When Educational Ideals Are Overtaken By Commerce

Of late, there has been a slew of books that critique higher education in the U.S. Many of these written by American scholars and pedagogical practitioners who are intensely invested in the system delivering better learning outcomes. Higher education in the U.S. matters not just to Americans, but to diverse global stakeholders. After all, countries like India, China and Korea continue to send students to American shores, for both undergraduate and Master’s degrees. Moreover, many colleges set up in other countries collaborate with American institutes or model them in some fashion.

In The Real World of College, the authors Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner, reach troubling conclusions after a 10-year study comprising of hour-long interviews with a panoply of 2000 participants: 500 incoming students, 500 graduating students, faculty, admin, parents, trustees, young alums and recruiters. Gardner hardly requires an introduction in most literary circles, but for the unfamiliar reader, I would like to dip into the backdrop of the authors.

About The Authors

Gardner is currently the Professor of Cognition and Education at Harvard. He pioneered the widely influential “theory of multiple intelligences”; moreover, he has written extensively on creativity and on many other human attributes. He is also a director of Project Zero – a five-decade-old project at the Harvard Graduate School of Education that aims to optimize human potential. Fischman is also a Director at Project Zero and the author of Making Good: How Young People Cope with Moral Dilemmas at Work. It’s significant when a study like this has been initiated by deep-thinking scholars seated inside one of the most well-resourced and reputed institutions. If thinkers at Harvard are concerned, we ought to stay alert to their disquiet.

The Original Aims of Liberal Arts Colleges

To begin with, the authors qualify that their study was directed primarily at liberal arts institutes. These institutions – differentiated from professional, vocational, or technical colleges – were established with broad humanistic aims to interrogate the nature of pretty much everything. They did this by mimicking ancient Greek practices that invited independent thinking and rich dialogues between professors and students. And by transmitting knowledge across a broad range of subject groups – the arts, the sciences, mathematics, philosophy, history and the social sciences, to name a few. The idea was to spark students’ interest in particular fields, after which they could select Majors and Minors. And also to seed them with the kind of cross-domain understanding that fuels creativity.

More broadly, they aimed at propelling student transformation – involving a deeper morphing of one’s beliefs, values and purpose in society. And to empower students to carry such changes into the wider world.

Contemporary Distortions

But that original ideal, as the authors posit, is no longer being served in contemporary liberal arts settings. They suggest that there are four mental modes with which one can approach college: Inertial, Transactional, Exploratory and Transformational. The fourth mode is the ideal one, but the third – Exploratory – could eventually lead to that. One of the issues today is that at least 50% of students approach college not just in a transactional mode, but in what they call an ubertransactional mode. In other words, everything is about resume building, in order to land a coveted job. Usually, these sought-after jobs are in pedigreed companies like Google or Goldman Sachs. As Gardner puts it, in his wry way, these undergraduate institutions have become training grounds for specific corporates.

The pragmatically minded might say, so what? For students saddled with huge loans (or even immense parental payouts), isn’t landing a dream job the end goal? The authors say that for one thing, the faculty at liberal arts colleges are not ideally suited to transmitting such skills. Wrangling with higher mathematics or literary nuances may not lead to deftness with Excel Models or other interview-cracking know-how.

Side Effects On Students

At a broader and more significant level, the authors suggest that these students might face a long-term loss – something that may not be visible during their college years or even in the immediate aftermath. They might lose out on the opportunity to develop their minds fully – or in other words, to love learning for its own sake, without constantly being tugged by extrinsic motivators.

One of the more tangible effects of being hyper-transactional (and one is not talking about being moderately transactional here) is that students are not enjoying their college experience as much as they could. Many report feeling alienated from their community and surroundings, with many more reporting concerns about mental health issues or about engaging in unhealthy levels of substance abuse. If students are constantly fretting about landing jobs, sheer competitive stress can make the four years seem torturous rather than stimulating or life-changing in a positive way.

Another shift noted by the authors is the dominant usage of “I” rather than “we” in student and parent interviews. Parents used “I” even more than students, and young alums – those that had completed a year or two of their first jobs – even more so. The authors suggest that too much centering on the “I” is another unhealthy sign of our material age – wherein responses are driven by self-interest rather than by being community or other-centered.

They also suggest that colleges introduce a conscious program to help students “de-center.” “Ultimately, we want to increase the likelihood that those on the cusp of entering the ‘real world’ will not only attend to their needs, but also those of our broader society.”

Fischman and Gardner recognize the pernicious effect of constructing student “resumes” right from kindergarten: “If K-12 schooling is reduced to a relentless, pressured pursuit of a ‘winning’ college application, who are the students when they arrive on campus?” There used to be an era when colleges were treated as a means to an end. Instead, getting into particular colleges has become an end in itself, with unhealthy runoffs on students and families.

Reflections for Indian Students

I also want to add a personal note to their overall thesis, which I largely agree with. If students want to leverage a liberal arts curriculum, they are unlikely to do so when they are financially stressed. Fortunately, for Indian students, there are excellent Indian alternatives that can offer a similar broad outlook. Like Ashoka University, Flame, Azim Premji, Krea, and O.P. Jindal, to name only a few in no particular order. Since even these institutions can be out of reach to a vast majority, we need many, many more such settings available at affordable rates in cities and towns teeming with go-getter young adults.

Besides, why not liberal arts courses or institutes aimed at mid-lifers? For folks that feel reasonably settled in financial terms, but who are willing to explore purposeful or satisfying careers that were out of reach (or unavailable) in their 20s.

One more caveat that I would add is that vocational, technical and professional colleges can also produce students with a humanistic or broad outlook. Many Engineering and Business schools have added other departments to cultivate a wider exposure. We can well imagine legions of engineers, who are attuned to the social consequences of the bridges they are building or roads they are tarring. Just as we can conceive of sociologists, who care less about the marginalized subjects featured in their books, and more about engineering their own advancements in the field.

References

Wendy Fischman and Howard Gardner, The Real World of College: What Higher Education Is And What It Can Be, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, 2022.