College Students: School Is Not Your Job

To get the maximum value out of those few golden years, treat them like leisure in the truest sense of the word.

...College freshmen who just arrived on campus have heard, from parents and politicians alike, that college exists mainly for the sake of work. Colleges themselves tout their graduates' employment rates, starting salaries and career networks as a major selling point.

Students have gotten the message. An overwhelming majority of first-year students tell pollsters that getting a better job is a major reason for going to college. Across 25 years of teaching at five universities in three states, I have heard students consistently call school their "job." Given the cost of attending a four-year college, it's reasonable that they want assurance their degrees will lead to higher earnings.

But the expectation that college will help them land a job has led too many students to approach college like a job in its own right: a series of grim tasks that, once completed, qualifies them to perform grimmer but better-paid tasks until retirement. That's a shame, because this mentality leaves no room for what college should primarily be about: not work, but leisure.

College is a unique time in your life to discover just how much your mind can do. Capacities like an ear for poetry, a grasp of geometry or a keen moral imagination may not "pay off" financially (though you never know), but they are part of who you are. That makes them worth cultivating. Doing so requires a community of teachers and fellow learners. Above all, it requires time: time to allow your mind to branch out, grow and blossom.

The 20th-century German philosopher Josef Pieper might have said that when students see college solely in terms of work, they deny their own humanity. Pieper points out in his 1948 book, "Leisure: The Basis of Culture," that the word "school" comes from the Greek "schole," which means leisure.

Pieper borrows his idea of leisure from Aristotle, who saw contemplation as the highest human activity and thus essential to happiness. "For we do business in order that we may have leisure," Aristotle wrote, implying that leisure must therefore be a greater thing than work...

For all but the most fortunate, earning power is an inescapable concern throughout a student's life. But if it's the only value that defines a life, then students don't need a true education at all. They don't need to construct a vision of the whole world and their place in it. They don't need to address the larger questions that arise through open-ended discussion with professors and peers. They just need narrowly focused training...

It's not easy to make space for leisure within universities that look increasingly like corporations. It's not easy to fit open-ended contemplation into a Monday-Wednesday-Friday schedule. Still, at their best, colleges and universities offer an alternative to the culture that values people solely for their labor.

Yes, a college education will help someone earn more in a career. That's a good thing. But life is much more than work. I am certain that if students show an interest in questions beyond how to become better workers, if they exhibit a desire to learn for its own sake, they will meet people who are just as eager for it as they are. Jonathan Malesic