Not All Students Are Equally Studious
This is the third part in a FrumForum series on the value of college written by FrumForum's summer interns.
I am currently a student at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service (SFS), a vocational-leaning program embedded in a liberal-arts dominated institution. The arguments made by Daniel Smith the New York Magazine do not suggest to me that college lacks value. They suggest, and my experience confirms, that students do not derive the benefits of college just by paying and showing up. Like most things in life, they must be earned.
SFS is notorious at Georgetown for being the most difficult of the undergraduate schools. To graduate, SFS students must demonstrate proficiency in a second language, take a wide range of economics and political science courses, and are strongly encouraged to study abroad and find internships within the city. Many go on to work for the State Department or for other government departments or NGOs. That does sound like it’s worth the price tag and the time.
But, rather predictably, the fact is that the graduates who have the most success tend to be those who did the most work and took advantage of the opportunities they were given. For those who didn’t, it’s a mixed bag. I have a number of friends who simply go through the motions of college. Like most college students, they attend class, do the majority of their homework and manage to pull decent grades. But there are also a great many students for whom college is more than a four-year slog toward a degree. For them, college is a chance to pursue a wide range of interests without the pressure of paying a utility bill. Young adults who forgo college to work may be free of the accompanying mounds of student debt, but they do not enjoy the freedom to fail without major consequences. I am working this summer as an intern at an internet blog, but I doubt I will ever be a journalist. I do think I will be able to acquire some important skills and gain valuable “real-world” experience. But I can only spend my summer this way because I know I will be safely back on the Hilltop at Georgetown in September, whether I write like H.L. Menken or Charles Barkley.
This is why it is so frustrating for me to read articles like Smith’s. It is not that college lacks value. It is that the value of college is completely dependent on the student. By being enrolled at an American university, students have the opportunity to essentially choose the level of prosperity for which they are willing to strive. And the path to prosperity is hard but by no means secret. Every student knows that an engineering major is more rigorous than degree in history, but we are also well aware that it projects far greater lifetime income. Now, I am not accusing history majors of indolence. My point is that higher education offers a range of outcomes, which, unlike the outcomes of primary education, are almost completely dependent on the student.
Unfortunately, all graduates are counted equally in statistics, regardless of how many internships they applied for or how often they went to office hours.
When taken as a uniform bloc, college students may understandably give writers like Smith the impression that they are wasting time and money. This is akin to saying that a gym membership is “not worth it” because only some percentage of all buyers experience results. Clearly the numbers would be different among those who showed up and worked. The American university is still a vehicle to the middle class and beyond. But like any vehicle, it won’t drive itself.