By the time the pandemic arrived, residential colleges had been selling the college experience, along with a side of education, for decades. They had been promulgating it as a cultural aspiration for much longer. An education is useful and even beneficial. But it’s not what American colleges are built for, and it never has been.
College is a place like Las Vegas is a place: a host for the lifestyle it provides.
Americans perceive college as a shared cultural experience because it is one. You might graduate after four years, but in a way you never leave—even if you didn’t attend in the first place.
College creates a bubble that upends responsibility to the outside world. Students acted recklessly toward the virus not because they are necessarily careless or juvenile, but because college promises them a place apart, where ordinary rules don’t apply.
The drive to open campuses at all costs during a pandemic shows how deeply higher education has sunk its claws into the American imagination. We’ve built a large part of our society around the experience of college, but precious little around the education it provides.
Both diagnoses mistake college’s secondary purpose, education, for its primary one, collegiate life.
The pandemic has made college frail, but it has strengthened Americans’ awareness of their attachment to the college experience. It has shown the whole nation, all at once, how invested they are in going away to school or dreaming about doing so. Facing that revelation might be the most important outcome of the pandemic for higher ed: An education may take place at college, but that’s not what colleges principally provide.
The pandemic offered an invitation to construe college as an education alone, because it was too dangerous to embrace it as an experience. Nobody was interested. They probably never will be.