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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The culture is supporting a far more transactional approach to college than it used to. It is understandable given the cost for families (and I wish professors had more--or really any-- control over university budgets!) but I think it backfires both for learning, personal growth and for career preparation.  My advice to families is to balance your framing about college: highlight the importance of being intellectually curious, of taking courses that just sound interesting to you, learning about yourself and your interests as equally valuable to doing the work that intentionally and purposefully builds towards a career.   No one can hand either to you: students have to take the primary role in constructing their learning towards their own desired futures. The faculty and the school just try to create the optimal conditions and support for you to do this work.  So much of learning and careers are non-linear and the experience of tapping intrinsic motivation and curiosity and connecting it to intellectual pursuits is essential in any academic discipline and to building a thriving professional (and personal) life.

Frame a degree as not something you "get" (or, worse, buy!), but something you earn.  Think of earning a degree as being purposefully and actively involved in building the foundation for the long game of a flourishing life and a professional career.

Now being a parent of a recent college grad, I see this non-linearity firsthand.  My son's work in college has led to a great start of a career, but he now thinks two of the most influential courses were outside his major and sort of taken on a whim as they were what was available to fill a distribution requirement--a Russian studies course that gave him powerful tools and context for interpreting current events and a film studies course that has launched an interest in film and improved his critical thinking on the art form.  Both give him a lot of enjoyment, intellectual engagement post-college, a connection to others who find his interests/viewpoints interesting, and has even had career benefits because he was pulled into a project because of a connection he made with the lead talking about films during a company social event.  [/quote]

DP. Great post! I'm going to show this thread to my inbound freshman. I was a liberal arts student through and through.  As I progressed through my college years, career, grad school, and more work, I was continually surprised by what courses developed my thinking the most.  For example, during my MBA, I expected "Corporate Strategy" to be the most impactful, while instead it was "Advanced Cost Accounting". Eventually, in retrospect, there were many courses from which I retained little. The ones that made the biggest impact were the ones that involved a lot of analysis and discussion.  English lit, history, and environmental science are high on the list though not directly related to any job I've held.[/quote]

Yes to this!! 20 years later I am still so glad I took a class in an extremely niche subject well outside of my major, just because I was curious about it. And I am still grateful to the professor for helping me get up to speed despite my being weak on the prereqs for it - some of my favorite office hours visits were to talk with that professor. [/quote]

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