More on What College is For

New Yorker illustration

Louis Menard's article in a recent New Yorker, Live and Learn: Why We Have College, is worth reading because he helps us see that what one thinks college is supposed to accomplish, both for its students and for the nation, determines how one carries out and evaluates the work.  He sets this up by recalling an incident in which a student asked the professor, "Why did we have to read this book?" Throughout the essay he converses with two recent books on higher education and also reviews the history of the enterprize.

Initially he offers up the two theories about what college does: 1) it sorts people ("College is, essentially, a four-year intelligence test.") or 2) it socializes people ("Ideally, we want everyone to go to college, because college gets everyone on the same page. It’s a way of producing a society of like-minded grownups.").  In the first theory grades matter a lot; in the second, not so much.  Although this small quotation might suggestion that theory 2 is only about conformity, Menard allows (perhaps prefers) that the "like-minded" agree that independent thinking is valuable.

Later he offers a third theory: college provides people with the specialized knowledge needed for specific work.  (He uses the term 'vocational' here though I would not.) This theory, Menard asserts, accounts for the growth in the non-liberal arts sector of post-secondary education.  In some degree I think we could consider theory 3 as a variation on theory 1 with the addition of more "tracks" into which people are sorted.

Menard, at the end, identifies himself as a proponent of theory 2 and suggests that holding that view is related to his thinking that "Why did we have to read this book?" is a great question from a student.  Indeed, one wonders if it might not be a great question to ask students after they have read the book.