Self-education by reading, attending public performances, watching movies, having conversations with interesting people, and many other activities as well, stands as an alternative to formal schooling. Formal schooling comes with certification (the diploma) that self-education can't provide. Does self-education have other shortcomings that formal schooling avoids? For example, if self-education comes from the person following his own interests, might the person be too narrow minded to broadly educate that way or too myopic to struggle through something difficult but which would produce good results if mastered? Conversely, does formal education have its own shortcomings, particularly that it relies too much on extrinsic motivation (getting good grades) so blocks curiosity the student would otherwise develop?
Now a little disclaimer about me, before I produce my views on these matters. I went on to graduate school immediately after college and after that became a professor. In retrospect, this path was obvious for me, though in prospect it actually was far from certain. One aspect of that for me is having a strong desire for self-education from pretty early on. I attributed this to a variety of factors where the environment encouraged me in this direction. Individualized reading, which started in elementary school coupled with regular trips to the public library was a big part of it. Then there were piano lessons, more for fun than to produce expertise, but also playing sports with my neighborhood friends. This was when producing a renaissance man was still in vogue. I wrote about this some time ago in a post called PLAs Please. A kid with this type of orientation will find formal education a complement to self-education, mainly because there will be other kids at school who are similarly situated and friendships can develop this way, which is the source of many of those interesting conversations. Such kids typically like school, even if not all of the classes make a strong impression on the kid.
Then there is the additional factor for me, I don't know how common it was among my cohort, it seems more frequent now, where I went through a rather serious depression in tenth grade, with the upshot that I could ignore the extrinsic motivation after that (or delude myself that I was ignoring it) whereas other students were more taken up with the grades they were getting. For me, the issue was getting ego rewards from academic high performance. I came to understand that was a path for the depression to return. And I really didn't need grades as a motivator. I could learn and perform well in school simply as a matter of self-expression.
I did have a cohort of friends who were similarly inclined to me in an intellectual way, both in high school and in college, so I'm sure I was not unique this way. But I've not got a sense of how widespread this strong sense of self-education was among among others whom I didn't know as well. I do recall there was a certain stereotype about students who were pre-med and who were not otherwise extremely gifted as students. They tended to be much more mercenary about school, caring quite a bit about grades, and in that sense may have been a portent of the more general trends that would manifest a generation or two later. For such students school was a passport, nothing more, which represents a different extreme from me and my cohort. Now a bit of hand waving, which I'm prone to do when I don't have the data. I imagine that student orientation back when I was in high school, at least among the students in Arista (National Honor Society), all of whom would be college bound, lies somewhere along the continuum between these two extremes. This seems a pretty safe assumption. But, in addition, since I'm now well aware of the availability heuristic, I can compensate some for it and say that the group of students for whom self-education served as the driver for their learning was a smaller fraction of the overall population than I would otherwise have surmised. Nonetheless, when I refer to the value of college then, in the title of my post, I'm referring to students for whom self-education was a big deal.
My sense of things now is that among those who become academics, the vast majority had this inclination, so their college experience reflected that. Some years back, when I thought I might lead a campus project about student peer mentoring, I interviewed a couple of faculty members who had interesting relevant experience. One of those was Ann Abbott, who teaches Spanish and does so in a service-learning course designed where students assist members of the community. The following is from the linked piece:
The other part, this specific to Ann, is the immediate sense I had of finding a kindred spirit. Her personal philosophy about the purpose of undergraduate education, something we covered in the preliminary part of the discussion, is essentially identical to mine. She started right in talking about how over programmed the students are, something I agree with 100%. She also said that when she was an undergrad she went to the movies on campus a lot, mainly for foreign films. She also went to a lot of lectures. I did the same when I was an undergrad. In other words, much of the education was informal and happened outside of regular courses. By being so over programmed, the students block this informal sort of learning. They also miss out on the inquiry into themselves, which is what college should be about, at least in part, even while the students are readying themselves for a life of work that they will enter after graduation.
Now I want to posit something that only an economist would do. In economics, we think that producers have "production capabilities" and that formal education is largely an investment in human capital creation, that enhances the student's subsequent production capabilities after graduation (which is how it increases earnings). But we also teach that consumers have preferences. In the typical approach, where consumers purchase goods and services, we treat preferences as exogenous and say - there is no accounting for taste. But might it be that education also serves to develop tastes in the student, as to what is interesting and important to know and think about? Indeed, might much of education be developing a sense of what is important to the student and then in helping the student work through how the student's time and energy can be focused on pursuit of these important ends? And, then, might it be that the informal education is important precisely because it is better at educating the preferences of students in this way? If so, are we apt to mis-measure the value of education, by focusing only on the human capital side of the equation? And, might students who haven't done much in the way of self-education through college, themselves regard their education only for the passport function?
Now a different focus, which is on adult learning on the job. We call it learning by doing and many people today will acknowledge that it is both critical for the work and necessary for the individual. A person who is fully engaged this way grows in the job, whether there is a promotion accompanied with that growth or not. A person who plateaus and doesn't see further personal growth in the offing is well on the way to becoming "dead wood." So we should ask, what in college education helps prepare the person for learning by doing in the world of work? My contention, and I don't think this is much of a stretch, is that the learning by doing is easier for the person who did a lot of self-education while a student. Then it is just a continuation of what the person had already been doing, albeit applied to new and different circumstances. For the students who was more instrumental about school, however, real learning to learn will be a novel experience, perhaps frightening and difficult to master. This person may hit the ceiling too quickly, finding the challenge overwhelming.
Of course, I never experienced the counterfactual, where I worked in a non-academic job on a full time basis, to find out if my background in school would be a help or a hindrance in that setting. In the previous paragraph I'm speculating only. I don't have the experience to match the speculation. The closest that I've got to this is a change in careers, still within a university setting, from economist to learning technology administrator, where the prior career was a useful credential for the second one. There was definitely a lot of learning by doing in that second career and in that setting what I argued in the previous paragraph was correct. Outside that context, however, what I said is merely an educated guess.
Let me make one more observation and then close. In the small sample of people I know who are recent college grads who did not go on to graduate school but instead entered the world of work, there is a fair amount of job churn. After a year or two, they find something else. It may be that in this situation the college degree remains an important credential, not just for getting the initial job, but for getting the subsequent one as well. I'm not trying say there is no passport value to the degree. But I would conjecture that the person's track record thereafter begins to matter more as a credential and the degree itself fades in importance. Learning to learn skills therefore are critical and really should be cultivated in college. Those students who focus on the passport value of the degree, however, don't seem to see it this way. They are the vast majority of the students I see when I teach my course on the economics of organizations.
I do believe school has the ability to encourage students to be more active regarding their own self-education. But school as it is currently constituted is not structured for that to be an important goal. My recent post A Summer Camp for Teaching College-Level Reading and Learning to Learn was meant as a think aloud about how we might go about things differently to make students more aware of their own self-education capabilities. As you might guess from the title of that piece, I think reading intensively is a key part of the puzzle. It won't be an easy sell on this generation of students. But, in my view, it is the right area for us to be focused on now. I would like to see more discussion on this topic from a variety of educators and others concerned as well - students, parents, and employers.
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