Once we were all introduced, Dr. Price told us about the course we were beginning. Where orientation had been a kind of flyover of subjects like time management and goal setting, GEN 195 would really get down and dirty with these things. The first chapter of our textbook, Your College Experience, was entitled “Exploring Your Purpose for Attending College,” and that’s where we would begin. It seemed strange to me that a credit-bearing college course should be dedicated to telling students why they should go to college, but the entire first-year sequence turns out to be an almost surreal riff on the socialization process of higher education, where secondary characteristics of college graduates become the actual subjects of the courses. Having read in Your College Experience that graduates have better health outcomes, students could look forward a few weeks down the line to tackling topics like “optimal body weight” and “the rewards of physical fitness” in SCI 163: Elements of Health and Wellness. Having discovered that college graduates are more responsible borrowers, students could look forward to FP 120: Essentials of Personal Finance, in which we would come to “recognize the advantages and disadvantages of credit cards.” To call this material “remedial” would imply that such information would usually be considered part of a pre-college curriculum in the first place. Instead, it is emblematic of the basic confusion of correlation and causation that animates our obsessive drive to increase graduation rates. Because college graduates exhibit a collection of socially beneficial traits, we have come to believe that the development of these traits is college’s primary purpose. Even more dubiously, we have come to believe that merely handing out degrees will disseminate these benefits.
