A recent op-ed in The New York Times asserts that college is not a job. The confusion from college students about their relationship with education and labor stems from the view of college as a means to an end — for a particularly “good” or high-paying job. The result, the author warns, is that students see their education not as something fulfilling or worthy in and of itself, but as “a series of grim tasks” for which, once completed, they will gain compensation in the form of better employment.
Yet, the proposed reframing in this article that encourages students to see college as a time of leisure fails to alleviate the burden that so many students feel regardless of their expectations of the applications of their education. I don’t disagree with the author’s claim that skills such as an “ear for poetry, a grasp of geometry, or a keen moral imagination” are worth cultivating for their own sake, even if they “may not pay off financially.”
However, when pursued to its extreme, what is leisure if not another unrealistic expectation of the college experience of which most students will inevitably fall short? Personal edification and well-roundedness are much less concrete than more transferable and easily quantifiable skills. Either way seems to me to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the black-and-white mentality of either succeeding in earning the requisite degree for entry into a particular field and securing a skilled position upon graduation or failing to do so divides graduates into two extremes, the latter of which renders their costly education essentially valueless. On the other hand, the amorphous and unquantifiable nature of alternative goals renders them nearly impossible to fully achieve, such that students are constantly at risk of overwork in chasing them. College is a means to an end in this case, too, except that the endless pursuit of these goals offers no end in sight.
I recognize and deeply believe in the value of one’s college education beyond its direct application to the workforce after graduation, but I would caution that the impulse to maximize one’s learning, especially at the expense of one’s actual leisure time outside of the classroom or of more pragmatic preparation for one’s chosen career, can have the opposite effect.
How can a student ever fully devote themself to the mastery of a given subject, be it for their own gratification of learning or in service of more concrete goals, if they are too distracted by the pressure toward discovery and exploration of subjects for which they have no other interest? How can a student fully devote themself to their studies, in whatever subject or subjects they might be, if their conception of learning as leisure or rest from the labor demanded by the outside world precludes any acknowledgement of their laborious and demanding course load as something from which they need rest, too?
Learning certainly can, and should, to an extent, be joyous, but the expectation that it always should be seems like a recipe for burnout and misery. I don’t have to leave it to my imagination to see students forcing a smile as they overload their schedule with courses and extracurriculars that are not required for the completion of their college degree but that they feel are vital to a full college experience.
Students are burdened enough by the regular demands of their degrees without feeling as if they must tack on extraneous subjects and activities with the paradoxical expectation that they be both sufficiently challenging and completed with ease.
To say that college is work is not to say that its only purpose is to prepare students for work after college. It is to acknowledge the inherent difficulty and rigor of an education that successfully builds in those who complete it a foundation of knowledge that will serve them personally and professionally in years to come.
True, college is a unique context that allows for the cultivation of skills in areas that graduates might no longer be able to explore upon graduation. Who has the time to learn geometry while working an unrelated 9–5? Who has access to a geometry class if not on a college campus? The impulse to take advantage of finite learning opportunities while still in school is both laudable and understandable and, to an extent, should be encouraged. But college, for most studious students, is no reprieve from the outside world. It is a costly enterprise — both financially and in terms of effort — that is necessarily difficult for its successful completion. College is work, and that’s ok. There’s no need to make it harder by expecting that students see it any differently.
