Will Hunting once told some pretentious asshole in a bar that one day he’d wake up to realize “he spent a hundred and fifty grand on an education he coulda gotten for a buck fifty in late fees at the public library.” As much as I try to convince myself otherwise, I’m afraid I’m becoming that asshole.
The thing is, every time I miss a lecture and don’t fall behind I start to wonder. When I find a textbook that’s better than the one on the syllabus, or discover I work best alone on tough problem sets, I waver. The worst are the days when I disappear in the Hatcher stacks just following footnotes, reading nothing in particular, learning. The question is this: what the hell am I paying for?
After maybe a year getting used to this place, I’ve found that most of my valuable experiences are only tangentially related to the institution itself. Late-night conversations with cynics and ideologues do more for me than discussions in English class; word for word, I get more satisfaction writing blog posts than papers; I’m invigorated by pickup football at Elbel and runs through town, not treadmills and free weights at the IM Building; the most exciting thing that I’ve done at school probably happened between midnight and five with a girl, not during daylight with a professor.
But you know this. Your favorite moments aren’t provided by the University, they just happen here. A lunch with friends, an argument that changes your mind, a night out at the bar — that’s what you’ve come to love about this place, the stuff you’ll be able to remember fifty years from now. But it’s not what you pay for. It’s not the reason for your debt and difficulty. So what is?
It’s the signal that tells future employers you can work hard at a good school. It’s a line on your resumé that certifies you can read, write, and operate in a world of ideas to which only a handful of this world’s billions are privy. It seems trifling, even silly to put so much weight on the mere fact you did OK at college, but there is literally no more direct indicator of your eventual success. A 3.2 from the U of M is the best guarantee against not being a fuck-up that money can buy.
So we bear these costs not for the luxury of unabated intellectual meandering, or for our creativity and intuition to blossom; we’re not paying to finally understand math or discover Montesquieu — that we could do on our own. We pay for the simple signal we’ve been told we need, the one whose absence spells poverty, or worse: mediocrity. Tuition is our insurance policy against failure, and $150K is the premium for our fear.
That is, of course, if we’re trying to get a job.
Just as a kiss only counts if both parties want it to, your resumé only matters if someone is going to read it. In other words, if there’s no internship or entry-level position at the end of the maze, then you have no reason getting lost in the first place. So what happens then?
A palpable measure of freedom emerges when you stop letting interviews and applications surreptitiously inform your decisions. It’s the same kind of freedom you get by ignoring grades, or by reading a book just for the hell of it, or by meeting people instead of “networking” with them: when you drop the agenda, the incessant effort to signal, you can finally focus on the real crux of things. And in each case you give yourself a chance to actually enjoy what you’re doing.
The difficulty, of course, is that once you step outside the effort-evaluation-application loop, you lose a pretty comfortable safety net. In the most dramatic scenario — say, dropping out of university entirely to run a startup — you gain an immense amount of autonomy, a sense of unbounded opportunity, and a tremendous cost savings, but all of a sudden the complete fuck-up scenario becomes a lot more conspicuous.
Again, it’s a question of confidence. To put it bluntly: if we were really as talented as we keep telling everyone in job interviews, we wouldn’t even be here. We would have no time for the waste inherent in a collegiate curriculum, the hours we spend satisfying other people’s expectations. We would build our signal instead of paying for it. Anyone smart enough to do well here knows this, that they can do just as much, if not more, without an M-Card and a diploma. But they also know that the beaten path, though unromantic and unexceptional, pays the bills.
It’s the guy who’s smart enough to be just as disgusted as Will Hunting by the game we call “education,” but stupid enough to not play it, that we should be worried about. He’s the guy that might make us all look like assholes someday.
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If I was guaranteed a well-paying, enjoyable, autonomous, creative career from tomorrow until retirement, I would still choose to attend college. Maybe not for four years, but at least a little while. Two reasons come to mind:
1. I think people who spend their entire lives studying something have something unique and valuable to impart to those of us who don’t. Brilliant professors can use knowledge and intelligence not only to create and advance entire fields of study, but also to crystallize a complex landscape of information (one that would take a lifetime to fully absorb) into insights and nuggets of truth that a general undergraduate can understand or at least appreciate. These sorts of things - not quite the meat of a field … maybe more the juices or the flavor - can’t be learned from a textbook or a collection of papers. An offshoot of this is the importance of choosing classes not for the subject matter, which presumably can be self-learned with enough motivation, but on the basis of how good a professor is at doing this crystallization. Avoid professors who summarize the textbook for their lectures; choose ones who draw from their research and experience, ones who say something insightful every few minutes instead of every few lectures.
2. I’m not sure how crucial college is for this process, but developing context is vital to ensuring you keep learning throughout your life. By context, I mean an understanding of what professors do and how they do it, and thus an understanding of what *knowledge* is and how it’s imparted. In college, research becomes distillation of information from textbooks, reference books, and papers, not a summary of the first 10 Google hits, a couple Wikipedia articles, and whatever handful of primary sources your teacher selected. You learn what it means to be a professor of literature. You learn why the best economists are the best at what they do. You learn what math is. I’m not saying college is the end of learning what knowledge is, but having gone through almost half of it, I can tell from how far I’ve climbed that I’d miss the view.
Like you said, I think if you realize the limitations of a college education it becomes a more genuine and worthwhile experience. (I’m not sure if it’s worth $150,000 (because I don’t know how much money $150,000 really is, nor do I know how well my college experience will serve me), but it may be.) If you don’t realize its limitations, you can get sucked up into a mode of thinking where an education is only worth something when it’s over and stamped on a really thick, glossy piece of paper. And this is a bad thing. So I’d revise your last sentence: “it’s the guy who’s smart enough to get the good things out of education and not the bad, but not smart enough to distinguish the two, that we should be worried about.”
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[…] Addendum: The growing disillusionment of a University of Michigan student. […]
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a) How’d Seth Roberts find your blog?
b) I was going to say stuff similar to #1…he covered all the bases.
And what happened to the non-popup comments?
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[…] Det er det åbenbart bare de færreste, som er. Will Hunting once told some pretentious asshole in a bar that one day he’d wake up to realize “he spent a hundred and fifty grand on an education he coulda gotten for a buck fifty in late fees at the public library.” … Late-night conversations with cynics and ideologues do more for me than discussions in English class; word for word, I get more satisfaction writing blog posts than papers; I’m invigorated by pickup football at Elbel and runs through town, not treadmills and free weights at the IM Building; the most exciting thing that I’ve done at school probably happened between midnight and five with a girl, not during daylight with a professor. … [I]t’s a question of confidence. To put it bluntly: if we were really as talented as we keep telling everyone in job interviews, we wouldn’t even be here. We would have no time for the waste inherent in a collegiate curriculum, the hours we spend satisfying other people’s expectations. We would build our signal instead of paying for it. […]
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I don’t know how or why I know it everytime. I can always spot another UofM student in just a few words. I majored in music performance, Double Bass. You?
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