Of Course, We Should Keep Electives in Higher Education

I promise this newsletter is not going to turn into a “what weird thing did a Substacker say now” dispatch, despite doing that two days running. However, sometimes there are items that speak to a deeper pathology in our society and need, in my opinion, some refuting.

The Elysian, which is supposed to be a newsletter about Utopias and building a Utopian life, came out in favor of BYU’s decision to remove electives from the requirements for some degrees. Her argument is that college is just a training school, where the cost-benefit analysis should be paramount. And since college costs have gotten out of control, the reasonable thing to do is pare away everything that is not directly related to job training:

In the millennia since, we have kept the liberal arts but didn’t keep it accessible to all. Instead, we enshrined it in an institution that has become exceedingly expensive and often financially ruinous to students who won’t improve their income potential as a result. And what is the point of an expensive degree if it does not improve someone’s vocational status enough that the tuition can be afforded by their new wages?

“What do you do when 34% of your students sometimes struggle to find at least 2 meals a day?” Griffith asks. “You find a way to get them to a bachelor's degree quicker.”

And you certainly don’t charge them $5,000 for art classes. 

I shouldn’t need to say this, but this is solving the wrong problem.

I am going to pause here to establish some credentials first. I am a technologist — have been for the entirety of my professional career. I, too, took longer than most people to finish a degree in part because of the extra classes required. I too had more student debt than I would have if there had been no electives. (Or did before Biden’s programs cancelled it.)

But.

But I would not have gotten my engineering degrees if it wasn’t for required electives. I was going to be a lawyer or a newspaper person until my school made me take an engineering course. I fell in love with it, and switched to engineering, which lead not only to my carer but to meeting my eventual wife. Everything, literally, I have came out of that one elective I was forced to take. College is a place where you can find what you want to do, and electives are a strong part of that.

Even more, the electives I had to take have made me better at my job. Engineering is a creative endeavor, as are most jobs that require a college degree to one extent or another. The electives around writing, art, and basic sciences have fostered my creativity and forced me to think about things in different ways. Whether I enjoyed the elective or took it because the alternative met at 8am three days a week (schedule better, colleges. I once took a final at 9pm on Christmas Eve Eve.), I always learned something that reoriented my brain, and those classes are invaluable for my work.

But we should not assume that the point of college, or high school for that matter, is only job training. First, no degree makes you one hundred percent ready for a job. You almost always learn what your work really is in your first internship or real job. In something like technology, you need to constantly be keeping up with new information, and electives help teach you how to research and study in a way merely technical classes do not. More importantly, having a broad range of ways of looking at the person makes you a better you. We contain multitudes and we should be allowed to experience those multitudes in an educational setting. Learning about a wide variety of things, from science to art to communication, makes us better at our primary jobs — being a citizen. All high schools, much less all colleges, should be encouraging those aspects of citizenship.

Yes, the extra classes can be expensive. But you solve that by making college not expensive, not be making a degree a mere job training program. College used to be effectively free, and even when I first started I could work full time and pay for classes half time, and did so. But we have turned colleges into bloated, grotesque copies of too many corporations, with a dozen deans focused on advertising and more money spent on building chocolate fountains in the dorm rooms than on teachers. The problem of cost is not solved by gutting the purpose of education. It is solved by making college cheap.

Otherwise we have two tracks — one more fulfilling and useful in the long term for both the society and the people who benefit from it and who will inevitably already be rich. And one that demands poorer people stay in their place, not get the full benefit of the education they deserve and be content with job training only that is not likely to last their lives anyway. Fuck that noise. I am not staying in my place, and I am not going to give up on the benefits of education, at any level, because we are afraid to do what we did for our grandparents and parents — make education thorough and affordable.

Call me naive if you must, but giving up on improving the world doesn’t seem very utopian to me.