Free University? Meh.

I’m tired of hearing about free higher education. Which presidential candidates, we wonder fretfully, will make universities free? Let’s lionize this venture capitalist who wrote off an entire graduating class's debt! In various ways, the cultural trend runs toward making postsecondary education free, or anyway cheaper than dirt. More people, ideally everyone everywhere, should have at least the opportunity for postsecondary education. Or so the argument goes.

I taught university-level English for four years, and would like to return to teaching that level someday. I especially liked teaching students from working-class and disadvantaged backgrounds, students who’d often spent years in high school getting told they’d just pass into the same workaday grind their parents occupied. Seeing their eyes illuminate as their liberal studies core lighted new paths, was a constant pleasure and education for me.

So I believe in education. Given the choice between education and unawareness, I’ll always foster education. But I have two important objections to thrusting every high school graduate into university. First, not all education is synonymous with schooling. Second, we already have students and their parents mistaking a four-year degree for job credentials; how much worse will that become if every job assumes every applicant has a degree?

In eight semesters teaching Freshman Comp, I noticed a recurrent trend: my students regarded anything that wasn’t career-oriented as extraneous. This included my class. The idea that communicating well in writing isn’t a professional skill continues to astound me; but that also meant that most considered philosophy, Shakespeare, higher math, economics, and history as merely ancillary to whatever career goals they nourished. Only their future employment mattered.

Imagine that: an entire generation of students who want their education completely blocked into professional silos. Business executives who only know how to execute business. Computer technicians who only know computers… and so on. Meanwhile, we generate a crop of voters with no understanding of history; entertainment customers with no savvy for literature; lower-rung employees without the adaptability to learn their industries and ascend the corporate ladder.

What a bleak, dystopian world this postulates—and yet, it’s the world we increasingly have. Throughout America, liberal arts programs are dwindling, and liberal arts colleges seek new justifications for their programs. We consider graduates educated, not if they’re able to face life’s massively complicated facets with depth and equanimity, but if they’re able to slot neatly into somebody else’s capitalist machine. Education’s outcomes are measured entirely in dollar signs.

Students themselves don’t want this, mostly. I had multiple students who wanted to study art, but got channeled by parents into “graphic design,” for career purposes. An aspiring English major instead acquiesced to a journalism degree, which anymore amounts to a career in advertising anyway. And American lawmakers, over educators’ objections, have actively attempted to change what liberal studies even mean. For the students’ best interests, of course.

However, as I’ve written before, one group consistently appreciated their liberal studies core, not only for its own value, but for the way it influenced everything else about their education: non-traditional students. I had multiple students who took time after high school to work, travel, join the military, or raise children, and returned to school in their twenties or thirties. These students consistently enjoyed, even wanted, their liberal studies classes.

They wanted them for aesthetic reasons, certainly, for the appreciation of Shakespeare’s tragedies or Heidegger’s phenomenology, or the elegance of analytic geometry. But they also understood the practical relevance of these classes. Understanding history was a complete prerequisite for understanding the present. Reading literature let us step outside ourselves and see through other people’s eyes. Science and math taught us to approach the world systematically, rather than flailing helplessly.

Therefore I propose we must redefine what we value in education. If we want students to acquire job skills, we should make trade schools free, and encourage students to attend those first. Sure, let them acquire professional skills, if that’s what we value. But send them, at our shared mutual expense, to schools which specialize in professional skills, where they’ll get through faster with fewer prerequisites anyway.

Then, remove the stigma from students who return to four-year university later in life. Not everyone is prepared for university education just because they’ve finished high school—and that especially includes students who attended impoverished schools, rural students, and to a degree, men. If they aren’t ready at eighteen, but develop the skills and self-discipline to “do school” at twenty-five (as I did) or later, more power to them.