What Is College Education For?

What Is College Education For?

Recently, some people criticized that it costs great expenses to study in American colleges. In fact, most of the people going to colleges are mainly pursuing a degree in the certain field, with which they can have more opportunities to get a better job in American society. However, after graduation, the jobs they find are not necessarily related to or demand what they learned from the comprehensive courses offered in colleges. If colleges can basically be replaced by job-training centers, where people generally spend less expenses for more practical knowledge and skills, do they really need college education (P7)? As far as I am concerned, what college education primarily does for people is not simply helping them to get well-paid jobs. Instead, colleges have a core value that they provide people a unique setting to develop their sophisticated thinking, which involves thinking intellectually, critically, and creatively.

Distinct from most animals, human beings have the ability to think in a sophisticated way. However, this particularly ability needs to be brought out, and colleges have the precious function for doing it. According to the article "What Is College For?" by Gary Gutting, a Philosophy professor at the University of Notre Dame, "They [Colleges] are not simply for the education of students. This is an essential function, but the raison d'être of a college is to nourish a world of intellectual culture" (P6). In Gutting's view, what college education significantly contributes to American society is to build up a world filled with knowledgeable ideas. However, knowledgeable ideas come from humans' intellectual thoughts. In other words, colleges train students to think in an intellectual way by offering them the comprehensive courses with different fields of knowledge. For example, students in colleges learn ideas which have been sufficiently proved by science demonstrations. Also, they learn to examine ideas in a scientific way. Likewise, college education teaches students to think with a sense of humanity. For instances, scientists invented bombs, and people rather choose to pioneer mountains for railroads than to kill people for wars. In humanity, people also learn to face different values with a sense of respect. Therefore, comprehensive courses in colleges help students to develop their intellectual thinking with not only the overarching knowledge but also notions senses of science and humanity, which is not usually taught in job-training centers.