Three cheers for students starting college! They’ve heard doubts about whether it’s worthwhile; they’ve heard Silicon Valley’s claim that A.I. can feed them all the information (and misinformation) they could possibly want; they know college is expensive. Yet right around now, thousands and thousands of them are starting their undergraduate careers with enthusiasm.
Colleges and universities, like almost all institutions, have suffered from a decline in trust, but that isn’t stopping families from New Orleans to Appleton and from Berkeley to Tuscaloosa from gathering their financial and emotional resources to launch their young people toward a memorable educational experience. Parents will cry; kids will check one another out.
Even the Trump administration, which enjoys berating schools (for not protecting Jews or admitting too many Black people or just not promoting its preferred version of American history), has softened its tone for the moment. Last month, the secretary of education took a break from dismantling her department to issue a national call to action, asking college and university leaders to “advance American security interests, deliver academic programs that meet urgent work force needs, and contribute materially to the nation’s prosperity.” Laudable goals to be sure, and nothing to be neutral about, despite the call’s insistence elsewhere on institutional neutrality. But these are not the goals of students.
A significant percentage of first-year students are entering community college, and many of them will be looking for classes that prepare them for jobs in the near term. Nursing, information technology, the electrical trades and education will appeal to many, but the most popular areas of study are in the liberal arts. That’s no surprise because the liberal arts prepares students to pivot in many directions given shifting labor force needs.
And those shifts will be significant. Artificial intelligence is reshaping how tasks are completed almost everywhere. That’s why students at community colleges, like their counterparts at four-year schools, hope to learn to use large language model tools and develop the human capacities for discernment, for making sense of when and how to use the powerful research and analytic powers of A.I. The students are learning specific skills, to be sure, but they are also learning how to add human value to work in a marketplace infatuated with the wonders of automation.
Despite the pressures of a perilous job market, students often use the first semester for exploration. Course catalogs will include titles that baffle recent high school graduates and lead to head-scratching moments for parents and pundits. But this is nothing new. Some schools provide a core curriculum, and despite oft-repeated stories of far-left professors pouring woke doctrine down the throats of naïve youngsters, the writings of Plato, Machiavelli and Mary Shelley remain among the most assigned college readings in America.
Students in my humanities course this fall will begin with Confucius, Aristotle and Aquinas. Very few of my undergrads will major in philosophy but almost all, I expect, will approach the material with energetic curiosity. They always do. Why? Because they are taking the opportunity to discover who they are as readers, as conversation partners, as people. They are figuring out what kind of work they find fulfilling, what they love to do.
That said, it is essential that students also learn how to get better at the work they’ve signed up for. Discovering one’s passion is not enough. Through vigorous practice students should learn to work harder and better, so they can go further than they’d thought possible. If they use A.I. to avoid having to work hard, they’ll learn little.
Grade inflation, too, is pernicious, because it signals to young people that they’ve already mastered a task when they’ve really just begun to get the hang of it. Teachers must get over their fear of alienating students by setting high standards, and undergraduates must come to understand that they can do much better than they’ve already done. And they need to learn without undue dependence on technology.
I’ve been teaching college students for over 40 years, and one of the great pleasures for me at the beginning of the school year is seeing students develop friendships in their new surroundings. It may happen in a science lab or on a sports team, or through a discussion begun in class and carried over into the dining hall or the dorm. Every year I meet alumni in ripe old age who are still buddies with (or even married to) people they got to know in the first weeks of school. I’m convinced that there is something about young folks opening themselves to new possibilities in college that sets a durable foundation for long-lasting relationships.
Yes, college is less affordable than it should be; yes, there’s still a long way to go in improving intellectual diversity and pluralism on campus. Yes, it’s all too easy to mock the bombast or simple riotousness of the young. From Thomas Jefferson to Richard Nixon to Donald Trump, people have raised complaints about college students. After all, these students are learning how to practice freedom — the opposite of trying to figure out just how to fit into the world that is being left them.
Today’s students are trying to work out what it means to be decent humans in world growing more heated, hostile and, sometimes, heartless. We should cheer them on, for their sake and ours.
Michael S. Roth, the president of Wesleyan University, is the author of “The Student: A Short History” and “Safe Enough Spaces: A Pragmatist’s Approach to Inclusion, Free Speech, and Political Correctness on College Campuses.”
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