Ned Scott Laff and Scott Carlson’s newish book Hacking College reminded me of a conversation I had with The Girl when she was trying to decide where to go to college.
She was looking at a range of places throughout the Northeast, each with its own charms and flaws. I tried to strike the right balance between helping her avoid obvious mistakes and giving her room to make her own decision. Late in the process, when it came down to a couple of final choices—both terrific places—I offered a point about geography. Early-career breaks are largely accidental; you’re likelier to be accident-prone if you’re where the action is. An otherwise-wonderful school in the middle of nowhere won’t have the same sorts of accidental opportunities as one in or near a major city. (Having attended college in the middle of nowhere, I had some credibility on this point.)
That turned out to be true. She wouldn’t have been able to pick up the academic-year internship she did if she weren’t within commuting distance of Washington, D.C. And she’s picking up perspectives and connections in that internship that would not have happened in any class or seminar.
Hacking College is, in its way, an argument for encouraging happy accidents. Laff and Carlson take it as given that the assumed correlation between majors and careers is vastly overstated. (That’s somewhat less true at community and technical colleges. Majors like nursing, welding and dental hygiene are tightly coupled to obvious careers. But even here, we produce far more psychology majors than the market for psychologists would suggest.)
They note, too, that students’ interests—what they call “hidden intellectualism”—don’t always align with majors as they exist. Academic advising at many campuses amounts to a sort of compliance exercise, ensuring that students stay on track with course requirements to finish the degree on time. That’s important, but it presumes that the degree in which they’re enrolled is the right one for them. The process of selecting a major in the first place is often relatively shallow.
The guided pathways movement has taken the question of selecting a major seriously, proposing meta-majors for entering students to get a taste of various disciplines early on so they can choose the right path. Even if those courses are done well, though—and that’s not universal—the idea is then to put students on a prescribed pathway towards a clear goal. (Someday, somewhere, I’ll get the chance to teach my dream course: Money, Sex and Power: An Introduction to the Social Sciences. If you can’t find anything interesting among those three topics, I really don’t know what to tell you.)
Laff and Carlson note that students often have a sense of a “wicked problem” that they’d like to solve, but that wicked problems tend to lend themselves to interdisciplinary solutions rather than siloed ones.
The authors instead offer a more institutionally porous vision of college, in which students who have identified a wicked problem they’d like to work on apply a “research investigative inquiry” approach with heavy fieldwork and informational interviews to a “field of study” in which students can discover their “vocational purpose.” The short version of that involves students interviewing people who have the jobs they want and finding out how they got there and what’s missing in the field. Then the students return to campus, aligning their electives and majors to get them where they want to go. That may or may not lead to a path resembling the default major into which an adviser would have steered them.
The instructor in me liked this approach quite a bit; any experienced teacher knows that students who know why they’re there will perform better than students who were put there by default. The administrator in me was a bit more skeptical. Yes, steering students to the Career Services office early in their enrollment is an excellent idea, and I’m all for informational interviews and exposure to the world of work.
But the kinds of deep conversations and burning passions that Laff and Carlson assume are hard to scale. That’s particularly true when advising offices are understaffed and colleges are judged on graduation rates for prescribed programs. The tyranny of silos is that much worse when students transfer between colleges, as so many do. Courses and experiences that don’t fit into neatly defined boxes on checklists are either ignored or relegated to “free elective” status, which is where credits go to die. Intro to Psychology transfers cleanly; Intro to Social Science almost certainly wouldn’t.
As important as scale is, though, it’s helpful to keep in mind the point of the enterprise. We want students to become better able to make their way in the world, to contribute in ways that their tastes and talents allow. Disciplinary silos, guided pathways and fields of study are all tools to get there.
The challenge Laff and Carlson lay out is a worthy one. How do we balance the needs of scale and efficiency with the obvious benefits of happy accidents? Systematizing serendipity may sound like an oxymoron, but we know that serendipity is likelier in some settings than others. Figuring out how to scale those settings is a challenge, but it’s a challenge our students deserve us to take on. Nicely done.
