The Purposes of Going to College Essay

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Kwame Anthony Appiah discusses the question, “What is the point of college?” in his New York Times article of 8 September 2015. The author identifies two purposes of college, which he reduces to two descriptors: utilitarian and utopian. In other words, college has a utilitarian reason for being and a utopian reason for being. One can pursue either of these two ends by going to college—and because of that, the two purposes of college are said to be both utilitarian and utopian.

What Appiah means by this is that one point of college is to learn ideals and values that can be used to help move society and civilization onto a more righteous path, where principles and philosophies empower people to become the best that they can be. This is the utopian aspect of one point of college. The other is utilitarian: one goes to college to learn real-life applications that can be implemented in the real world to achieve specific aims, such as earning a living. The utilitarian point of college is for the individual student to obtain value for his or her time spent there: what the student puts in should return exponentially—like a return on investment. The student should receive or learn some skill that can benefit the student in terms of increasing his or her standard of living.

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This is the value utility. The utopian point of college is that the students learns values: for the time invested, a knowledge or understanding of self and society is obtained that helps guide the individual in terms of making good or right decisions about the future. The two are not necessarily mutually exclusive or necessarily complementary: they may be pursued individually or simultaneously or exclusively: it is all up to the student and what he or she wishes to achieve, according to the author. Often there is a tension between the two—between the utopian point and the utilitarian point—but there need not be, as Appiah asserts.

I agree with both purposes and see them as mutually reinforcing. A utopian world cannot be achieved without utility and effective use of utility requires values and principles for guidance. In other words, to implement ideals and principles and values in reality, one must adopt a skilled use of one’s utility; one must be willing and able to develop a skill that can be beneficial to society. At the same….....

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