College Degrees: Ticket to Exit or Ticket to Entry? - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

College Degrees: Ticket to Exit or Ticket to Entry?

“We are not concerned with what you do you after you leave or if you are prepared. We just want you to finish your degree.”

Needless to say, I was stunned by this frank expression of our degraded state of education. We have all been told that you have to get the degree in order to get the good job, the nice house, and to retire in Florida, But seldom do you hear an admittance that the university, or at least the Registrar’s Office, does not care about your future plans, only that you graduate.

Contrast this with the goal of a professor. As academics, intellectuals, and scholars, professors have a vastly different perspective on the role of education; indeed, to complete your degree from the academic standpoint means something quite different from that of the bureaucrat. The goal of the degree is to have immersed yourself in a field of study, such that you have a working knowledge of the discipline and are able to go out into the world and participate in the Great Conversation, build that machine, write the Great American Novel, cure diseases, discover lost temples, heal the sick, or design beautiful works of art. The goal is to be filled with the things that make us human: reason, creativity, passion, and intentionality. Reaching 120 credit hours does not indicate that a student is prepared to do these things. Worse yet, to the university, it does not even matter if you are capable of accomplishing great things, as long as you represent another increase to the graduation percentage and a potential alumna donor. Oh, how far we have drifted, how far we have fallen.

The college degree is now a checkbox to be filled rather than a vocation to be pursued. Whereas before the university was a gateway to an expanded mind, it is now the circumscribed mechanism by which we receive meaningless credentials that allow us to satisfy the desires we had in the first place. Our learning is yoked to the chariot of unrestrained ambitions and desires instead of informing them.

A college degree should help us decide what the good life is, how we ought to pursue it, and for what end. According to the registrar at my university, its purpose is solely to get a piece of sheepskin after four (or five) years of study, signifying basically nothing except the ability to tolerate university bureaucrats for four years.

Despite the madness of bureaucratic entanglements, I am reminded of a beautiful script written over the entrance to our chemistry building: “Enter to think God’s thoughts after him. Go forth to apply his thoughts in service.

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