I have addressed the lie that college necessarily equals a job before, but it bears repeating. Obviously there are factors that will determine whether graduating students get 1. work 2. in the field they studied 3. that becomes a career. These factors are generally outside the control of the university, and among them are these: the nature of the degree, the number of people that have that degree, the state of the industry/market, the general state of the economy, the geographic location of the student and their willingness/ability to move, and of course, the individual’s intelligence, aptitude, personality etc. For example, there is a degree in the United States called “Medical Billing.” If the the American government were to create a single-payer health care system or “universal health care” those degrees would in large part become effectively meaningless as the entire system they studied would no longer exist. The government can spawn and alter industries with great rapidity (the car smogging industry in California comes to mind). Technology can also totally alter markets and render swaths of jobs redundant or obsolete (and we know that AI and automation is already remaking the world in ways that are going to eliminate or slim down many industries). So, government fiat and technological advance can render specialties of study meaningless in vocational terms; college can’t guarantee a career or even a job, although this is the number one platitude offered by parents, school administrators, and educators when the wherefores of higher education come up in conversation.

There was a time when one might have heard teachers argue that higher learning, particularly in the Humanities, would lead to greater empathy and (as the name implies) humanity. I don’t think you can study the history of the 20th century and come away with the idea that even highly educated people are any more moral for their studies. Consider the example of Germany; it was one of the most culturally rich, well-educated, academically rich countries in the history of the world at the close of the 19th century. As a nation, Germany had an incredibly dense and thriving intellectual life, but within a generation, its people were capable of carrying out the Holocaust, or turning a blind eye to it. So, I don’t think you can argue that educated people on the whole, or even people who study the Humanities, are necessarily more humane, although there are studies that suggest reading fiction and empathy are related in some ways. Education can, but doesn’t always make for a better human with a better soul.

I think the only thing that colleges can outright guarantee are opportunities. Come into a classroom and you have the opportunity to listen, to discuss, to consider, to read, to write, to reflect, to grow. Many students do not take advantage of those opportunities, and they may (or may not) emerge from college with a degree or certificate but according to the authors of Academically Adrift, Josipa Roska and Richard Arum, 36% American college students graduate with “no significant learning.” I can put a great book into a student’s hand, but I can’t make him read it. If he reads it once, he will notice things, if he reads it twice, he’ll notice more. The more time a student spends with texts of quality, the more he is likely to discover in them, but his teachers can’t make him spend the time. What students have in college are opportunities; opportunities to encounter ideas and grapple with them, opportunities to see new perspectives and make decisions about what kind of person and life and world to make of and for themselves.

Therefore, I think it is incumbent on colleges and universities to be as robustly packed with intellectually diverse opportunities, ideas, viewpoints, and experiences as possible. What students choose to do with their opportunities is their own lookout; our job, in my view, our whole job is to expose them to as much as possible every second they are in class or on campus, and let them decide what to internalize. This exposure is the only thing we can control or guarantee. The lie of “learning outcomes,” that we can predict what a student will know at the end of a given course, is that all learning is measurable and immediate. It isn’t. I can’t guarantee what a student will decide is important enough to remember in the long term. I can guarantee that I will expose him to the things in the study of English that I think are important. That’s it. End of list.

This notion of maximum opportunity as the focus of higher education is the exact opposite of the principles behind “Guided Pathways,” which seeks to narrow the field of what a student might study to what will net “in-demand jobs” and push students through their studies at an accelerated rate. Dance, Photography, Drama, Literature, and Philosophy offerings are shrinking, student choices are narrowing because of a concerted effort by legislators and administrators to make the messy endeavor of discovering oneself (and the world) appear pleasing on a spreadsheet. Meanwhile on campuses all over America, the opportunities to attend or participate in plays, to wrestle with morality and the existence of God alongside Kant and Nietzsche, to read Mary Shelley and Herman Melville and John Milton and ask what it means to be human and where the boundaries of humanity are, to choose from a Babel of language courses and explore myriad cultures, are fewer and fewer year by year at the community college level. Instead, we are to teach them to write for business, as one of my colleagues suggested recently. I have been directed by my superiors not to assign novels, not to assign any fiction whatever in Composition classes. “They don’t need it.” I have been told not to teach logical fallacies. I have seen Theater budgets slashed 85% and people laid off, World Language Labs closed down, Tutoring centers diminished to uselessness, and Shakespeare offered once every two years, even as administrators hire more administrators and plead poor when they cancel classes. It’s a bad joke when administrators and educators enacting these policies claim that “students come first.” What they are doing is actively robbing students of opportunities they might otherwise have had and that might have changed or enriched their lives immeasurably. Who are these course-winnowing “educators” to decide what art, music, poetry, or ideas a student “doesn’t need” in his life? The arrogance of it staggers me.

I think an opportunities-based philosophy for Higher Education is more intellectually honest than the propaganda engine of jobs, jobs, jobs that seeks to turn Higher Education into a sausage factory that manufactures obedient employees. Dylan Thomas comes back to me every time I think on these things.

“Rage, rage against the dying of the light…”