STEM is perhaps one of the most pervasive acronyms for undergraduate college students across the nation, drilled into young students’ brains from the second they begin contemplating their plans for the future. The job market for undergraduate technology and science majors is red-hot, and the current social milieu in the nation practically hardwires young minds to gravitate toward these lucrative careers, regardless of what their real interests may be. But is a highly specialized education really as valuable as we think it is? Are liberal arts majors wasting their time by not harnessing their intellectual capital in the most “rewarding” career fields?
In order to answer these questions, we must first step back and answer a broader question: what is the purpose of undergraduate higher education? The rapid blur of competition and reformation that has come to define recent decades has had a serious impact on how students view the purpose of their time at higher institutions. A college degree has essentially become mandatory for the pursuit of a professional career. As a result, a college education is now viewed more as a necessity than as what it truly is: an opportunity.
Simultaneously, passion for actual learning is dying. We live in a nation where nearly two-thirds of the adult population owns a smartphone, while only 58 percent have read a nonfiction book in the past year. Speed has become the creed for adults; life has turned into a quest to maximize the utility of our technological resources faster than the brain can possibly process what everything means. As a result, undergraduate education has taken a huge blow to the chest. Students wring their universities dry for each line on their résumés, yet a well-read student has become hard to find.
Thirst for knowledge is fading away from undergraduates, and as a result, higher education is losing its focus on exploring the depths of human intellect. College has become a stepping-stone, a four year itch on the backs of students with inherently misguided ambitions. The concept of attaining wealth in the professional world has protruded the sacred boundaries of our nation’s higher institutions, for as an undergraduate, if you sit back to smell the roses, you lose.
So, is a specialized education more valuable in today’s society? In terms of finding a job: absolutely. The statistics show liberal arts majors will have — on average — more difficulty in finding a high-paying job out of college within their fields of interest. But this indicates nothing about a liberal arts student’s intellectual potential in comparison with his peers; rather, it shows universities have allowed the outside world to exploit and corrupt the minds of a huge portion of young individuals in this country. “Value” of a major has become a term that defines how readily a student will succumb to cookie-cutter models within the modern job market. Big businesses do not hire intellectual revolutionaries; they hire résumés and ironed shirts and talking heads that are trained to tell them what they want to hear.
If a specialized education is perceived as more valuable than a liberal arts education, then we need to change the definition of “value.” An undergraduate education should teach students how to test the boundaries of thought, not coil a repressive vice around a specific portion of their brains. Universities should push students to idealize and execute change, not waste their formative years punching numbers into pre-existing formulas. Attending college should infuse electricity into an individual’s veins, not leech a student’s idealism through scare tactics and pressures surrounding their futures. Can we say our universities promote the American ideal of the “pursuit of happiness” when they hardly even exist in a sphere separate from the professional world?
College administrators need to analyze what sort of students their undergraduate programs are creating. Universities are rewarded for supplying businesses with their specialized “cookies,” but they are doing so by repressing the integrity of their own undergraduates. Education needs to change — it must be perceived as an exciting opportunity to undergraduate students, otherwise society will continue to grow more and more apathetic to true intellectual expansion. As students, we cannot allow the professional world to occupy our minds until we have forged our own paths within the luxury of a diversified learning experience. Students: define your own education. Do not let your education define you.
Ryan Gorman is a Viewpoint writer.
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