I think conversations like this are handicapped by how we collectively frame higher education.
Faculty like to imagine that a university education is something we deliver, primarily through the formal curriculum. Most of us are so far removed from the intimacies of the student experience that we fail to see that something bigger is going on here.
For undergraduates in particular, the university is a context that supports the work of self formation. It is ecosystem in which young men and women can take control over their own growth, and as Georgetown University’s President Jack DeGioia says <https://president.georgetown.edu/speeches/designing-the-futures-launch.html>, figure out for themselves what it means to live an authentic life.
Academia’s role in this is deeper and more nuanced than what manifests in the formal curriculum, and it goes beyond teaching and learning. The work of inquiry that faculty pursue grounds this ecosystem in academia’s strange mixture of idealism and dispassion. We set such an ambitious scope of work that it allows students to take seriously the equally grand enterprise of shaping their own lives. We create a culture of inquiry that empowers students to dig and question, and while they don’t do this to our standards in the classroom, they do often point it inwards, and in doing so they routinely break free from much of the subtle bias and values that they had previously taken as gifted truths. And perhaps the most valuable role of the formal curriculum is how it works to form a community of practice shared among students.
This is a crude an incomplete inventory, and in reality the aspects of the university experience that faculty often dismiss as extra curricular are just as important as the academic components, but my point is this. We need a systems view of the university in order to appreciate the true role and impact of higher education.
When people are surveyed <https://er.educause.edu/~/media/files/article-downloads/erm1221.pdf> years after graduation, they consistently rate their time in college as a transformative experience, one of the most important times of their lives. Yet when asked about the ten most impactful components of this experience, the formal curriculum usually doesn’t even make the list—nor does graduates' major areas of study or any specific skillsets they developed.
Still we persist in framing university education as something we deliver, something we teach, something students learn.
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