The Price of an Education

There are other cases where one pays for an experience rather than a service, and you simply cannot approach matters in the same way as in the aforementioned instances. You can hire sherpas to guide you through the Himalyas. But if you pay for a mountain-climbing expedition to the top of Mt. Everest, and never get on the plane, or expect to be carried to the top, and when you sit at home doing nothing but paying the bill you find you haven’t had the experience you demand a refund, you are in for a disappointment.

An education is like the latter situation, but I think many of our students today are under the impression that it is like one of the former ones. They pay the tuition (or more likely their parents do), and of course they do actually have to do some things (like just maybe go to class, and write some papers). But if exactly what is required of them is not spelled out in every detail, step by step, then somehow they feel as though they are being treated unfairly.

In the humanities, at least, grades are an attempt by professors to evaluate not whether you’ve jumped through certain hoops (although some such mundane things may be necessary as part of a course), but whether you’ve made the most of an opportunity, whether you’ve had a meaningful educational experience, whether you’ve sought to wrestle with issues and methods for approaching those issues.

Education can take place – indeed, it should take place – throughout one’s life. Every long-term experience of another culture, every book read, every conversation, and every thought thunk is potentially an educational experience. So why pay for university? Because there is simply no comparable time in one’s life when one can have a shared educational experience, with that much time devoted simply to reading, learning, exploring, and pondering.

Yet for some, it seems, the closest they want to come to the experience of climbing Mount Everest is to google “Mt. Everest”, change a few words, and wait for the “A” and ultimately the diploma they view as their right. They’ve paid for it, after all.