By David Bordelon
Why go to college?
Most believe the answer to this question is “to get a good job.” But a recent poll casts doubt on that assumption. In 2024, the Pew Research Center leaned into this belief, framing the question in blatantly transactional terms: “Is college worth it?”
The result was a shrug.
Almost half of the respondents believe that a four-year degree is now “less important” for a job.
So if college isn’t needed for a “good job”—if its “worth” is only measured in dollars—why go? If it’s not a career engine, then why bother?
The answer lies in a reason difficult to capture in a poll: personal and intellectual growth. Judith Shapiro, former president of Barnard college, explains this more intrinsic and fundamental purpose, writing that college makes “the inside of your head … an interesting place to spend the rest of your life.”
This spring, in my American literature class, Jess embodied this purpose. As part of the course introduction, I asked students what they hoped to learn from the class: sitting in the front row, she was the first to raise her hand. Jess talked about how much she enjoyed discussing poetry in English II (a required Composition/Literature course), especially the differences in student interpretations of how particular words shaped a poem’s meaning. She reported leaving those classes “intrigued” and, as she put it, “feeling smarter.”
A business major, she hadn’t taken many humanities electives, which explains the hesitancy of her final comment: “I’m probably the only one who feels this way.”
I asked who else felt the same and when everyone raised their hand, I asked Jess to turn around and see that she was not alone.
Billie quickly volunteered that she had signed up for the same reason: “In my English II course I really liked studying poetry too.” Like Jess, Billie isn’t an English major: she’s enrolled in our Early Education program.
They reminded me of two students in the same course from last year: Jack, a public works employee taking classes (financed by the GI Bill) that, as he put it, “interested” him, and William, a patio installer, taking classes because he liked to read. Jess, Billie, Jack, William and countless others are a population that’s missing from discussions about college and often absent in the polling data; students who come to college because they are interested in, to use a phrase that has fallen from favor, a life of the mind.
These students mirror those interviewed in a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, “It’s Not All About the Money.” The authors, Scott Carlson and Ned Laff, push back against the notion of students adopting a purely monetary view of education, reporting that many are drawn to college, not for the economic benefits of a degree, but for a clearer sense of direction and design in their lives.
“Meaning and purpose should be a central concept in how students plan their undergraduate education, and colleges should understand how they can harness those aspirations to drive student persistence,” they argue.
At a time when New Jersey community colleges are going all in on career prep, and at a time when students live in a culture lost in transitory pleasures and suffering from “depths of despair,” it’s time for them to regain an emphasis on fostering and supporting students like Jess and her classmates who value college not for what it can bring to their wallets, but what it can bring to their minds.
Dr. Bordelon is the president of the Faculty Association of Ocean County College where he is a professor of English. More on his work and publications can be found at davidbordelon.wordpress.com.