I had a conversation with another parent about this same topic. They argued this same position about the often overlooked value of the college experience.
I understand what you’re saying, but the reality is for the working class it’s very much about seeking stability. Expanding our world view is a luxury and less a priority when you are struggling to make ends meet.
The message I got growing up was that college is the only sure path to success. Unfortunately, there was very little awareness and support in understanding how to navigate higher education. Being a first generation college student also placed me at a great disadvantage. I learned the hard way that how education is marketed is harmful to the inexperienced, which is why I am personally skeptical about the value of education.
Until college is short of being free, my preference is a skills-based model with the least debt burden. And as far as expanding world views and making a difference, a heavy community service component is beneficial in building awareness, compassion, empathy, problem solving, and collaboration.
Another piece of this puzzle is how increasingly moot it’s becoming to even try predicting what an economically sound route through education would look like. In real time, we’re watching the “safe” options evaporate in the face of AI.
For instance, kids who were promised a fruitful career if they dedicated their adolescence to learning how to code were among the first casualties, with coding being the task these chatbots have proven most capable of automating. Some of the world’s best coders have recently said that the latest models can accomplish in an hour what a whole team of engineers would take several months to complete.
So perhaps it’s becoming a safer bet to think about the distinctly human capacities we have: like learning history and applying it to modern relevance, or developing the interpretive skills that let us navigate ambiguity and complexity.
And while AI is trying to convince us it can create art for cheaper, it won’t be able to express the authentic points of view that define what art actually is. A machine can generate images and text, and it can predict what can provoke us to react, but it can’t wrestle with what it means to be alive, or to belong to a particular moment in history. That wrestling is the substance of the humanities, and it may turn out to be far more economically resilient than we’ve been led to believe. The irony is that the fields we’ve been dismissing as impractical may be precisely the ones that remain most resistant to automation, because they’re grounded in the irreducibly human work of making meaning.
There’s a class dynamic here worth considering too. For generations, following your heart in education has been an economic privilege: something available to those who could afford to not worry about immediate returns, while everyone else had to focus on what would keep them afloat in a world constantly clawing money away as you try to afford basic opportunities. The philosophy major was a luxury; the accounting degree was survival. But if AI continues disrupting the “safe” paths at this pace, the advice to abandon your passions for something “practical” may soon look not just spiritually bankrupt, but financially too.
Thank you for this piece, Rahaf. Lots of questions to consider, and an important topic that needs rethinking right now.
Thank you for this nuanced, thoughtful piece. As a historian teaching at a high-priced college, I think about these issues quite often. Our department struggles to attract majors because few students are willing to pursue a “impractical” major like history, unless it is paired with something viewed as more practical, such as economics. But students love our courses, and so most of the students I teach are not majors. They want to learn history, they want to learn how to write, they want to learn how to think for themselves. But they hear the message about the market very clearly.
This is a very important conversation and you’ve framed the questions clearly. As a retiree, I had the good fortune to audit a class at my local (very elite!) liberal arts college which explored the questions of “who is education for?”, “who gets to decide what students learn?”, “what is the importance of education in a democratic society?” And more.
We read a ton of very challenging and confronting material and our conversations in class were gritty and sometimes raw. I was often surprised by the insightfulness of my classmates, and the facilitation skill of our brilliant and understated professor.
My overall feeling at the end of the semester is that the students in this class were learning the skills they needed to handle the critical complexities of life on this planet: curiosity, empathy, active listening, holding two opposing ideas at one time, respect, self-reflection, among others.
Auditing this class was THE BEST thing I have done for myself. The reading, discussions, and experience of this kind of learning was transformative for me.
My daughter once asked me “What is intelligence?” My answer to her was “curiosity.” Education is not finite and to make it so limits its value. A broader definition of education for the U.S. might be useful. A focus on encouraging curiosity and life long learning would, perhaps, imbue society with an appreciation for “education.” When education is encapsulated by buildings, books, and the three Rs then it becomes lost and impossible or unattainable to too many. Is education only available in one form? Or is it available through street smarts, common sense and from nature?
I want to stress that book smarts and higher education is extremely important but as a society we have focused on “one way” - an ability to pass tests - which is not the only way to learn or perform or to achieve. This “one way” minimizes those who cannot or do not “pass the test.” I grew up in a world where some of the smartest people I knew were the least educated. An emphasis on degrees and education left these people out of conversations about their social and political needs. When we as a culture realize education can come in many forms and has value in and of itself, the transactional nature of education would be obsolete.
