Over the years we academics have painted ourselves into a corner with not just the claim that a college degree will help in finding a decent job (which is true!), but that it will get you some grand level of "achievement". In Denver, 54% of working-age adults have a college degree. They mostly have decent jobs, I'd bet. But 54% of your population cannot be leaders of distinction. As the man asks: who will take the coal from the mine? Who will take the salt from the earth? How to answer questions from anxious parents on college tours? I'm not sure either, except to say to them that campus is a place of many things, arts and sciences and professions and sports and getting to know people from different places, and these are all of value, and we should look at our children's experiences here (and I say this as a parent of college students) as time well spent, not just for the future, but the here and now.
I always think this is what's wrong about civic education (or "liberal arts makes people better citizens") when that's translated into some particular curricular project--or some skill set ("doing this properly"). What we're hoping for is some kind of dispositional sensibility, what might in other senses be called "wisdom", and since the 1980s or so, we've been agonizingly praying without a plan that somehow that can happen in a way where it's not the same thing as "class consciousness", e.g., just the reigning outlook or habitus of a particular kind of elite. The problem for faculty is that we're really terrible about thinking through what might produce dispositional orientations, ways of being in the world, wisdom, etc. and we ourselves probably don't collectively do the best job at modelling what we'd most like to see as an outcome in this sense.
Over the years we academics have painted ourselves into a corner with not just the claim that a college degree will help in finding a decent job (which is true!), but that it will get you some grand level of "achievement". In Denver, 54% of working-age adults have a college degree. They mostly have decent jobs, I'd bet. But 54% of your population cannot be leaders of distinction. As the man asks: who will take the coal from the mine? Who will take the salt from the earth? How to answer questions from anxious parents on college tours? I'm not sure either, except to say to them that campus is a place of many things, arts and sciences and professions and sports and getting to know people from different places, and these are all of value, and we should look at our children's experiences here (and I say this as a parent of college students) as time well spent, not just for the future, but the here and now.
I always think this is what's wrong about civic education (or "liberal arts makes people better citizens") when that's translated into some particular curricular project--or some skill set ("doing this properly"). What we're hoping for is some kind of dispositional sensibility, what might in other senses be called "wisdom", and since the 1980s or so, we've been agonizingly praying without a plan that somehow that can happen in a way where it's not the same thing as "class consciousness", e.g., just the reigning outlook or habitus of a particular kind of elite. The problem for faculty is that we're really terrible about thinking through what might produce dispositional orientations, ways of being in the world, wisdom, etc. and we ourselves probably don't collectively do the best job at modelling what we'd most like to see as an outcome in this sense.