College isn’t a myth, it’s an experience

Demanding more from remote learning during the coronavirus pandemic is reasonable, but not for the reasons you’re thinking

This was written largely as a response to Masha Gessen’s New Yorker piece and fueled by insomnia and frustration.

The sooner professors admit that they are only a small portion of what it means to go to a four year college or university in the US, the better the case for higher education’s survival as an institution.

So much of the public discourse around the transition to remote learning (not “distance learning,” as it’s an insult to distance learning) questions whether higher ed can even pretend that this semester gives students both a quality educational experience and reflects the high cost of tuition.

The critique gets even harsher. For instance, Masha Gessen asks in the New Yorker, “What exactly is a four year college?” and makes the case that colleges are little more than institutions that provide hospitality and catering, and at worse, are no better than a hedge fund masquerading as a non-profit educational institution.

To call the four-year college experience a myth, as Gessen does, is not just jaded but also misinformed.

Yes, higher ed — especially at a four year residential college or university — is only partially about the in-class education students receive. But it is precisely the experience of being at college that is worth the tuition dollars. And when students leave, what they take away are the connections, skills, networks, and fun, actual fun that they have, despite the hardships that they may face while in school.

Colleges offer residential dorms and buildings, but they are not just material places where people live and go about daily life away from their parents. Rather, colleges are affective places that form an essential part of many people’s core identity. Students form long-lasting friendships they will carry for the rest of their lives. It may be the time of their lives that they are most unburdened by the difficulties of their homes and backgrounds. It is indeed a place for reinvention, as Gessen does get right. This isn’t a myth, this is a reality.

I say this as someone who spent two years as part of a living and learning community at George Washington University between 2016–2018, distanced from the drama of daily student life but charged with bridging the faculty- student divide. What I took away was that college, for the vast majority of my students, was less about getting an education and more about the hope for a particular experience — one that only a four year college provides. College is a place where people engage in daily life but also develop deep, affective bonds from finding a lifelong partner to forming memories of both good and bad choices that will shape better decisions later on.

We can ask whether students are getting what their tuition is worth. They are not — what they have been forced to leave behind because of a global pandemic is a very real loss, but it most likely has nothing to do with our efforts as professors and administrators to pull together great classes.

What students are missing the most but likely cannot articulate is the infectious enthusiasm and confidence that comes from being around people who still believe in possibility. The world may have said no in the past, but it will say yes in the future.

Students surround themselves in fellow communities of dreamers, from the deep passion that some students find in student religious groups or advocacy organizations to the seriousness of which they take their college newspaper reporting duties, for example.

This is what college does. It puts students in conversation with other dreamers who retain the hope that the future — their future — can be better, and certainly more exciting than it is now. It is not a myth, it is a reality. This idealism that is interpreted as reality is my favorite aspect of working in higher ed.

Every piece of commentary that reduces the college experience to education is missing what college is mostly about. Some of this narrow perspective is founded upon professorial elitism and parental denial about what colleges actually deliver. Colleges deliver frat parties, potential future spouses, and lots of practice screwing up with minimal consequences when those with more power ask you to deliver. Whether someone in my class absorbs why algorithms enable and perpetuate inequalities is important. But so is the experience of feeling like one is part of something bigger — whether that be school spirit or a school activity.

These experiences that Gessen thinks of this as a myth are essential for learning to exist in a society that requires commitment to collective well-being even when people are different from you. The four-year residential college experience is arguably foundational to good citizenship. This isn’t a myth, it is an outcome that is far more important than what happens in the classroom (or on zoom).

Higher education has a higher purpose, but we need to stop pretending that our mission is simply about delivering education. The college experience is an experience worth the big tuition dollars, and this is why online classes can never make up for it.