This topic is desperately important at this juncture in history. Thank you for digging deeper here!
The quote that jumped out at me in the beginning of the article was this: “Education is not one thing. It is an institution, an experience, a cultural signal, a sorting mechanism, and a deeply personal period of life.”
As someone who innately values learning throughout one’s life, I think you actually identified what COLLEGE is, not what education is. College can certainly be all of those things, but education isn’t confined to an institution, a building, or a period of life. Education is (or should be, in my estimation) available to every single person who’s still pumping blood on planet Earth. We can educate ourselves in a thousand ways every single day, whether we attend university or not. I feel like the academic culture is desperately clinging to the concept that education can only be achieved within their storied buildings, which is far from true in today’s connected world. Education (not just knowledge, but knowledge plus experience and all the nuanced parts that go into what makes one “educated”) is available far beyond the institutions that claim to have a corner on the market.
In the U.S. the system is most obviously broken, or at the very least, going through a critical shift in how we consider what’s “worth it.” The debt, the time commitment, the social aspect, and the long term value (both financially and otherwise) of attending college are all things students and parents are looking at through a different lens. We certainly need college-educated citizens in our country and world, but we also need those who forge a different path without college. Our society is starting to recognize the value and need for both without automatically pushing students into college without considering what’s best for the individual. Education is a million times more multi-faceted than the narrow box many of us had previously been stuffed into.
Great article, especially as the parent of two recent college grads. We are privileged and they were able to go debt free which I know many students can’t do. One majored in early childhood ed and the other in wildlife bio. They majored in what they loved and I do think they learned many of the independence skills that are overlooked that are mentioned in the article. Thankfully, they’ve been able to get jobs though not high paying ones. I do agree that the cost of higher ed is outrageous and the system needs reform. Not every job needs a degree and that’s ok. Not sure what the answer is but the article brought up many questions to think about. I agree with the commenter who said we need educated citizens but education is “ multifaceted”. One thing I think all of us should be taught after high school is civics.
I had a conversation with another parent about this same topic. They argued this same position about the often overlooked value of the college experience.
I understand what you’re saying, but the reality is for the working class it’s very much about seeking stability. Expanding our world view is a luxury and less a priority when you are struggling to make ends meet.
The message I got growing up was that college is the only sure path to success. Unfortunately, there was very little awareness and support in understanding how to navigate higher education. Being a first generation college student also placed me at a great disadvantage. I learned the hard way that how education is marketed is harmful to the inexperienced, which is why I am personally skeptical about the value of education.
Until college is short of being free, my preference is a skills-based model with the least debt burden. And as far as expanding world views and making a difference, a heavy community service component is beneficial in building awareness, compassion, empathy, problem solving, and collaboration.
Another piece of this puzzle is how increasingly moot it’s becoming to even try predicting what an economically sound route through education would look like. In real time, we’re watching the “safe” options evaporate in the face of AI.
For instance, kids who were promised a fruitful career if they dedicated their adolescence to learning how to code were among the first casualties, with coding being the task these chatbots have proven most capable of automating. Some of the world’s best coders have recently said that the latest models can accomplish in an hour what a whole team of engineers would take several months to complete.
So perhaps it’s becoming a safer bet to think about the distinctly human capacities we have: like learning history and applying it to modern relevance, or developing the interpretive skills that let us navigate ambiguity and complexity.
And while AI is trying to convince us it can create art for cheaper, it won’t be able to express the authentic points of view that define what art actually is. A machine can generate images and text, and it can predict what can provoke us to react, but it can’t wrestle with what it means to be alive, or to belong to a particular moment in history. That wrestling is the substance of the humanities, and it may turn out to be far more economically resilient than we’ve been led to believe. The irony is that the fields we’ve been dismissing as impractical may be precisely the ones that remain most resistant to automation, because they’re grounded in the irreducibly human work of making meaning.
There’s a class dynamic here worth considering too. For generations, following your heart in education has been an economic privilege: something available to those who could afford to not worry about immediate returns, while everyone else had to focus on what would keep them afloat in a world constantly clawing money away as you try to afford basic opportunities. The philosophy major was a luxury; the accounting degree was survival. But if AI continues disrupting the “safe” paths at this pace, the advice to abandon your passions for something “practical” may soon look not just spiritually bankrupt, but financially too.
