Students Are Missing the Point of College
Chronicle of Higher Ed | Howard Gardner and Wendy Fischman
Harvard Graduate School of Education’s Professor Gardner (AB ‘65, Phd ‘61) and Project Manager Fischman (GSE ‘99) explain that students’ lack of engagement and alienation is not due to the pandemic; rather, students lack a sense of belonging and don’t see the purpose of college beyond getting a job. What’s the solution? “Colleges need to reflect on and embody their central educational missions; they should use all means possible to help students connect with that mission, believe in it, embody it, and gain from it over the course of a lifetime.”
“While it’s possible that today’s students seem more disconnected than ever before, the lack of student engagement is a longstanding issue — a contemporary form of the ‘anomie’ Émile Durkheim detailed well over a century ago. At the heart of the disengagement is a lack of belonging… Anomie among college students is not new — and it’s not just focused on academics.”
Prior to the pandemic, Gardner and Fischman finished a 5-year study in which they interviewed more than 2,000 people across 10 campuses, including students, faculty members, administrators, recent alumni and job recruiters. In this study, “fully one-third of college students expressed alienation… students reported not just a lack of engagement with academics, but also feelings of alienation from their peers and their colleges.”
Most striking: “In our 1,000 hour-long conversations with students, we found that nearly half of them miss the point of college… They approach college with a ‘transactional’ view — their overarching goal is to build a résumé with stellar grades, which they believe will help them secure a job post-college... In short, they are more concerned with the pursuit of earning than the process of learning.”
How did this happen? “Their high-school experiences prepared them to get into college, but did little, it seems, to educate them about the purpose of college… [note how] admissions tours and information sessions are filled with information about dining halls, recreation centers, comfortable dormitories, as well as internships or junior years off campus. From one’s first encounter — and continuing throughout the course of one’s college experience and even in magazines directed toward alums — minimal attention is given to the intellectual mission of college.”
What’s the solution? “Students need to be ‘onboarded’ to this mission by faculty members, administrators, and staff members who model, support, and believe in it. Common experiences like core academic courses or service activities should help diverse groups of students forge connections with each other — and in doing so, reinforce the intellectual mission.”
What about all the rest, including social justice work or religion? “If an institution wants to include a second mission — for example, a focus on religion, civic participation, or entrepreneurship — that ancillary mission needs to be carefully ‘intertwined’ in class and across the campus with the primary intellectual mission…”
“In order to dissolve longstanding student alienation, colleges need to reflect on and embody their central educational missions; they should use all means possible to help students connect with that mission, believe in it, embody it, and gain from it over the course of a lifetime.”
