Going to College – For Real, This Time

I’m feeling a little nostalgic this week — about our 18 year-old daughter who is pushing off from home and, silly as it might sound, about this nine month old blog, too.  The former child runs on strong legs and is ready for bigger fields; the latter is still crawling and has an uncertain future…but has at least made it this far.

My very first post here last November, also published as a column in our local paper, was called “The College and Not College Trip.”  In it, I described the mix of experiences we had on a family road trip, exactly one year ago, when we went to see two campuses before our daughter’s senior year began.  What I most wanted to convey then was the sense that, even though any one institution of higher learning can seem like a world set apart, there are generally dramatically different kinds of experiences – sometimes even from a past century — available just outside these enclaves.

Now, as our girl sets off for her freshman hiking trip, I am partly wondering what she’ll discover about the varied ways people are leading their lives, the different kinds of struggles they may have in the nearby streets and whole region all around the campus where she’s going.  Knowing her, I think she will be open to seeing a lot and trying to integrate at least parts of her course material with some of what she will actually observe.  There will plenty of colliding elements, I am sure

And, judging from what I read in a New York Review of Books article (from November 24, 2011, but hardly old news) called “Our Universities:  Why Are They Failing?” she will need to stay alert and focused to get the most out of her college education.  If we have, in recent years, been lulled into thinking that just getting to a halfway decent college is enough, apparently we need to think again.   One new book has this uplifting title:  Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.  The authors, Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, tracked a bunch of students during the first two years of college, using something called the Collegiate Learning Assessment, and found this:

With a large sample of more than 2300 students, we observed no statistically significant gains in critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing for at least 45% of the students.

Thud.  Let’s just say that this is not exactly the result we would want.

Will it surprise you to learn that most students say they spend much more time doing all kinds of other things (socializing, working out, fooling around on computers) than they spend studying?  Maybe this is as it should be, but we’ve got to wonder at least a little bit, what with the skyrocketing costs of sending our kids to these places.  Isn’t the college experience supposed to be more than just some kind of rubber stamp?  Don’t we hope that it can even be transforming in some way?  The most discouraging sentence in this article, which reviews a handful of books on the topic and presents dire statistics about high rates of attrition at all kinds of institutions, is definitely this one:

Our great democratic university system has become a pillar of social stability – a broken community many of whose members drift through, learning little, only to return to the social and economic box that they were born into.

So much for the great adventure of four years away from home, four years that more and more includes semesters in the far reaches of the world, too.  Imagine if this line were written in big letters and posted up to greet all the packed cars arriving to their destinations this week.   Let’s just hope it’s not true.

In this culturally rich five-college area where we live (at least for a little while longer) and with constant reminders from the culture about how crucial it is to get a degree, questioning the benefits of higher education seems close to sacrilegious.   I certainly don’t want to do it, especially since I’m watching our daughter set forth with so much vim and vigor.

But if there were ever a moment when I felt the validity of the philosophy about getting as much or as little out of something as you put into it, it would be the starting college kind of moment.  No institution, no matter how rich in resources, can make someone smarter (or kinder or happier).  It might provide the setting and an array of opportunities for remarkable growth…but knowledge doesn’t just flow into our brains in a kind of one-way transaction.   We have to reach for it, keeping in mind what it’s for, after all.