Students contemplating a college education may think in terms of increased earning power. They may think of it as an investment in their future. It is that, but it is also more than a financial investment. The personal growth that may be expected from a college education can be regarded as an investment in life itself.
Mature entrants to higher education often benefit more than their younger fellows. This is because they might have missed out on earlier opportunities. So they will appreciate the privilege when the chance finally comes later in life. It is a privilege to experience higher education because it can be a life changing experience.
One used to think about higher education as a time of ‘reading’. That was the word used in place of ‘learning’ or ‘studying’. A bachelor’s degree entailed some years of ‘reading’ the stored wisdom of generations, usually in the areas of philosophy, politics and economics. From those broad backgrounds it was assumed that a student could advance further, either into a professional or academic direction.
Reading is such a critical word because it implies writing. Literate, civilized societies store the ideas and intellectual achievements in writing. Higher education proceeds from the point at which an individual is ready to engage with the great ideas that are at the centre of the society of which he is part. The wonders of literacy are currently being revealed as the Bamboo Curtain is drawn aside to reveal amazing parallels between Western society and Chinese civilization which has develop in isolation for a short period, in historic terms. Literacy stores universal truths in perpetuity. Higher education should be a process of discovering some of those truths.
Philosophy is described by some as the mother of all academic disciplines. Doctoral dissertations in fields as wide apart as music and history end up as doctors of philosophy because the are original contributions to thinking within the discipline. Reading philosophy then, is reading the thinking on any number of topics, the emphasis being on the process rather than the product.
Philosophy is a training in academic discipline. Done in isolation, reading may go round in circles in the manner of a lost hiker. At an institution of higher learning one receives direction from tutors and peers. An examination provides a goal.
Although politics might strike a hard science student as being quite irrelevant and airy fairy it is in fact a ‘science’ because it objectively studies the dynamics of power in human affairs. Relevance may be a perceived quality. Great insights like the Eureka principle have come about because a thinker suddenly saw the relevance of something simple.
The chemist and physicist may be more interested in the physical manifestations of power, but even an atom bomb cannot be divorced entirely from who drops it and why. This may illustrate the value of background reading which can make all the difference between a philistine and a cultivated agricultural scientist.
The boundaries of economics shift like and dunes, but the general description is that it studies the deployment of scarce resources. This wide definition allows for the study of many seminal works that have shaped the world as we know it. Some knowledge of economic principles should be a hall mark of a well rounded mind.
In planning a college education students are likely to focus more on career relevance than was the case in the Oxbridge BA era. However, sight should not be lost of what the Greeks called the ‘Golden Mean’. Wherever the well rounded mind goes to specialize, it will be better able to prosper if it has a deep foundation.