The aim of a college education

As an adjunct professor for almost five years, I've heard students from 18 to 22 discuss why they came to college, what it means to be there, and most often what they plan to do when they leave.

I remember having those thoughts more than forty years ago. I would learn, achieve, impress, and then graduate to reach higher aims of status and maybe even a living wage. I would at least work in the arts where I had studied.

This didn't happen. My career in theatre never materialized (I never got remotely close to a living wage), and I earned my living not at all in the arts. Yet today I don't regret it. My undergraduate and graduate degrees are not wasted.

On Monday I plan to ask my freshmen what they consider the aim of their college education. I've asked this before informally and the answer is always the same: to get a better job, to command a better salary, to achieve status (as in respect within the community), to be proud of having fulfilled a dream and achieved a demanding commitment.

But now the question is loaded. I've thought this one through and I've come to this conclusion: the aim of education is to make meaning out of life, to have the tools to structure a life where the concrete can be made abstract and the abstract can be concretized. A college education will force you into a discipline, but that only allows you a practical tool to perhaps use for economic activity and personal fulfillment. A college education in its most classical purpose has as its end the goal of expanding personal awareness of the breadth and depth of the human condition. But this is only leading the horse to water. To drink fully of the cup of life is the goal of lifelong learning, of the school of everyday hard knocks, of failing again and again and never giving up. Getting a better job is secondary; jobs and even industries come and go. Making meaning is permanent and continuous, even when it's mostly in the subconscious (it usually is). Perhaps my freshmen will remember this forty years from now.