Many families and individuals are weighed down with graduate or under-grad debt while national theorists continue to recommend higher education as the solution to boosting the economy. These growing concerns have lead two authors to ask whether students are expecting too much from a college degree. One of two story trends that emerge from the research is seen in this student called Nathan.
His sputtering progress after college was foreshadowed by his choices during it, Mr. Arum and Ms. Roksa write. Nathan coasted, focusing more on socializing than on academics. He studied mostly with his friends, doing so alone for just five hours a week. When asked to name a significant academic experience, he at first couldn’t think of one. Still, Nathan graduated with a 3.9 grade-point average.
If he had received a 2.1 grade-point average, would he have changed his trajectory and tried to raise it, or would his final record simply reflect his work accurately? (He was given a Business degree, by the way.) Is it the college’s fault in even a small way that he has trouble finding a good job within a few years of graduating?
On another topic in higher education, Gregory Thornbury of The King’s College in New York City, says we must continue to cast a vision for the next generation to run with.
I think we’re guilty of assuming that young people have signed up for the evangelical project or that they’ve signed up for democratic capitalism. We definitely get students who have signed up for that, who come from homeschooling backgrounds and so forth. They’re all charged up and ready to go. But there are also many who have never heard the case for the truthfulness of Christianity, for the things that caused flourishing in Western civilization. When people ask me, “What’s your personal mission?” I often say to them, it’s to re-enchant this generation with the animating ideals that made Western civilization in general and America in particular great. We are legatees of a great intellectual inheritance, and we have to make that case again.