Undergraduate education is about a lot more than getting a good job

Nearly half of incoming university students say they are only there to get a job - and that's not the point of most undergraduate education.

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

For students across Canada, this week marked the first week of school. Being only recently out of school myself, I am amazed how quickly I blocked out the way that Labour Day weekend marked the end of summer freedom, and how sharply those feelings came rushing back as I watched a chain of first-year university students wearing fluorescent pink orientation t-shirts walk past the café where I sit and work outside when the weather is nice. As soon as I noticed it, I saw pieces of the return to school everywhere I looked. And the more I looked, the more I began to notice a very particular thread of conversation taking place around, specifically, the purpose of undergraduate education. 

From the New York Times to creators on social media to universities themselves, there appears to be an almost obsessive focus on the role of your undergraduate education in your future career: that what you study as an undergraduate student will be directly linked to the job you have after. 

I’m not going to say that is entirely untrue. If you want to go to medical school, it’s probably a good idea to focus on science. And it would be hard to argue that programs like computer science and engineering are not career-oriented (that being said, I know a number of people in the high-level coding space with bachelor’s degrees in things like Italian and history). 

So while it is not totally fictitious, I would argue that in a lot of cases, it’s largely untrue. And it also completely doesn’t matter. 

I have a bachelor ‘s degree in economics from a small liberal arts college in San Francisco. Aside from whipping out some of that knowledge to combat mansplaining on occasion, it is by and large irrelevant to my life and largely irrelevant to my job. I loved studying economics, I thought, and think, that it is a fascinating topic and one that I am always happy to discuss. But if I were to do undergrad over again, I would study something like art history. Why? Because I’m not an economist. I was never going to be an economist, and I knew pretty quickly that I wasn’t headed towards anything even vaguely approximating a related field, like finance. Studying economics isn’t necessarily even a trajectory into economics graduate programs in most cases, something I learned during a panicked conversation with an advisor when I had convinced myself I wasn’t going to get into law school. Could I have chosen something more related to my future career, once I knew what that was? In all honesty, not really. On paper, economics sounds like a useful field of study, but in reality my life today would be no different if I had studied something that sounded less serious on paper, and that I was more inherently interested in and involved less math. 

From my undergraduate class of less than 150 people, some of us went on to professional school and graduate school immediately. Some found jobs in their chosen field within six months of graduating - largely in the tech, finance, and start-up space. One joined a monastery. Another moved to to a remote town to pursue personal happiness. A lot moved home for a while and worked in bookstores, as waiters, and secretaries, or some combination employment, sometimes bouncing from city to city or country to country as they figured out what came next. Within three years of graduating, a few more started graduate school, not necessarily in areas that had anything to do with what they studied in undergrad. All of us were taking the steps we needed to figure out what the rest of our lives were going to look like - a process that will be ongoing for years. These were all motivated, exceptional students who graduated from a university with a 1.7% acceptance rate. Our undergraduate education was invaluable - but not because it landed us directly into careers. That’s not its sole purpose. It was just one of many steps in becoming well-rounded and fulfilled individuals who are finding our place in the world. 

In the early days of Ivy League education, and the early days of American universities generally, the reason to go to university wasn’t because of the job you would get after. Well into the 1970s, the accounts of students talk about the value of spending four years learning and exploring with a degree of freedom that will only diminish as the years go by. The purpose of an undergraduate education, for a very long time, was to enhance your quality of life. And while yes, it was a different time, where sons came home to take over their father’s businesses and women…were really held back by systemic barriers, the role of undergraduate education hasn’t changed  all that much. 

For most of us, undergrad isn’t job training - it’s life training. 

My undergraduate education was highly formative for me. It was the first time that I had to learn how to be an adult in the world. And I got to do that with none of the baggage that comes with being an actual adult with responsibilities and limited vacation days. The life and learning skills that you develop over the four years of most undergraduate programs are likely to serve you longer and better than the specific knowledge that you gained in your classes - I couldn’t tell you anything about what I read for a political science class I took in my third year of university, but I can remember learning how to change the way I communicated questions and answers to match the needs of my professor, a skill that I have used repeatedly. 

Focusing too much on the end of the road runs the risk of not getting the full benefit of the journey. While getting an undergraduate degree is a highly valuable part of the trajectory towards a future career for many people, it’s important not to lose sight of the larger life value that you get from a university education. 

You’re there to learn - learn from everything you can.