a loaded word, and my guess is it has a certain connotative meaning that is less than positive in some circles. Some people criticize higher education as some sort of bastion of liberal elitism, and connecting a goal of becoming more sophisticated to that perception of college could be a turn-off. But take pause to consider my point here. First, the true meaning of the word sophisticated is simply "having, revealing, or proceeding from a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge (Google dictionary)." If the typical college student lacks real world experience, college is then a way of helping to provide some amount of "worldly experience and knowledge." Okay, but what does that mean?

Again, in my opinion, I equate sophistication with a very practical ability to talk to more people about more topics.

That's it.

You go to college for four years so that at the end of it all you can simply have intelligent conversations with a wider array of people about a wider array of subjects (than when you began). This might sound a little cynical, but to be totally honest, for me, as a kid that grew up in a very homogeneous, mostly white, middle-class, Judaeo-Christian suburb, this aspect of college was absolutely essential. I entered college as a fairly dumb 18 year old (dumb to the world that is, and more or less dumbed down by the soul-crushing boredom of my high school experience, but actually kind of intelligent in a latent way). In college I took classes with a wider range of people than I knew back home, and I attended a small school where students were expected to get to know their professors to some extent. I honestly thrived in the environment, as those professors helped me see that I had good ideas, and that I was a decent writer and thinker. At the end of the four years I still didn't know what I wanted to do with my life, but I had a new confidence in my own intelligence, and I decided to put off the real world a little longer by going to graduate school. I didn't have any money left for school, so I went to the one that made me an offer to attend for free as a graduate assistant. The conclusion to this personal example is that I never would have made it through graduate school if I hadn't become more sophisticated as a result of my undergraduate experience. I was suddenly surrounded by extremely smart people who were mostly older than I, and although it was tough at first, I was equipped to listen well, adapt, and eventually prove that I had a right to be there. I ended up with a master's degree, and that allowed me a fairly straightforward means of earning income as a college teacher wherever I chose to live.

If you understand what I mean by the purpose of college being to become more sophisticated, it might help clear up some inevitable confusion. If you think you are going to learn how to do a specific job in college, you will eventually realize that isn't really the case. You might get frustrated by assignments like writing essays about classic literature, or how to do research for a persuasive speech. You might be a liberal arts major rejecting the fact that you are required to take a lab science, or you might be a science major rejecting that you have to take public speaking. But if you understand that it is simply all meant to make you more sophisticated, so that you can talk to more people about more subjects, then it starts to make sense. I am not going to say that all of your classes in college will be relevant, or even good, but its more about the overall effect than the individual courses.

If you combine the above statement with previous explanation of learning theory, now you truly are on the path to being more knowledgeable and worldly, and even without much life experience, things might work out okay.

I will leave this with a hint of another future post in this series (maybe the next one). If you understand what I have explained here, and you still think going to college is the right choice for you, then the only way to really make the most of the experience to be engaged. If you think that all your time and energy is going to worth a damn by sitting in the back of a classroom with your cell phone propped up on your backpack while you scroll the latest social networking site, then you are completely missing the boat. No college is going to tell you that you are to become sophisticated. They will tell you that you're getting some sort of fictional career training. If you do not engage with your classmates and professors, whether in online classes of face-to-face, then you will end as one of the thousands of people who years later say college was a big waste of time. If you want to leverage the true power of what college really can provide, you will pay attention, ask questions, answer questions, take a leadership role among your peers, visit your professors during their office hours, join clubs, show up for networking events, etc. If you do so, you might not get what the college said you would, but you will end up with something much greater and probably more beneficial.

Thanks for reading. Please follow me to follow this series, and keep a lookout for my next post. But most important, please leave a comment if you found any of this compelling or have any specific questions. I am happy to help anyone navigate this important life choice.

Previous posts on the topic of higher education:

Why College? An Honest Insider's Guide for Students and Parents (Part 1 of this series)

Turning Higher Education Inside Out With Steemit

About Me

My name is Craig and I have been teaching college courses for almost 30 years. My "career" began when I was still an undergrad and my professor would call me (on my land line) to tell me she was too sick to attend class and then ask me to teach that day's session. She knew I was planning to attend graduate school on an assistantship that would involve teaching my own classes, but it occurred to me much later that I was probably saving her from getting fired. (She had a chronic health issue that the college was not willing to accommodate, but it did end up taking her life at a relatively young age.) I did go to graduate school, and I have been teaching more formally ever since. For 17 years I taught part-time at various colleges around the US, while also working my way up from entry level positions to senior management in both retail and hospitality. I have taught at schools from La Salle University in Philadelphia, to Seattle Central Community College, to Chaminade University in Honolulu, and I have held jobs from Christmas tree salesman to general manager of a large retail mercantile, and busboy at a second rate diner to beverage manager at one of the largest hotels in the world. My relatively unique work experiences has provided some really good insight into what employers look for in new college graduates, and has helped me craft classes that are as relevant as I can imagine. I also believe I am an expert on the specific qualities students should hone while going to college to be as successful as possible beyond. Let's just say that while I was teaching part time all those years, I also hired, and fired, a lot of employees. More recently, I made the transition to full-time teaching ten years ago, and am currently a tenured Assistant Professor at Community College of Philadelphia, the second largest higher education institution in Pennsylvania, where I am a member of what I've been told is the largest English department in the United States. I was the lead writer of our current Communication Studies curriculum, have served as its Chair, and enjoy teaching communication courses to our 350 or so majors.