College is “what you make of it”
Or is it?
By Beracah Yankama
Director, StudentsReview College is what you make of it.
There's a phrase that I've come to loathe. I hear it so frequently that
it represents to me everything that is wrong with the current application and
collegiate process.
The phrase
College is what you make of it
suggests that a person is entirely personally
responsible for the success or failure of their college experience, which seems like a plausible idea on the surface—after all, aren't
we
all responsible for everything in our lives?
But the idea is misleading. If we were truly personally responsible for our college
experience, why do we pay to attend a college or university at all? We could exercise our
personal responsibility to create our own educations, create our own opportunities from the millions of textbooks
readily available at our local libraries and avail ourselves of local experts. Education
used to be that way, with apprenticeships to local masters. But no longer. Now
we pay.
This begs the question, "Why do we pay?" Well, we pay to have opportunities presented
that would otherwise be unavailable. We pay to have the overwhelming amount of information sorted, ordered, and presented in a
framework that can be comprehended—more than our local library. We pay to interact with the best in
the field, to learn the state of the market, and to be competent for that market. In short,
We pay to have
the college provide to us things that we cannot possibly provide to ourselves.
Saying that college is what we make of it absolves the College or University of its primary responsibility—to render the educational services for which it is paid and to advertise correctly the services that it does
(or does not) provide.
Currently colleges are benefitting from an
everyone should have a college education
sentiment
that is a holdover from the post-WW2 1940s GI Bill, the Draft, American Dream, and achieve a better life
times. There is a strong emotional "belief" in the college education, but no well defined
metrics to evaluate that education or what it provides anymore.
In the future, people (especially
StudentsReview) will be looking more closely at the
return that a college education actually provides. In the meantime, if you choose to believe that "college is what you
make of it", then you should start the "making it" before you even apply—by researching and choosing the
right college.
