What’s The Point of University?
University, like life, is not a means to an end
What’s The Point of University?
Well, what do universities do?
They employ people who teach and research. If you go to one of these universities, those teachers can teach you about different things, and if you learn enough, the administration will call that body of understanding a degree and will give you a piece of paper to certify that understanding.
Some employers will recognise these pieces of paper and take them into account in accessing your fitness for certain fields of employment.
Sometimes, these employers, and the government, will require that you have one of these pieces of paper before you work in certain fields of employment.
When the latter is the case, this piece of paper is called, or is accepted as, a qualification.
Hence, if someone wants to work in one of these fields, they will most likely have to obtain one of these pieces of paper, and so they will go to university to that end.
Jobs
So, one answer to the question “What’s the point of university?” might be this:
You can go there to get a qualification.
You get a degree to get a job.
Fair enough. But is that the point of university?
If it is, then if universities are well-formed, every degree at a university should set people up to get a job.
For some degrees this makes sense: engineering, medicine, law.
It’s reasonably clear what job you’re going to be doing with that degree, or at least what job you could do with that degree. And it seems reasonable to think that many, if not most, go into these degrees because they have decided beforehand that they want the jobs that naturally follow.
That is, they’ve decided they want to work in a certain field of employment, and going to university is just a step in fulfilling the requirements of that decision.
But then what about the Arts. If you’re going to university to get a degree to get a job, what exactly are you hoping to get out of a degree in art history?
Sure, there are jobs for historians of art, but presumably far fewer of these jobs than those for engineers.
Also, university costs a lot of money — in most countries at least — and if you’re going to spend that much money on something, you better be getting something out of it, right?
It better be a good investment.
This is the first in a number of assumptions that seem to permeate the culture at universities, as well as the view many people in the general public have about universities and the possible reasons for getting degrees from them.
The other important (or pernicious) assumptions are that:
Everything we do is a means to an end;
The point of life is economic prosperity; and, closely related,
The point of life is the humanitarian project of eliminating global disease, crime, and poverty.
At times, these ends or goals are valuable, meaningful and important. But the problem is that there is more to life, and more to university, than ends alone.
Not Everything is a Means
If the point of university is to get a degree to get a job, then, as alluded to before, what’s the point of an arts degree, or a mostly theoretical or research-focused science degree, where the products are not practical, periodic, or guaranteed?
Well, there is no “point”.
But, like many other activities in life, there doesn’t need to be.
The question is invalid, or it harbours the pernicious belief that everything is a means to an end.
What’s the point of a game of chess, or of soccer, or reading a novel, travelling, going to a museum, to the beach, having dinner with your family, watching a movie, sex, kissing, or talking about the weather?
To think that they have a point is to kind of miss the point. There is no point. Or at least, the point is not the end, not entirely.
The point is not checkmate, or winning, losing, resolving a plot, finishing the meal, having a list of things seen and done, orgasming, sharing saliva, or getting a detailed weather forecast.
Yes, these are required, or eventual, or consequential, or hoped-for outcomes, but they’re not really why we do those things. And if they are why we do them, the pursuit and the experience are often shallow and cheap, and the pleasure mostly fleeting.
Not everything in life is a goal or a task to placed on a list and checked-off.
The point of life is not to get a degree to get a job to get a house, partner, family, pension, and a solid block of marble with your name on it.
Some of those things might be necessary, or a good compromise, or enjoyable, rewarding, or a central and deeply meaningful part of your life.
But somewhere along the line, you’re going to have to do things that interest you, and do them purely for that reason.
Even if you do pursue these things as a means towards a job or a partner or a public recognition, people — potential partners, employers, collaborators — are going to be far more attracted to an enthusiastic, motivated, and lively person than a tortured grouch with all the right qualifications.
So it makes sense to just do things for the joy of them.
You have to genuinely not worry about or think about the money, the recognition, the outcome, the risk, or the possible rewards.
