At
the last high school graduation I attended as faculty member, I sat on the
stage, robed and hooded, with the rest of the teachers who served as honor
guard for the class. Normally, commencement was held in the football stadium,
but a downpour forced us into the auditorium where all graduates and attendees
were up close and personal, not to mention damp and uncomfortable.

From
my vantage point, I could reach out and touch graduates as they crossed the
stage--and see right up the gowns of the young men sitting, splay-legged, in
the front row. In spite of the class advisors' admonitions--and, probably,
their mothers'--many of the boys were wearing shorts and flip-flops and didn't
appear to be duly impressed with the ceremonial aspects of the occasion. I was
surprised at how many of them were bearded, or sporting cool-dude facial hair;
physically, these were full-grown men.

I
started thinking about my district's four-option school entry program: students
could enter school via "developmental" kindergarten and/or regular
kindergarten, and those who "needed a little more time" could do a
year in junior first grade, before moving on to regular first grade. Parents tailored
two- or three-year combination plans to get their kids to second grade, and the
large majority of those taking three years were boys. Because of the desire to
give their sons a leg up, back then, many of the young men sitting in front of
me were a hormonal nineteen years old. They'd been driving for four years, and
could easily have been carrying an M-16 in Iraq. In an earlier century, they
would have struck out on their own long before, as farmers, wayfarers or
fathers.

Today,
of course, the conventional wisdom is that their economic goose is cooked
unless they seek further education. This week's cover story in
Newsweek--"Why College Should Take Only Three Years" (by Lamar
Alexander), and a follow-up roundtable with higher ed luminaries discussing
"What is College For, Anyway?" don't manage to make an airtight case for the
three-year plan. But both pieces shed light on the big questions that we ought
be asking about a college education:

• Are
  high school seniors poorly educated and thus unready for college--or are they merely
  bored with the low challenge of high school?

• What
  does anyone need to know and be able to do to make a success in a modern
  economy? Seriously. Is there a formula for job readiness in non-technical
  fields?

• What
  comes first: a broad, internalized knowledge base, or the skills to analyze and
  evaluate the surfeit of information and data available to everyone?

• Does
  technology make it easier and faster to learn--or more challenging to develop
  focus

• Is
  there a one-size-fits-all plan, a general agreement about how much coursework represents
  a bachelor's degree? And does the new standard for being well-educated now automatically
  include a second degree, beyond the B.A.--upping the educational ante once
  again?

No
consensus reached. In fact, the various experts did not agree on the primary
purpose of pursuing a college degree--is it building workplace skills, developing
an educated citizenry, or simply the credential needed to the lock the bearer
into a higher socioeconomic stratum?

Here's
an image from Robert Zemsky, education reformer and professor at the University
of Pennsylvania: College is like a supermarket where we let students freely
choose courses. When they get to the cash register, we tell them they don't
have the right things in their shopping carts, so they must continue shopping,
for five or more less-than-fruitful years. Might it be an intellectually
productive thing, that academic mucking about? Or is it a nationally
embarrassing inefficiency, a waste of time and money?

I'm
not sure. At some point, young people need to grow up, spend time working,
traveling, living independently, making their own choices. Going to college or
trade school should be motivated by a desire to learn something, be it plumbing
or Shakespearean sonnets. You can't put off adulthood and real life forever.

Image: Uhuru1701, Flickr Creative Commons