Is university a waste of time and money?

Or is it just a dance with music that keeps everyone standing by the snack table, waiting for the last song to play?

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Of course, what is said, what is seen, and what exists at a superficial level does not always show what lies beneath. So when organizations or people disconnect from their original mission and stop asking, “Why am I here? What am I trying to do,” it leads to rot under the surface.

This could mean a company losing touch with understanding its customers; it could be a hockey team forgetting that it is not a game but a battle; it could be a church that meets not to serve but to be served.

But in our wanderings, rarely is there the self-awareness to admit that we have become detached from our mission. Correcting this should be the role of managers, spouses, and friends; they should try to right our ships and put us back on course. But often, they, too, are silent; silence and continuance are easy and safe.

Post-secondary education may be the worst of the wanderers; it is the marriage where bills are paid, but fidelity, unity and love have been abandoned, leaving just the minimum of cohabitation.

Our education systems get too much respect and not enough introspection, the incentives are misaligned, there is too much focus on grades, and student’s complacency is purchased with inflated A’s.

What industry has customers who celebrate paying for a service they do not receive? Only education.

Universities and colleges have chosen to lose heart, push aside their consciences, and turn the light off on the truth that academic institutions do not exist to manufacture credentials and run classes. Those things should only be tools to facilitate learning, but they have become like robes and talismans to an uncommitted priest who foolishly puts what remains of his faith into his empty rituals.

Students, too, can fall into the same trap, going through the actions but neglecting the purpose, the heart of the exercise, that again, to learn.

Psychologist Daniel Pink famously notes that extrinsic motivation doesn’t work well except for tasks that don’t take much thinking. But does our education system not fixate on the extrinsic? Grades, GPAs and credentials are all extrinsic rewards.

The gold standard of motivation is intrinsic rewards, those ephemeral, internal forces that push people to work hard and engage. But they can not be taught, imposed, or created from the outside. A seed of this desire must exist; if not, such a person must reconsider their direction.

I tell my university students they may be in the wrong program if they get no pleasure or interest in their business courses.

But in Canada, we think everyone needs to go to university, stigmatize trades, and then wonder why our classrooms are filled with apathy and why trade jobs are going unfulfilled. And we wonder why our university grads are clueless.

But even if the student has those intrinsic seeds of motivation, they can’t thrive when the instructor is the lazy farmer, their classroom ground hard and rocky, full of weeds and thistle, a ground from which only the most vital seed could push shoots that break the ground.

But while the farmer’s ground and cultivation are plain to see, the professor’s is less apparent.

Mark Anthony, lamenting Caesar’s death, said,

“For I have neither wit, nor words, nor worth,

Action, nor utterance, nor the power of speech,

To stir men’s blood: I only speak right on;

I tell you that which you yourselves do know,¹”

He did not speak of what he could not do; he spoke plainly about how if blood is to be stirred, it needs to be stirred from within.

Why do we wonder when students see education as an extended obstacle course of tests, exams, projects and presentations? Indeed, when their professor drones on, reads the PowerPoints and seems no less eager than students to be done with the class, their message is clear: it’s either they hate every moment there or that they have discovered how easy it is to disengage and still collect a paycheck for what they call teaching.

Perhaps companies should hire those just good enough to be admitted to the university, test them for problem-solving and knowledge and let their new hires skip the extended academic obstacle course that post-secondary institutions have created to maximize their revenues and minimize their efforts.

Universities could be more selective in the intake and insist that lecturers, instructors, and professors create a fertile learning environment for those driven to learn. But while teachers famously fall under the “those who can’t do, teach,” administrators often fall under the “those who can’t do teach, and those who can’t teach administrate and hire other administrators.”

Post-secondary instructors' chairs, deans, and department heads are usually content to see academic gears turn so they might lounge comfortably, just listening to the academic factory hum along. For them, completing the process is the end, not learning; they run an assembly line when they should conduct an orchestra.

Bums in seats, classroom fill rate, and graduation rates are the metrics that get the bright lights. But the truth is found only in those tiny moments when worth breaks through; the tender care of soil beds allows those tiny mustard seeds of intrinsic motivation a chance to grow into real trees.

Sadly, sometimes, what matters most is the most difficult to measure. But indeed, when we recount our favourite class, it is usually associated with our favourite teacher, and that teacher was rarely a listless, uninspired presenter.