The thing has to be its own reward. You have to give up these projects and endeavours as a means towards those ends. You have to do things for their own sake, because there’s not a lot of living to be done elsewhere.
People Aren’t Governments
The government has to worry about keeping the economy going because it allows us to get what we need and want.
But not all the things we need and want in life are the things that will directly keep the economy going.
There’s no good reason to think that we should manage our individual lives in the same or in an analogous way to how the government manages a society. Yet it seems that we make decisions about our lives with the economy in mind, and decisions about university are no exception.
To some degree, this is an extension of the assumption that university is a professional investment, but it differs in that it asks not what value will it have for me, but what value will it have for the economy.
Like the individual question of what one is getting out of an Arts degree, society and governments might ask what they are getting out of universities that produce graduates of the Art.
But while it may be valid for governments to ask whether we should have public institutions that support people in pursuing degrees not directly beneficial to the economy, not every public institution has to work for public ends. Or, at least not direct economic ends.
Even if we as a society do make such calculations, the benefits to an economy of a educated population aren’t only the direct ones.
Public art galleries might bring in revenue, but the point, surely, is to have a public space in which to showcase art for whatever reason people might find themselves wanting to look at it.
Some things are worth supporting as a society purely because they bring us joy or inspiration or because they’re beautiful.
This broader societal conscientiousness about the needs of the economy gets imported into our personal decisions about our careers and education.
Everybody wants to be doing their bit, and everybody wants to be making sure everybody else is doing their bit.
But somehow we’ve adopted the view that the only valid bits are those that add material value to the economy.
Generally this value is measured in how much money a person is making — a measure which means those lauded for their contribution to the economy are also the ones individually taking the most out of it.
But the economy, like life, is made up of more than jobs and revenue.
The economy is the summation of all our wants, needs, values, choices, and actions as we interact with each other. Hence, almost anything you do adds to the economy, simply by definition. But even that doesn’t fully avoid the pernicious sentiment.
Sure, whether what you do is a positive contribution or not may be a important question, but the rubric for judging such things is not, by default, the creation or distribution of material wealth — there are more things of value than that.
Also, it’s difficult to know exactly what contributions will have a significant effect on the economy, and not everyone will be suited to those things assumed to be economically valuable.
In any case, economic prosperity is not the rubric we should use to judge our own decisions.
What’s good for the economy might not be good for the soul.
When we make these assumptions about productivity and economic prosperity and progress, and we judge everything we do and every endeavour we embark upon from that framework, we miss the point of why we care about prosperity and progress in the first place.
We care about them because they help us get what we want.
But if we fail to see economic and social prosperity and progress as facilitators of our wants and needs, and instead see them as the object of those same wants and needs, we, again, end up working our lives away getting degrees for jobs we hate for things we don’t need because we think one day we’ll finally arrive at what we want.
That day won’t come. Because by the time it comes you’ll either be dead or be dead inside.
Not Everyone Can Save The World
The last pernicious assumption is that the only valuable use of one’s time and energy is in working to eliminate crime, disease, and poverty.
These are noble pursuits, and important ends, but unfortunately they are not the central motivating concern of most people, and they are unlikely to be fitted to or appropriate for everyone.
Even for those who are motivated by humanitarian concerns, it can be difficult to figure out how best to serve those concerns. There are a lot of questions to ask:
Should you study?
What should you study?
What field should you gain experience in?
What’s the best way to spend one’s time to try to solve these problems?
Which path is going to match one’s preferences and capabilities?
We can’t all be humanitarian aid workers, just like we can’t all be doctors, astrophysicists, lawyers, flight-attendants, soldiers, or basketball players.
The only reasonable strategy, and the only reasonable expectation, is to do what you want and what you can — take whatever motivates you or grabs your curiosity and roll with it, do it with enthusiasm and care, and try to do something good for others and for the world where you can.
The problem with this thinking extends beyond the individual trying to make a decision about what to study. We also don’t know what field of research or which discipline is going to produce important solutions.
