College teaches you how to learn

The argument

Aside from any of the other benefits associated with university, attending higher education makes you a better person by teaching you how to learn. You have to attend high school because if you don’t the government imposes legal penalties. When you are there, you are disciplined by teachers and forced to study and apply yourself. At university, you are there because you want to be there. Nobody will force you to do your work, and there is nobody to discipline you if you don’t. Therefore, you learn how to learn. You learn how to find internal motivation to push and challenge yourself. These qualities are impossible to put a price on and make you a better person.

Context

People who know how to learn are more adaptable. This makes them a better person in both their professional and personal lives.

Premises

Counter-arguments

The mechanism proposed is not specific to college. If self-direction develops because attendance is voluntary and no one compels the work, then apprenticeships, self-teaching, starting a business, military service and any serious unsupervised project develop it on the same reasoning. The argument identifies a property of chosen difficulty rather than a property of universities, and 'worth it' is a comparative question — worth it relative to the alternatives, at the price charged. The description of universities is also idealised. Attendance is monitored on many courses; work is set to deadlines, graded and chased; students are placed on academic probation and excluded for failing to submit. Coursework structured by a syllabus someone else designed is a considerable distance from the unsupervised self-motivation the argument credits. Where degrees really are self-directed — a research thesis — that is a small part of most undergraduate experience. 'You are there because you want to be there' is likewise not universal. Many students attend because a degree is the entry requirement for the work they want, because family expects it, or because the alternatives were never presented — attending under economic and social pressure is not the same as attending by choice, and the argument's whole mechanism depends on the difference. Most of all, the argument never touches cost, which is what makes this question a question. Nobody disputes that university can teach self-direction; the dispute is whether that and the other benefits justify the tuition, the debt and the years of forgone earnings for a given student in a given field. An argument that a benefit exists is not an argument that it is worth its price, which is why the sibling position holds that the answer depends.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P1] The contrast is overdrawn: university courses monitor attendance, set graded work to deadlines, chase submissions and exclude students who fail to comply, so the unsupervised self-motivation described is not the ordinary undergraduate experience; nor is attendance uniformly voluntary, since many students enrol because a degree gates the work they want or because family and circumstance expect it. [Rejecting P2] Learning to learn follows from chosen difficulty rather than from university specifically, so the premise applies equally to apprenticeships, self-teaching, starting a business or any demanding unsupervised project — it does not distinguish college from its alternatives. [Rejecting C] 'Worth it' is a comparative question about benefits against costs, and the argument never addresses tuition, debt or forgone earnings — establishing that a benefit exists is not establishing that it justifies its price, which is what the rival positions contest.