College and citizenship

What’s the value of a college degree?

College grads have an average debt burden of $33,000 after graduating. Is college a ludicrous waste of money? Perhaps, if you measure it by what happens a year or two after graduation. But the long-term data says otherwise: according to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the value of a bachelor’s degree is near an all-time high.

But surely those data reflect the sexy STEM or business majors of today! Aren’t the Humanities in decline? In a word, no.

I can’t prove this, but I hope that one reason why number-driven indicators of college success are limited is because people realize there is something humanizing about the discipline of careful thinking forged in the college classroom. Frank Bruni points to this larger hope in a recent essay:

We live in a country of sharpening divisions, pronounced tribalism, corrosive polarization. And I wish we would nudge kids — no, I wish we would push them — to use college as an exception and a retort to that, as a pre-emptive strike against it, as a staging ground for behaving and living in a different, broader, healthier way.

One problem, he writes, is the way we have defined success in college, “which so heavily emphasizes how a career is successfully forged and how financial security is quickly achieved.”

This measure of success is not the only one. In their Fall, 2013 meeting, participants in the Boston College Roundtable addressed the question of the value of the liberal arts, so much a cornerstone of the educational paradigm at Catholic institutions. Thomas G. Plante summarizes:

In a nutshell, we invite students to “come to our educational approach and tradition that embraces ethics, compassion for others, holistic education, and the highest educational and intellectual standards and ideals that help build a better and more just and humane world. Enjoy our hospitality, graciousness, and even love.”

Bruni’s diagnosis, that our society is characterized by balkanization exacerbated by digital enclaves–which college students, left untutored, will continue to inhabit–is correct. His prescription is partly right:

Now more than ever, college needs to be an expansive adventure, yanking students toward unfamiliar horizons and untested identities rather than indulging and flattering who and where they already are. And students need to insist on that, taking control of all facets of their college experience and making it as eclectic as possible.

Yes, students must be pushed outside their comfort zones. Yet the answer is not to urge students toward eclecticism, a kind of intellectual buffet. Rather, the answer is to mentor them through shared reading (the root of the word collegio), which cultivates not only the skill of thinking but also the skills proper to friendship necessary in a civil society.

Catholic colleges and universities must be about friendships rooted in the shared desire to understand the world. For our part, if we really want to know the value of a college degree, we must do more than look at post-graduation salaries or job placement rates. We must ask what kind of people our graduates become even fifty years after they graduate from the formative experiences we offer.