I just read this piece on Stanford University, which is obviously a hyperbolic piece, but gets at something that I think is important about a lot of the discussion around college these days. Basically, the piece says students and faculty treat Stanford like an ongoing job fair, where the point is not to get an education, but to make a lot of money. People go in the expectation of leaving; at least, that’s a common attitude among the students, and maybe some of the professors.
This reminds me of an old story—I mean, genuinely pretty old—told by Plutarch, in his “Life of Pyrrhus.” Pyrrhus was a famously warlike and ambitious king, and Cineas was one of his counselors. One day, Pyrrhus presented a new plan to Cineas, a plan to invade Rome. Cineas thought for a minute, then asked, “what next?” Pyrrhus said, well then we conquer all Italy, to protect our conquest of Rome. Cineas asked, “what next?” and Pyrrhus replied, after Italy, then Sicily, to secure our southern flank; Cineas asked, “what next?” and Pyrrhus said, we take Libya and Carthage, to secure Sicily; Cineas asked, “what next?” and Pyrrhus replied, from Africa we can seize Macedonia, then secure all of Greece, and then we can sit at our ease and enjoy life. Cineas then pounced: “We can do that now, and without risking so much so often, and harming so many.” Pyrrhus was annoyed by Cineas’s reply, but not deterred by it; so he went ahead with his wars anyway, much to his later regret. He did give us the phrase “Pyrrhic victory,” however, so he is remembered.
Pyrrhus exemplifies what the Greek philosophers called the pathology of pleonexia, of endless appetite, what Nietzsche called haben und mehrwollen, “having and wanting more.” This category reappears in Latin as well; Augustine, following the Roman historian Sallust, talks about this as libido dominandi, which is simultaneously the lust to dominate and the lust that dominates, and he identifies this as the central driving force in human history, East of Eden.
In contrast to pleonexia, Cineas’s “what next?” exemplifies the beginning of wisdom, and what the humanities should aim for. “What next?” asks finally, why—what is this for, what end does it seek? (Remember General Petraeus during the 2003 invasion of Iraq: "tell me how this ends.") The challenge is that we humans spend almost all our time pursuing the means to our ends, so that our grasp on the ends for which those means are meant can easily slip. Today is no different. Our worldview provides us no privileged or even very central vocabulary with which to ask and answer the question “what next?” We leave it up to individual preference. But this silence actually tacitly discourages us from interrogating this issue too closely, and thus encourages the atrophy of our critical self-consciousness. Our silence slides from laissez-faire into laziness with nary a bump. We begin to accept a set of pre-given ends without thinking about whether they matter very much to us at all.
No one has asked the Stanford kids, “what next?” What do you think the tech gurus do with all that money? Well, first of all, they use it to make more money; then, eventually, they use it to retire, and think about the meaning of life, and enjoy things. Bill Gates gets to walk on a treadmill and watch lectures from the Teaching Company all day if he wants to!
To which I reply: the Teaching Company? I mean, I know them—really, I do. And I believe in their products. But who are the teachers the Teaching Company hires to make their films? Well, the teachers who teach classes at places like—ta da!—Stanford University. Bill Gates has a lot of money, and he’s using the time that the money has bought him to, um, effectively go back to college, which he never, you know, actually finished. (He dropped out.) What you are calling a life seems to resemble, a little bit, a giant detour.
So my thought for Stanford students, and their elders is: you are at a place meant to give you the chance to contemplate and learn, and you’re foregoing the chance to contemplate and learn so that you can (ideally) get a lot of money and when you get the money you’re going to spend it to find ways to . . . contemplate and learn. Here’s where Cineas can help you, perhaps. College is not job prep.
Don’t get me wrong. I respect the question of how 22 year-olds are supposed to suture together an education from 6 to 22, with a paying career from 22 to 65 or 70 (or later). There are lots of people worried about getting a job with a liberal arts degree. And I suppose I should state frankly that my adult employment has been entirely in higher-education, so I never had to find a full-time job out of my BA in a non-academic context. (I did other things—I worked in a factory, broke up a concrete patio with a sledgehammer, worked in retail and bookstores, and even did medical experiments for money—but those were always marginal part-time gigs.) So my views are, shall we say, unsalted by the savor of personal experience. So: caveat emptor.
But I don’t want to opine about this. I want to point you to some data. And while you may have heard that reading Chaucer prepares you to ask “wouldst thou like fries with that?” in an excellent middle-english accent, in fact the liberal arts do really really well as an education for a career. The career path of liberal arts graduates is not a straight line but a "swirl," which I think means it takes several years for people to find a particular match for their interests and skill set, but that that search is not endless. One can gain a career and also an education, or at least the beginning of one. (Remember, the day you graduate from college is called "Commencement".)
Another report on the same study went a bit deeper:
“There is an enormous part of the economy hungry for graduates with skills in analysis and communication -- skills students are honing as they conduct close readings of texts, persuade their classmates in seminars and hone the style and structure of papers,” Sentz said.
That might not be clear to students, however, or to college leaders.
“Students outside STEM fields often lack the sense that they are gaining discrete, in-demand skills in the course of their studies,” he said. “Consequently, they do not perceive a clear line between their education and the working life for which it laid the foundation.”
I can't say trust me--again, I've never worked as a businessman or a manager in a company or an analyst or anything like that. But I can say, I'm not surprised.
While I’m in the role of cranky academic, there’s a lot of evidence that "Rankings" for schools are deeply misleading. Or at least the rankings most commonly used. They mostly seem to score schools--at best--for the quality of their intake of students, which is really an index of their reputation. Here is a better system of ranking, one that compares students and schools for what they do to increase student economic mobility and life options. You'll notice that one of their crucial factors is faculty research--that is, first-order scholarship.
What would I recommend? Just this: learning can be, should be, probably always is, a lifetime endeavor. It is rewarding for what the learning allows you to do, but it is also rewarding in itself. When people come back to their alma maters for reunions, they are not looking to sit in on management seminars or new accounting methodologies. They want some taste of deep thought, of big questions, of a reminder that they once grappled with fundamental issues, and that now, after some time in the world, they realize that those fundamental issues remain fundamental, even in their own lives. They know now, after some encounters with life, what the great Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska tried to tell us all: “the most pressing questions / are naïve ones.”