Emily Hoeven | All the things I don't know

Growing Pains | What I’ve learned in college

By Emily Hoeven 04/11/16 10:25pm

The more years I spend as a student, the more I find myself wondering, “What is the point of an education?” In general, there are two answers to this question. One answer emphasizes the journey — education is an end in itself, something that ought to be celebrated and pursued because of its inherent, internal qualities. The other points out that education is necessary: Getting a good job and moving up in the world are often dependent on one, if not more, degrees from an institute of higher learning.

Even in a world where attending college would have no effect on my future job opportunities, I think I would still choose to go. The classes I have taken here, the professors I have had the chance to learn from, the students with whom I live and work and share this crazy four-year experience of trying to balance social life and academics and growing up and navigating a new city — all of these things are intrinsically valuable to me. The many layers of the college experience have challenged me in innumerable ways, presented me with new viewpoints, caused me to continually reexamine my identity and my beliefs, broken me down and built me back up.

However, in many ways, college has become a burden to students because of the huge price tag attached to it. While this price tag exists partially as an attempt to put a numerical value to the intangibility of the college experience, it also makes it clear that college is a financial investment that the student can only justify by landing a lucrative and prestigious job. It’s a negotiation: Pay me this now, and I’ll help you get to where you want to go.

As college is the natural step between young adulthood and adulthood — which usually involves a job — it does have a certain responsibility to prepare students with the skills they need to succeed in the workforce. But at the same time, there is more to the future than just a career — there is also future life. Life outside of work, life after retirement.

One could argue that this, having a successful and happy life outside of work, is just as important, if not more so, than having a successful, prominent and fulfilling career. And thus I ask myself: What am I actually learning in college — and what should I be learning in college? When I graduate with a Penn degree, what will I have to show for it? Will I be prepared for my career, for my life outside my career, both or neither?

Answering such a broad question is nearly impossible. Yet it is something that is often answered with references to our GPA, our resume and the extent of our networks. While these things do to an extent measure our accomplishments and our preparedness for the future, they are too simplistic. These metrics exist because they allow us to quantify experiences and characteristics that fundamentally cannot be valued by a one-size-fits-all standard. In other words, these metrics are proxies.

This is difficult for me to admit, as I’ve always been someone who correlated good grades with knowledge. Yet since coming to Penn, even if I perform well in a class, I sometimes feel that I don’t deserve the grade because the class has made me extremely aware of all the things in that field that I don’t know about. I worry that I’ll graduate in two years without knowing so many things about so many different subjects, and even lose knowledge that I’ve gained (like how to perform a statistical t-test, or all the different facets of literary theory). And this makes me feel that I have squandered the cost of my tuition and that I am unqualified for the future.

But what I will graduate with is a deep and genuine appreciation for the sheer expanse of what is out there to learn, question and discover — and the sincere thankfulness that I was able to get a taste of it. And I think this consciousness — that I do not know nearly as much as I want to, but that I do in fact want to know more, discover more, meet more people — is what makes college both financially and intrinsically valuable. It is this awareness that will most catapult me towards the future I want, both in terms of my career and the rest of my life.

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