Thank you for this piece, Rahaf. Lots of questions to consider, and an important topic that needs rethinking right now.
Thank you for this nuanced, thoughtful piece. As a historian teaching at a high-priced college, I think about these issues quite often. Our department struggles to attract majors because few students are willing to pursue a “impractical” major like history, unless it is paired with something viewed as more practical, such as economics. But students love our courses, and so most of the students I teach are not majors. They want to learn history, they want to learn how to write, they want to learn how to think for themselves. But they hear the message about the market very clearly.
I see the same thing here at Auburn, where I teach history.
This is a very important conversation and you’ve framed the questions clearly. As a retiree, I had the good fortune to audit a class at my local (very elite!) liberal arts college which explored the questions of “who is education for?”, “who gets to decide what students learn?”, “what is the importance of education in a democratic society?” And more.
We read a ton of very challenging and confronting material and our conversations in class were gritty and sometimes raw. I was often surprised by the insightfulness of my classmates, and the facilitation skill of our brilliant and understated professor.
My overall feeling at the end of the semester is that the students in this class were learning the skills they needed to handle the critical complexities of life on this planet: curiosity, empathy, active listening, holding two opposing ideas at one time, respect, self-reflection, among others.
Auditing this class was THE BEST thing I have done for myself. The reading, discussions, and experience of this kind of learning was transformative for me.
My daughter once asked me “What is intelligence?” My answer to her was “curiosity.” Education is not finite and to make it so limits its value. A broader definition of education for the U.S. might be useful. A focus on encouraging curiosity and life long learning would, perhaps, imbue society with an appreciation for “education.” When education is encapsulated by buildings, books, and the three Rs then it becomes lost and impossible or unattainable to too many. Is education only available in one form? Or is it available through street smarts, common sense and from nature?
I want to stress that book smarts and higher education is extremely important but as a society we have focused on “one way” - an ability to pass tests - which is not the only way to learn or perform or to achieve. This “one way” minimizes those who cannot or do not “pass the test.” I grew up in a world where some of the smartest people I knew were the least educated. An emphasis on degrees and education left these people out of conversations about their social and political needs. When we as a culture realize education can come in many forms and has value in and of itself, the transactional nature of education would be obsolete.
This topic is desperately important at this juncture in history. Thank you for digging deeper here!
The quote that jumped out at me in the beginning of the article was this: “Education is not one thing. It is an institution, an experience, a cultural signal, a sorting mechanism, and a deeply personal period of life.”
As someone who innately values learning throughout one’s life, I think you actually identified what COLLEGE is, not what education is. College can certainly be all of those things, but education isn’t confined to an institution, a building, or a period of life. Education is (or should be, in my estimation) available to every single person who’s still pumping blood on planet Earth. We can educate ourselves in a thousand ways every single day, whether we attend university or not. I feel like the academic culture is desperately clinging to the concept that education can only be achieved within their storied buildings, which is far from true in today’s connected world. Education (not just knowledge, but knowledge plus experience and all the nuanced parts that go into what makes one “educated”) is available far beyond the institutions that claim to have a corner on the market.
In the U.S. the system is most obviously broken, or at the very least, going through a critical shift in how we consider what’s “worth it.” The debt, the time commitment, the social aspect, and the long term value (both financially and otherwise) of attending college are all things students and parents are looking at through a different lens. We certainly need college-educated citizens in our country and world, but we also need those who forge a different path without college. Our society is starting to recognize the value and need for both without automatically pushing students into college without considering what’s best for the individual. Education is a million times more multi-faceted than the narrow box many of us had previously been stuffed into.
Great article, especially as the parent of two recent college grads. We are privileged and they were able to go debt free which I know many students can’t do. One majored in early childhood ed and the other in wildlife bio. They majored in what they loved and I do think they learned many of the independence skills that are overlooked that are mentioned in the article. Thankfully, they’ve been able to get jobs though not high paying ones. I do agree that the cost of higher ed is outrageous and the system needs reform. Not every job needs a degree and that’s ok. Not sure what the answer is but the article brought up many questions to think about. I agree with the commenter who said we need educated citizens but education is “ multifaceted”. One thing I think all of us should be taught after high school is civics.