I have a confession to make:
I did not love my college experience.
Let me go further to say that I believe my college experience, in many ways, was destructive to me as a human being. For much of it, I was quite unhappy, unhealthy, and anxious.
Before I say more, let me clarify what I don’t mean. I don’t mean that I’m not immensely grateful for the opportunities afforded me by my education (and grateful for the chance to even have an education in the first place). I don’t mean that I don’t value the friendships I made, the things I learned, the professors I had, and many of the things I experienced. I’m not even bitter about the tremendous amount of debt that I accrued (honestly).
So, what was it that made me so discontented those four years? And why do I think it’s worth mentioning now?
To put it simply, I was seeking an experience rather than an education. And in some ways, I missed out on both. I didn’t really understand what I was at college to do, and that lack of purpose and the places where I (wrongly) looked for that purpose led me to some deep unhappiness. The reason I’m writing about it now is not simply because it was my experience, but because I believe it belies a deeper crisis in higher education that needs to be brought to light.
In order to better understand this problem, allow me to paint a picture of my high school self. I was your average over-achiever (is that an oxymoron?), taking college classes at our local community college, participating in extracurriculars, volunteering at my Church, etc. And for the most part, I was doing these things for the right reasons; I did them because I was interested and I wanted to.
As high school went on, ambition began to creep in. Perfectly innocent ambition, too. What did I want to do after high school? Go to the University of Notre Dame, of course!
So, what did I need to do in order to apply for my very competitive dream school? Guard my 4.0 a little more closely. Tally up my various extracurriculars, awards, and service experiences. Try to add a few more into my schedule to pad my transcript. Write essays about my passions and aspirations. Actually study for standardized tests.
I needed to define myself in terms of my accomplishments. Now, this is not a bad thing in and of itself; this is just part of interacting with the world. But let me say this: in the process of receiving two letters of rejection from Notre Dame, I learned very well how to define myself by my accomplishments. How to guard my GPA much more zealously. How to make time for yet another extracurricular to prove how well-rounded I am. How to write eloquent, convincing essays about how much I really wanted a more rigorous education.
By the time I was actually accepted as a student at Notre Dame halfway through sophomore year, I didn’t know how to do anything other than achieve at a high level all. the. time. I felt as though I had spent the past several years trying to convince people that I could achieve this thing and now that I had been given the opportunity, I needed to work doubly hard to prove it. Besides having the “transfer student inferiority complex” (i.e. thinking that basically everyone here was smarter than me because they got in the first try), I fed into the cultural narrative that these were supposed to be some of the best years of my life—that I needed to try (ALL THE) new things—that I needed to figure out definitively my passion in life.
As the rigor of my academics increased, as I took on more and more leadership roles, as I looked for opportunities to figure out what I wanted to do in life, I slept less, ate less, and had less of a social life. By my senior year I was president of the Liturgical Choir, secretary of The Children of Mary club, on the planning committee for a the Edith Stein Conference, had an internship at Ave Maria Press, had two work study jobs (one at the Law School and another in Campus Ministry), and was finishing up a double major in English and theology. While none of these things was bad of itself, It’s no wonder that off the top of my head I can count at least a dozen distinct locations that I pulled all-nighters. I was anxious and stressed out constantly. I had embraced the persona of the frazzled, exhausted intellectual—a martyr to my studies and activities.
Thankfully, through God’s grace and the help of friends, I stayed close to the Sacraments during undergrad—attending Mass every day, making Chapel visits, going to Confession—and was eventually able to emerge from that darkness. But many do not have the positive support I had. It’s unsurprising to me that we see such high rates of anxiety, depression, casual sex, drug and alcohol use, and suicide in college-age people when we, as a culture, have demanded an unsustainable lifestyle.1
My purpose in writing this is not to elicit sympathy or air grievances. I write this to point out that we have a major problem in our educational system. We have lost a sense of education as being an activity of leisure. Not leisure as a “time off” or a “break,” but leisure as the state in which contemplation of higher things is made possible. In Leisure, The Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper remarks that the “‘liberality’ or ‘freedom’ of the liberal arts consists in their not being disposable for purposes, that they do not need to be legitimated by a social function, by being ‘work.’” In other words, the real purpose of a liberal arts education is not a utilitarian one. The liberal arts are meant to be an end in and of themselves. Our problem is that we have fed into the lie that the only things worth doing are things that can be commodified. The liberal arts have become a victim of the transactionally-minded meritocracy we live in.
The English word “school” comes (through the Latin) from the Greek word for “leisure.” An institution of higher learning ought to be a place in which, born of true leisure, students are given the opportunity to contemplate truth, goodness, and beauty simply because, in itself, it is a worthy pursuit. Many people (myself included) miss out on this precious gift because we prioritize “experiences” over education and fill our lives with so much activity that we have left no room for contemplation. Study must retake its place as the primary vocation of the student.
Schools are producing students who are capable of achieving and doing, but are incapable of being and contemplating. I can’t propose an easy solution to this problem. It’s a complex issue whose roots run deep in the American educational system. But it’s a conversation that we need to be having.
1 Editor's note from Dan: The casual sex and hookup culture on college campuses is oddly self-perpetuating because of social norms and perceptions. This podcast from NPR's Hidden Brain pulls back the curtain and points out how only a small number of people are actually comfortable with this weird and backwards culture.↩
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