What Is College For?

Colleges don’t simply teach you skills. They socialize students into the culture of the world they will be entering and introduce them to others who are already part of that culture. This is no different from an immigrant going to the Ivies in the 1920s. And that is the point. The declining class is not immigrants. The political consequences of tha

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The first disadvantage of an elite education, as I learned in my kitchen that day, is that it makes you incapable of talking to people who aren’t like you. Elite schools pride themselves on their diversity, but that diversity is almost entirely a matter of ethnicity and race. With respect to class, these schools are largely—indeed increasingly—homo... See more

Frank Donoghue, the author of The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, writes that liberal arts education has been systemically dismantled for decades. Any form of learning not strictly vocational has at best been marginalized and in many schools abolished. Students are steered away from asking the broad, distur

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In college, you get assigned hard things. You’re taught to look at paintings and think about science in challenging ways. After college, most of us resolve to keep doing this kind of thing, but we’re busy and our brains are tired at the end of the day. Months and years go by. We get caught up in stuff, settle for consuming Twitter and, frankly, jou

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Pendant au moins la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle et la première du XXe, la plupart des universités ont cru en quelque chose qu’Anthony Kronman, de l’école de droit de Yale, appelle « l’idéal humaniste ». Selon cet idéal, le but d’une université était téléologique – il fallait contribuer à répondre aux grandes questions de l’existence. Pour dire le

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