The price and worth of a degree

While escorting a high school senior through the college application process this year, I heard a lot about the purpose of higher education. On campus visits, I listened to administrators and professors rhapsodize about how their schools inspire higher-level learning, create a sense of values, ethics and civic engagement and hone critical thinking skills.

But those noble goals often directly contrasted with comments posted by students themselves on college review sites. In online public forums, college graduates debated far more practical matters: Did their college open doors for jobs? Did their undergraduate pedigree get them into law or medical school? Was their school worth $40,000 a year?

Or, as the T-shirt says, “I have a degree in liberal arts. Do you want fries with that?”

My son has chosen a small, liberal arts college that he believes will help shape the man that he will become. He tells me that while 50 percent of college is about the academics, the other half is about figuring out the kind of life you want to lead, the sort of person you want to be. Always pragmatic, I sat there thinking, “Is any of it about getting a job?”

As a college student, I was more interested in what I needed to find employment than in what I needed to find enlightenment. I treated college as a turnstile to a career.

This month, hundreds of commencement speakers will reassure graduates that their liberal arts degrees are worth the investment and will produce dividends that no financial ledger can measure, including the ability to think for themselves.

In a remarkable address to Kenyon College graduates in 2005, the late novelist David Foster Wallace rejected such bromides:

“So let’s talk about the single most pervasive cliche in the commencement speech genre, which is that a liberal arts education is not so much about filling you up with knowledge as it is about, quote, teaching you how to think. If you’re like me as a student, you’ve never liked hearing this, and you tend to feel a bit insulted by the claim that you needed anybody to teach you how to think, since the fact that you even got admitted to a college this good seems like proof that you already know how to think.”

Wallace went on to tell students that the real purpose of their liberal arts degree “was to keep from going through your comfortable, prosperous, respectable adult life dead, unconscious, a slave to your head and to your natural default setting of being uniquely, completely, imperially alone day in and day out…. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out.” (The entire speech can be found at www.marginalia.org/dfw_kenyon_commencement.html. )

A cheerier, but still sobering, assessment of a liberal arts education was offered by novelist Margaret Atwood to University of Toronto students in 1983 who, like today’s graduates, were stepping into a depressed economy and a tense world stage.

“As you will soon discover, a liberal arts education doesn’t exactly prepare you for life,” she told the assemblage. “A preparation-for-life curriculum would not consist of courses on Victorian Thought and French Romanticism, but of things like How to Cope With Marital Breakdown, Getting More for your Footwear Dollar, Dealing With Stress, and How To Keep Your Fingernails from Breaking Off by Always Filing Them Towards the Center.”

Still, Atwood said a liberal arts education equips people to understand that they aren’t helpless in the face of a planet careening out of control, telling them, “You may not be able to alter reality, but you can alter your attitude toward it, and this, paradoxically, alters reality.”

Harry Potter creator J. K. Rowling sounded a similar theme last year at Harvard, recalling that she had ditched modern languages for the classics as soon as her parents had driven off. “One of the many things I learned at the end of that classics corridor down which I ventured at the age of 18, in search of something I could not then define, was this, written by the Greek author Plutarch: ‘What we achieve inwardly will change outer reality.’ That is an astonishing statement and yet proven a thousand times every day of our lives. It expresses, in part, our inescapable connection with the outside world, the fact that we touch other people’s lives simply by existing.”