What Should College Be?

 Reading the New York Times in New Hampshire is always something of a magic carpet ride. But this piece on how careerism is ruining the college experience threw the Phantom for a loop.

The author, a young woman, now in law school, described her disappointment to learn that college was not about good times and bull sessions, but about competition and hard work.

"When I pictured myself in college, I envisioned potluck picnics and late nights listening to Taylor Swift, overanalyzing class crushes. Maybe even joining a Quidditch team.

I never daydreamed about hiding in the library bathroom crying because I had just been rejected by an undergraduate law journal."

Sophia Macy

A few years ago Sophia Macy, the 18 year old daughter of movie stars, was caught up in a cheating scandal, when her mother was found to have paid to have her SAT scores altered and she remarked that she never studied for her SAT's or, for that matter, much at all, and what she really thought going to USC was about was going to football games and sorority parties. That of course reinforced the idea of fecklessness.

Isabella Glassman

Now we have this twenty something, Isabella Glassman, complaining about competitiveness in college.

Everyone wants to work for Goldman, Saks or McKinsey or go to Yale Law, Glassman laments.

Quel dommage!

315,126 applicants vied for 2,700 positions at Goldman Saks in 2023!

Undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania cut each other's throats trying to get into the Wharton School of Business. 

People study long hours and stress out about failing.

Of course, what undergraduates are now competing for is not so much places in medical schools--as medicine is no longer a ticket to avoid the military or even to the upper class, but simply a sort of trade school, where, if you are interested in money, you have to compete for places among the radiologists, opthalmologists, anesthesiologists or dermatologists (the ROAD to happiness.) Or surgeons.  Outside the ROAD, most doctors are making salaries just below or just barely into 6 figures. 

No, undergraduates have become too sophisticated to want to be doctors or engineers--they know the big dollars are in finance, venture capital and all that jazz.  So let the games begin!

Of course, in the 1960's, when Ivy League schools began admitting students of modest financial means, a sizable proportion of these strivers wanted to go to medical school, or to become engineers. The only people more miserable at college than premeds were the engineers, the wags said.

These students took difficult courses and competed to be higher up on the grading curve with a bunch of equally determined and motivated kids.  

Nobody thought about potlucks, football games or Quidditch teams, well nobody who came to college to get ahead thought about any of that. 

Of course, there were still those who majored in French literature or Medieval History, who did not seem to worry much about launching into a job, much less a career after college. They somehow thought life would take care of them as it always had.

But then the Vietnam War blew up, and just about every male on campus suddenly got interested in what lay beyond graduation day, because getting drafted was more likely than not, and every biology, chemistry and physics major suddenly discovered that medical school looked like a very good idea. Medical School was an automatic deferment between 1967 and 1974, and law school could sometimes be finessed into the judge advocate general corps, which was not a bad way to become a veteran without getting shot at.

After the draft ended, maybe things got back to hedonism and fecklessness on campus, but if Ms. Glassman is any guide, kids paying big tuitions may have decided a return on investment is in order, and Goldman Saks looks good.

But, if you are female, not worried about the draft, come from money, you can drift through college, party hard, and if you are still unmarried at graduation, go off to the Sorbonne or the London School of Economics and maybe picnic in Hyde Park, and drift along and maybe get a job in publishing or an art gallery or something toney, and why should college be hard work, or stressful or challenging?

College once upon a time was not about fun but about survival, competing and moving on to the next stage.

Pre meds, engineers and even some pre law students are now "careerists," and much gnashing of teeth happens over the loss of liberal education, the demise of departments of English, art history, Egyptology, philosophy, sociology, history and classics. 

When F. Scott Fitzgerald went off to Princeton, there were no SAT exams and the idea of meritocracy was that your father had gone to Princeton or your family was exceedingly rich.

Now it is all about grubby competition.

After all, if college is not a safe space, where does a girl find a safe space?

Real Life

As Thomas Hobbes noted, if you read Hobbes in college, life can be a drag:  "No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short."