College teaches interpersonal skills

The argument

Arguments about the value of a degree usually turn on the subject studied, but this one concerns something universities provide regardless of what is taught in them. Universities are a place where students of all races, backgrounds, economic standing, and nationalities are brought together. The mixing is not incidental; it follows from how institutions recruit, drawing from a whole country and often from many countries into a single campus. For many students it is the first time they have lived outside the town or city they grew up in, and therefore the first time the people around them have not been broadly like them. What makes that formative is the sustained and unavoidable nature of the contact. A student shares accommodation, seminars, teams, and societies with people whose assumptions differ from their own, over years rather than in passing. They have to negotiate with them, disagree with them, divide work with them, and sometimes repair things that have gone wrong. None of this is taught, and all of it is practised continuously. The skills that come out of that practice are precisely the ones the working world places a high value on. Most jobs require coordinating with colleagues who were not chosen, communicating across differences in background and expectation, and reading a situation accurately enough to act well within it. These are difficult to acquire deliberately and are learned mainly by being put in situations that demand them. Exposure to this rich melting pot of individuals is therefore not a pleasant side effect of attending university but part of what the institution delivers. Because college teaches interpersonal skills that are highly valuable in the working world, proponents argue, a college education is worth it.

Context

College thrusts young students into a new setting where they are forced to branch out and make friends. The interpersonal skills they develop here are invaluable.

Premises

Counter-arguments

There are much cheaper and easier ways to build interpersonal skills. The same students could simply relocate to a new city and build the same skills at a fraction of the cost of a university degree.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P3] Attending university is not the only way to develop these interpersonal skills.