The Time Has Come

As I find myself approaching graduation, I am sad to say that I am disappointed with my college experience. I can fault no one but myself and yet I feel as if the 120 credit hours that I will have received by next semester have been in vain. Perhaps I have grown as an individual, on a personal level, but I don’t feel as if my education has improved much at all. I feel so empty when I look back on the abandoned promises given to me by the hundreds of college admissions brochures that bombarded my mailbox during my junior and senior years of high school. All of the pictures of great halls filled with inspiration, students yelling out in passion, seem to be mere phantoms in my memories. Indeed I have learned and acquired the knowledge promised to me in the degree plans and syllabi of my classes, but I have not received an “education.”

In ancient times, a university was thought of as a place where people would go to follow and indulge their passions. But sadly I am guilty of following the same passion that many students of my generation follow, the love of money. We go to college in hopes that we will be able to get better jobs and make more money. Arthur Levine and Jeanette Cureton conducted a study to expose the idea that today’s college students “want a different type of relationship with their colleges from the one undergraduates historically have had. They preferred a relationship like those they already enjoyed with their bank, the telephone company, and the supermarket.” Students now feel removed from their universities, as if they are indeed just another number to be churned out from this “knowledge factory.” It feels as if we merely need to pick up parts, or upgrades if you will, of knowledge in order to become a perfect working product of society. We can pay the factory and get put on the conveyor belt and four years later, we come out augmented, improved, a better model that will be more useful and efficient and thus, more valuable to our “consumers” or employers. Pick up one component of History, a few components of Language, another component of Mathematics, and throw in a little bit of Science and Voila! We’re already through our first two years, halfway towards completion, but what have we really achieved?

Universities were once thought of as places that “merely brought a number of young men together for three or four years.” They were places where people went to delve deeper into their passions, and study subjects that not only interested them, but also engaged them. Today’s students merely follow a curriculum, they meet the minimum requirements, and leave. There isn’t a university culture of learning, there is a university culture of obeying, following, and detachment. Each student functions like a lone vessel, with a thousand individual components interacting in one place. Each component has its own motivation that pulls on the student. Each student must think about work, friends, family, finances, sleep, and, of course, education but many times all the other influences overshadow that of education. We forget that education is supposed to be the force that will better the other aspect our lives. We get so caught up in just trying to survive that we forget to take the time to develop passion in something. “There’s a sentiment currently abroad that if you step aside for a moment, to write, to travel, to fall too hard in love, you might lose position permanently.” So perhaps we need to change the way we view our education, we need to integrate it more into our lives. We should take a step back, and take the time to learn something, if even one thing, well.

Perhaps the detachment is so noticeable because of the particular university that I attend. It is a generic smaller state university so focused in the studies of engineering and higher science that many of our students hardly ever step outside. So many people desperately cry out for more school spirit, and yet it will never change until the students feel more passionate at an individual level. Perhaps there is something that could be done on both sides, by the students and also by the university. The university should help to remind students that they shouldn’t just be focused on trying to obtain a piece of paper to hang on a wall, but instead they should find a passion. Students should take time to explore those passions. We shouldn’t declare a major. We should declare an interest. So luckily I have one semester left to find an interest, and to truly explore it. If you have the luxury of more time, I suggest that you develop a true passion and study it, and it will mean so much more to you than a tiny, thin, piece of a tree.