Breaking the Boundaries of Higher Education
College is often described as the stage of our lives when we can explore our academic, personal, and professional interests. After years spent taking required courses I wasn’t interested in, wasting time on unnecessary homework assignments, and constantly feeling anxiety and stress from my GPA, I looked to college as a place of freedom. When I got to Washington University, I experienced that freedom—living independently, working multiple jobs, and having the agency to craft my own schedule. However, in the academic realm, I continued to feel constrained. For too long, higher education has been structured to generate competition, not collaboration. By constraining student choice through the GPA system, distributional requirements, and prerequisite courses, we create a college experience that fails to prepare us for the real world. For a more meaningful college experience, we must radically reimagine what academic freedom and agency could look like.
Advancing human knowledge and quality of life should be the primary focus of higher education. By equipping young people with the skills they need to thrive, higher education institutions like ours prepare students for the betterment of society. The innovation, productivity, and progress we aspire for doesn’t come from atomized individualism: it is rooted in radical collaboration. From business to social movements, we’ve observed the power of collective action in generating meaningful change.
Unfortunately, classroom policies continue to hold us back. Grade deflation and closed-book individual examinations foster competition, not cooperation. Curving incentivizes students to view their own success as zero-sum and hope their classmates fail, instead of wanting everybody to succeed academically. Exams that do not allow us to collaborate or access notes are not just stressful but also fail to reflect a modern world where professionals are encouraged to work together to solve problems and are permitted to use the Internet. A GPA system that rewards its “winners” with the semesterly Dean’s List and penalizes its “losers” with lower graduate school admissions rates legitimizes arbitrary grading standards that endow some with an undeserved superiority complex and others with imposter syndrome. These courses turn classrooms into battlegrounds for the highest grades, instead of collaborative environments for creativity to prosper and for students to learn.
These stressors are compounded by distributional, major, and minor requirements that force students into courses they may not otherwise take. While some herald this as a beacon of interdisciplinary engagement, such courses ultimately constrain students from gaining full agency over their academic schedules. At colleges like Brown, Grinnell, and Smith, there are no distributional requirements, core curriculum, or required courses. Meanwhile, at NYU-Gallatin, the University of Washington, and Indiana University, students who reject major requirements are encouraged to make their own major. Students paying for an education are entitled to create their own academic paths. While many may prefer the distributional requirement model, universities also have an obligation to serve students who have no interest in taking a course in statistics, computer science, or literature.
These courses turn classrooms into battlegrounds for the highest grades, instead of collaborative environments for creativity to prosper and for students to learn.
The alternative to the current system, which pits us against one another and entrenches arbitrary hierarchy, is a system that prioritizes collaborative engagement: a system with less interest in ranking students against one another and more interest in producing and executing creative ideas. These are classrooms where students focus on learning, not grades; where students want to be in every class they take, and are never begrudgingly “fulfilling a requirement; and where students are taught to utilize the full set of skills at their disposal—from the Internet to their textbooks—instead of being forced to memorize the structure of mitochondria, or the year Marbury v. Madison was adjudicated.
Most importantly, these are the classrooms that will create change-makers, innovators, and creatives. Humanity’s greatest challenges—climate change, poverty, racism—are not problems with easy solutions one person can offer. They will require radical collaboration, and a mindset which cares about what we can give to the world to enrich the lives of all people–not just ourselves. These classrooms will not only teach our generation to make a living: it will teach us to lead a life.