For me, not attending university was never an option. I was of that generation after the 70s, 80s and 90s when women finally had the right to attend universities and it was expected that they had careers. My own alma mater only became co-ed in 1987. I came from a family of academics. My grandfather attended the top university in Tokyo, Japan and was a poet. My father himself had written travelogues in his youth, when he had been rated first in his class at Seoul National University, where only the top 1% of academic achievers were allowed to attend and then consequently ended up dropping out to join the air force. On my father's side of the family, everyone was an academic or a Professor; we all went to Ivy League universities, top public universities, went to business schools, graduated at the top our class at MIT, Princeton and UC Berkeley.
I, myself was a never really an overachiever. I liked to enjoy life, to relax, to have fun. For me, ambition was about the bigger, long term picture; not about merits on a Diploma or a résumé. Despite having graduated from Columbia University, I was one of those students who always did well without ever having to study very hard. I had a gift for memorisation and tutors always loved it when I repeated their own thoughts and opinions into all my bluebook tests and essays. Multiple tests, to me were a mathematical equation of elimination, and essay tests were about a predictable structure outlining popular opinions.
In my sophomore year, I recall one of the most brillant students in my philosophy courses, who happened to be an Orthodox Jew and wore yamulkes to class every week; that the paper he'd written full of criticism about contemporary philosophy and asking relevant questions that seemed to question the status quo, only received a C+, while my mediocre repetition of old ideas received an A. That was the year when I realised that grades did not factor into what we consider "education." Education, was rather a process of self-enlightenment- through investigation and questioning of one's source of knowledge- and the various authorities who hold this judgement. Universities provide an environment into this Socratic questioning of old vs. new, in ideal, but in reality, I found instead that it only created a population of students who were only interested in attaining good marks, re-wording a repetition of old ideas, and simply not caring about the material- but more motivated by the auspices of attaining a 6-figure job after graduation.
What the Ivy Leagues present today- as much as I, myself have benefitted from them, is that they are a kind of social club. A country club membership to be able to socialise with the people who had the connexion to the people to perhaps bring you into the world of aristocracy or to make your ideas a reality.
My father never once told me that he couldn't afford to send me to the best universities. It was expected that I would attend. Money was something I never had to worry about when I was in high school. In his mind, it was his patriarchal duty to send me to the best universities in the United States, even if he had to work holidays and weekends to fund my education; in my father's mind, it was his duty to do so. I had wondered though about the students who go into massive debt to fund their education, who didn't have a father like mine, by taking out loans and credit cards with the increasing cost of American education; and I wondered if perhaps Mark Cuban had been right in saying that the next big bubble is the institution of American education?
The figures looked dire- the tuition at a lowly rated private university such as Loyola University in Los Angeles, CA was the same as the tuition at Harvard University in Cambridge, MA, the top rated university in the United States. It was becoming clear that universities in the States were really just a business and a social club. In comparison, my mates in England were going to Oxford and Cambridge for barely nothing and most of my friends in Switzerland and France went to university for free.
Is education a privilege? My answer would be yes without a doubt. But the more complex question is, is education only for the wealthy? And in the United States, that is apparently so in the current era. When my cousin attended UC Berkeley in the late 80s, she paid a total of $10K to receive her degree, compare that to the current rate of $150K for the average student.
I love my father, and certainly I was grateful for my education- but I think if I had to do it all over again- I would've travelled abroad- exploring different countries, learning different languages, and getting work experience in different fields instead of slaving away for four years writing A papers. Then again, that is precisely what my father had chosen to do, and I guess I was my father's daughter after all.
With the price of the education bubble near asphixiation, the advent of online schools, with Stanford and MIT testing out free online curricula, I could see that Mark Cuban's vision was finding its way in contemporary American society. In the future, education will be separate from the business of education, because if we thought about it, at the core, education was really about finding a community to fuel one's own interests, through one's own intellectual curiosity without having to be given a grade about what one had learned. Learning did not necessarily have a quantification. Grades and tests were only a basis of assimilation after all.
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