I've an angle on college, for obvious reasons, having spent some 50 or so years teaching at one or another of them. And I agree completely with the idea that not everyone in the world needs to go to college. I also think it's completely true that a college degree ≠ a job or a career, although there's no doubt that some degrees that go in that direction pretty readily.
The point of education, IMHO, has nothing to do with a job or with an income or with some social status. I'll be etymological and point out that “education” comes from the Latin for “lead away from.” That's what an education does, as far as I'm concerned. And yes, there's no doubt that, all on my own, I could have read the same list of books that I read as an undergraduate. But the reading would have been bounded by my own self. I would not have been led from myself, but rather I would have been blithefully stuck in myself—in my family, in my experience, in my little room over the garage, not knowing that there's another room with a different view.
That’s why to my mind home schooling is a danger. Even with the most expansive of parental units guiding the curriculum, it tends to reinforce what’s already there. It’s not simply or only the instructor who offers a different viewpoint. It’s the other kids in the classes, in the labs, in the dorms, in the dining halls, at random on campus. The guest lecturers, the world-famous violinist, the physicist who sets out to explain string theory to the great unwashed.
All of that works together to form what’s offhandedly called “the college experience.” The key term there, it seems to me, is “experience.” That can’t really be duplicated in a private setting. And the more variety there is in the student body, the better the experience becomes. So-called “affirmative action,” now execrated as DEI, is good for the marginalized who get a chance to work out of their marginalization, but just as good for the privileged who get to see a world they’ve never experienced before.
That's not to say that the leading from self need be permanent. I've seen it many many times that a kid goes to college, takes the fast track to another universe, and then after they graduate circles back to where they came from.
But that return is hedged about with new perspectives and ideas that, for most of us, would not have been encountered without college. It's a little bit like real geographical travel. As Candide says when he comes across El Dorado, "This is vastly different from Westphalia and the Baron's castle. Had our friend Pangloss seen El Dorado he would no longer have said that the castle of Thunder-ten-Tronckh was the finest upon earth. It is evident that one must travel." College is El Dorado.
