Unfinished draft essay.

Introduction

Within the United States today, there exists one universally accepted reason for students to pursue higher education: for better job prospects.

College has become nearly synonymous with economic mobility. High schoolers are shown graphs of average lifetime income by level of education, incoming freshman are advised to pick a major based on their anticipated career, and, when asked why they chose to attend college, most students respond with primarily economic reasons. Whatever personal motivations you might have for going to college, your main reason is expected to be career-related.

Some people take an opposing view: college isn’t about getting a job, it’s about getting an education. Choosing a major, they say, isn’t nearly as important as simply having a degree, because a degree’s value lies in the communication, time management, and critical thinking skills it develops independent of field-specific knowledge. This is the view I myself hold, that old, liberal, Humboldtian ideal.

I’ll refer to the belief that higher education should primarily serve career interests as vocationalism, and to the inverse philosophy as avocationalism.

As outlined above, vocationalism is extremely popular in modern America, so much so that it seems silly to call it out by name. It’s the default, the expectation. Most debates about the usefulness of college today focus on whether college is the most effective way to prepare students for their careers; they presuppose vocationalism.

Many avocationalists seem to sneer at both sides of this argument. “Education,” they might say, “used to be about learning! Students would be taught how to think and appreciate the arts! Now they only learn what businesses need them to know!” Many seem to nostalgize about the good old days of real Liberal Arts education! Not like you kids have.

It’s this very argument I aim to rebut in this essay. Despite my own avocationalism, I’ve come to the conclusion that universities as we know them today have never truly focused on conferring a broad Liberal Arts education. That is to say, college has always been for vocationalists.