Entering the first year of university generally marks a departure from the meticulously regimented educational path that Canadian students stride for during the first 12 years of their academic career. Suddenly, it is up to you to decide what programs to take, and how seriously to engage with academic responsibilities.
Instead of hall passes, detention, and parent-teacher conferences, first year students grapple with the prospect of Con Hall lectures where nobody can demand your attendence.
Instead of the mandatory mix of subjects and courses that generally characterizes high school, students must now decide for themselves what it is they are here to learn.
In the face of this daunting decision, it is only natural that many seek guidance from parents, friends, and popular culture. We tend to adopt a sheep mentality, following the herd in hopes that the academic choices we make pay off with a lucrative job or prestigious graduate school.
Perhaps this explains the recent surge of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) majors amongst university students in North America. Nowadays, students are proportionally disregarding English, history, and philosophy for ‘hard’ disciplines like engineering, chemistry, and computer science. The burgeoning political science can even be seen in these terms, as a means of recalibrating social and literary analysis towards an “objective,” theory-based social “science.”
There is, perhaps, nothing objectively problematic with this trend. As the Harvard Crimson argued last year in their controversial editorial, “Let Them Eat Code,” the increasing digitization and mechanization of the modern economy demands a reciprocal surge in trained STEM undergraduates. The relative dearth of “hard” skills that English majors leave university with, compared with an engineering graduate, seems to make this phenomenon logically sound.
Since university presents a significant financial and opportunity cost, who can blame a student for structuring their academic career around post-graduation and professional planning? Nevertheless, we cannot all be engineers, biologists, or programmers. It is, in my opinion, disturbing when a student whose true passion lies in the humanities, disregards this path in favor of the “practical” choice. This decision signifies a shortsighted perspective in which “hard skills” like data analysis and quantitative reasoning are the only ones that matter. It suggests that the professional and human benefits of a university education can be easily encapsulated in a few words or phrases.
In reality, our academic, social, and personal lives at university affect us profoundly in a far broader sense. Besides the hard skills that STEM programs specialize in, we should recognize the importance of “soft” skills, as well of the subtle, even immeasurable, changes to an individual’s personality and perspective.
“Soft” skills like critical thinking and communication abilities are developed particularly by an education in the humanities or social sciences.
U of T’s president, Meric Gertler, referred to these skills as a “core set of capabilities to serve [students] well no matter what further educational or career opportunities they pursue.” In an interview with The Varsity, he argued that the ability to communicate effectively (verbally and in writing), critically consume information, and question arguments, benefits a professional career in a varied and flexible way.
More important is the intellectual and personal growth that occurs during your university years. By engaging with your studies, and by striving and falling short, we can learn what drives us individually. We are exposed to a world of high culture in academia that inevitably expands our comfort zones if we choose to engage in it. By encountering a diverse set of people and ideas that challenge us to examine our own worldviews, social structures, and unexamined assumptions, we become more enlightened consumers, citizens, and thinkers.
Whether academia intrinsically motivates us, or instead serves as a means to an end, there are two questions many of us ask, but they needn’t be mutually exclusive. It is possible that the university experience gives us clarity on the type of profession that can satisfy both our ideals and our pragmatism.
Whether this growth is worth the cost of tuition is a value judgment that students, as the consumers of education, must make for themselves.
University is not the only means to develop one’s personal and professional character. Professional school, international travel, and online education exist as an alternative way to transition into adult life.
Nevertheless, non-STEM students should not fear that they are wasting their money, if their university experience provides them with a sharpened mind, expanded perspective, and a driven sense of direction.
Lee Eames is a fourth-year student at Woodsworth College studying contemporary Asian studies and Buddhism and psychology.