It’s difficult to know where innovation is going to come from, and often the importance and positive impact of some bit of research or innovation is only judged as such after the fact.
A long time ago, no one would have thought that playing around with glass triangles and a light beam would help anyone, and it could have easily been brushed off as a frivolous pursuit, but that pursuit effectively led to the medical benefits of x-rays, among numerous other innovations that laid the groundwork for our modern technological society.
There are endless possible paths curiosity can take you down, and some of them will lead to discoveries and progress, others won’t, and it’s impossible to predict which will be which.
That tells us that if we’re making these calculations and trying to predict which pursuits lead to innovation, and then giving only those pursuits validity, then we’re once again falling into the trap of thinking that the point of education and academic pursuits is to produce innovation or economic improvements.
Again, we are not just mediums for economic ends. We’re humans who like to do things.
Isaac Newton, who did spend time playing with glass triangles and a light beam, never saw the benefits of an x-ray machine, but he probably had a lot of fun playing with triangles and light beams.
If we want to spend our time doing that, or investigating history, or reading and writing poetry, or studying the logic of ancient languages, then so be it.
If we like to do it, if it gives us joy and meaning, then that’s what we should do.
Do We Need Universities?
A valid question might be whether universities are the right place for the kind of passion-pursuits addressed above, or whether they should only serve practical personal and societal ends.
In saying that economic ends shouldn’t drive university pursuits, I’m not saying that universities shouldn’t provide vocational qualifications or shouldn’t teach the technical and practical skills that lead to them.
(In any case, the idea that practical skills are separate from intellectual pursuits is itself a result of cutting everything with an economic knife — engineering or medicine are no less intellectual pursuits than philosophy, they just also provide you with skills to more directly impact the physical world.)
However, I do think that universities should be more than just a qualification factory.
Universities, on both the personal and societal levels, should be about creating a culture of curiosity and inquiry and intelligent debate and conversation and, yes, advancement and progress in making the world a better place.
But, do we really need universities for that?
Most of what universities teach can be found readily on the internet. So if the degree you’re getting isn’t necessary for a specific occupation, then there’s no real need go to a university to feed your curiosity.
And while universities generally advertise themselves as places where calls for passion and curiosity are answered, and while there are definitely opportunities to have meaningful intellectual experiences and be a part of that culture, it is not entirely within the power of universities to provide and ensure such things.
Universities can make some things available and permissible, like social clubs and on-campus bars and meeting places, but there’s no guarantee that you’ll actually meet anyone and get along, or that the people at your university are smart, passionate and curious — they might just be there to get a degree.
Unfortunately, that’s often the case.
And when the classes are full of people who are just there to get their degree and get out of there and into a job, then the conversations and discussions and mingling of ideas are often limited, lacklustre or lost.
The same is true when 90% of the class are people who aren’t confident with the language or with the culture of open debate, but who are there because they present a massive economic benefit to the university with the incredible amounts of money they pay to be there.
That isn’t to say there shouldn’t be intellectual and cultural diversity in the classroom — diversity is what makes the classroom more interesting and challenging — but if the admission requirements are lax because the university is incentivised to be lax out of financial interests, then they’re not only corrupting the purpose and value of the university, they’re also putting those students in an environment they’re not prepared for.
Importantly though, this state of affairs isn’t a problem with universities as they were intended.
Rather, it’s just one example of the misaligned incentives that emerge when we think that the point of a university is just to serve the economy.
Universities shouldn’t be treated as businesses. Doing so crushes the whole spirit with which such institutions were brought into being.
Pursuits for practical ends are built on the pillars of impractical interests; attempting to industrialise the latter to serve the purposes of the former is to failure to understand the value of the mechanism altogether.
That’s because universities, and the intellectual pursuits they were built to support, are not to be treated as economic machines, there to serve economic ends.
They are a product of our culture of curiosity and inquiry and the free exchange of ideas, and they are an invaluable part of our society, there to be served.
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