Curtis WestbayI stared at the video title— “Degree, Bootcamp, or Self-taught: Which is Right for You?
This was one of the suggested videos I saw on the homepage the day after looking up answers to a few web development questions. It seemed that the algorithm had seen people like me before, looking for help with coding. Those people, the algorithm knew, might be looking for a career transition. Career transitions are more and more common, especially compared with the workplace of a half century ago. More and more frequently, people find employment in careers that don’t necessarily align with their college degree. And beyond this, more and more people are doing highly skilled work without attending college at all.
It’s a product of our times, when internet access has brought the lecture hall to phone screens. The suggested video offered two alternatives, one of which, the “bootcamp,” is a popular alternative to college for web developers (who study things like the Javascript coding language). And it made sense to me that people would look for some middle ground between college graduate and autodidact. The former involves 4-8 years of unemployment or partial employment and a substantial financial investment; the latter requires tremendous will power and organization. That bootcamp that the video was trying to sell me promised benefits of both— months of study, unlike the years of college; structure of instruction, unlike the challenge of self-directed learning.
And there is a cottage industry of online professors who have made their own curricula for web developers. Dozens of experts offer the bootcamp that you need to gain employment in less than a year. It all made me think, what if they’re right? What if college is unnecessary?
So, do you still need college?
Yeah, probably. Like I said in the preface, I know little to nothing about getting a job in China. You parents assure me that not only is a college degree important, but so too is the reputation of the college awarding a degree. The fact remains that colleges used to be more necessary, though. Before the internet, you could really only learn to the depth you could learn at a college, at a college. Colleges had extensive libraries that were in no way digitized and teachers who could explain the materials contained therein.
But still, you may meet a web developer who was a self-starter, but that doesn’t mean you’ll meet a molecular biologist who learned their field without attending college. Even if someone has a keen interest in a topic and works hard to express and explore that passion without an attachment to college, they’re probably a hobbyist, not a professional. (Though, it is interesting to see when an amateur scholar does something to advance a field— e.g. Michael Ventris first deciphered Linear B Bronze Age Greek tablets, and he wasn’t a trained Classicist, but an architect!)
So, at this moment, it seems that professional prospects that come independently of college aren’t universally available, but locally. That is, an aspiring computer science student doesn’t necessarily need college to learn, nor to get hired, but a biologist probably does. Expertise in a field isn’t enough to secure a job on its own; you need trusted credentials, too. Rare counterexamples like coding exist where someone’s work can speak for itself, but these are exceptions to the rule.
So, what’s the point?
I think that colleges are painfully aware of the extent to which college attendance is little more than a reflex to many, many students. High school students are going to college, in their own words, for vague reasons: to have good job opportunities, to expand on what they learned in high school, to take the next step. These reasons are enough for colleges that aren’t selective, and it’s telling that less-selective colleges hardly take the time to ask why an applicant wishes to attend college period, let alone at their specific institution.
But highly-selective colleges want to know why students want to attend college and why they want to attend their college. They also have the luxury of extreme selectivity, of denying admission to 80% of applicants or more. They meet a student’s vague and superficial reasons for college attendance with skepticism. If you just want to attend college to get good jobs, then why open our doors to you? You could get good jobs without us. If you just want to attend college to expand on what you’ve learned in college, why attend college at all? You could just learn new things for free online. If you just want to take the next step in an academic path, then can’t you do that at any one of the thousands of universities in the US, or the world?
This process of demonstrating interest to a college is part of their admission calculus— it’s how they determine the intersection of who is qualified and who is seriously interested. Students can have a strong academic foundation, but offer no evidence of direction, passion, inspiration. Students can be deeply interesting and inspired, but offer no evidence of ability. If you know what you want to do, you have already started doing it, and you have the ability to keep doing it, you’re part of the way to admission. Then, you have to convince the application reader that you should do what you want to do where you want to do it, and that there’s not many other places that you could do it.
And for highly-selective universities, even that might not be enough. There’s an element of randomness to the decisions that get made when your acceptance rate is under 20%.
Authentic applications offer action to back up statement.
I’m sure there’s a Chinese equivalent to an English phrase I heard growing up— “You have to walk the walk, not just talk the talk.” The same is true in college applications. Our students will do a lot of research on the right college for them. Personally, it’s painfully obvious to me when a student has contrived reasons as to why a highly-ranked school is absolutely the perfect place for them, and I’m sure that it’s even more obvious to the application reader. Talking the talk is demonstrating interest in essays, walking the walk is grades, scores, activities. Especially when it comes to activities, the most authentic and attractive candidates can show that they aren’t content to let their dreams be dreams. They already know the challenges that will come with studying their intended major in college, and they aren’t daunted by them (or, at least, they haven’t been as they’ve explored that interest so far).
Some students struggle to answer the question, why college? For highly-selective universities, the inability to articulate why you would go to college at all is an easy reason to reject an applicant. But for those colleges, the question isn’t just why college?, it’s why our college?
If our students can’t answer both of these questions, then we can’t expect them to find success in college applications.