Tweet This
With college classes underway or about to be across the country, millions of students are starting the fall semester with high hopes, both of what they’ll achieve in the classroom and what doors the education they’re pursuing will eventually open. For many, they believe that path to their bright future includes a perfect GPA. They couldn’t be more wrong. In fact, this year’s crop of college freshman would be wise to do less studying and more socializing . Here’s the case against chasing the A.
Grades are increasingly meaningless. Academia is not immune to the same vanity sizing that is rampant among clothing retailers. In 2009, in a survey of over 200 schools, researchers found that 43% of college grades handed out are As, which represents a 28% increase over the number awarded in 1960. The days when a C meant “average” are long gone. If everyone is getting an A, an A communicates almost nothing about an individual’s aptitude . With a growing consumer- based approach to higher education, expect letters to lose even more relevance.
As well, unless you’re doing a PhD or trying to get in to law or medical school, there are few instances in which anyone in your post-college life is going to care about how you did in Intro to Anthropology. And, in the case of law or medicine, if you got straight As, but crashed and burned on the LSAT or MCAT or don’t have anything to offer the admissions committee other than a stellar academic track record, you’re probably not getting an acceptance letter anyway. Think your grades are going to be the clincher on landing a prestigious internship? Not only can you likely not afford to work unpaid, internships are often a dead end in terms of upping your employability. Research shows interning leads to a less than 2% increase in the likelihood of receiving a job offer upon graduation.
But there’s a powerful argument for self development over academic striving that has nothing to do with making yourself more attractive to future pay check signers. In fact, it argues that pursuing opportunities on that basis is exactly what’s wrong with today’s students. An orientation to your education and your career in which you seek out experiences (volunteering, joining clubs, learning Mandarin) for the extrinsic rewards that come from being able to list these “assets” in a bullet list for the validation of an authority figure is a pretty hollow one. You might get the job, but you never “get” yourself .
Recently, William Deresiewicz has been garnering plenty of media attention for his book, Excellent Sheep, which attacks elite higher ed institutions for wooing upper middle class wunderkinds and then spending four years turning them into anxious, high-achieving clones fit for elite consulting or high finance jobs, but lacking in life experience or autonomous thought and plagued by a terrible fear of failure that prohibits academic or career risk taking. As Deresiewicz writes in The New Republic:
“I taught many wonderful young people during my years in the Ivy League—bright, thoughtful, creative kids whom it was a pleasure to talk with and learn from. But most of them seemed content to color within the lines that their education had marked out for them. Very few were passionate about ideas. Very few saw college as part of a larger project of intellectual discovery and development. Everyone dressed as if they were ready to be interviewed at a moment’s notice.”
The most valuable knowledge in a knowledge-driven culture is self knowledge. Knowing what drives you, inspires you and fulfills you in the absence of the approval or oversight of others (your “dance like nobody’s watching” moment) and figuring out how to balance these interests with the need to keep a roof over your head is what a happy life looks like. College is a prime time to start the work of figuring this out and often that learning comes from peer interaction, not professorial lectures.
“College is not the only chance to learn to think, but it is the best. One thing is certain: If you haven’t started by the time you finish your B.A., there’s little likelihood you’ll do it later. That is why an undergraduate experience devoted exclusively to career preparation is four years largely wasted," Deresiewicz argues.
There’s an earnest Reba McEntire music video from the early 90s in which she plays a stay-at-home mom who decides to enroll in college. In one snippet, the professor praises a paper she’s submitted, but expresses disapproval at the fact it’s covered in coffee stains from a dinner table accident. Reba simply shoots him a coy smile and declares that she learned more from the stains than she did from the paper. Your summa cum laude diploma might look great framed on the wall of your first condo, but your 4.0 won’t keep you warm at night or teach you how to thrive in an increasingly fragmented and insecure labor market. So, if you’re heading back to campus in the next few days, by all means keep your syllabuses close, but keep your social calendar closer .
Connect with me on Twitter.
