Analysis Of The College Crossroads

This fall, over 17 million undergraduates will be attending college in the United States. Their goals as students are to become ready and qualified for the real world. (18) It is difficult to describe how this should happen, because the concern of higher education remains ambiguous. Philosophy Professor Kwame Antony Appiah retells his first lecture and expresses his questioning he had after the experience. In his article, The College Crossroads, he addresses that issue and provides two differing terms to express modern education. Labelled Utility U and Utopia U, Kwame’s article contrasts both teaching methods with the motive to describe the purpose of college and its inconsistency. With Utility U, the focus is on value of the education system per dollar. Kwame expresses the purpose is to determine how much human capital can be created from the student consumers. Utility U’s approach is to cut costs to better the “value proposition” within the school. (20) They want to squeeze, as much return as …show more content…
Utility U is more economic based while Utopian U takes more of a morale stance. Both provide an education environment for students to work out the answers they have before the start of their free lives. This can be further expressed in Kwame’s article, “Mr. Chip’s encouraging smile has pedagogical value, but so, perhaps, does Professor Kingsfield’s basilisk stare.” (20) The quote can be interpreted as representation of both educational fields. Mr. Chip’s smile is in reference to the Utility belief that if the consumer is happy, then the school’s service leads to a good review. In contrast, Professor Kingsfield’s basilisk stare may not be as encouraging as Chip’s smile, but that teacher is more likely to invoke critical thinking into the student through his credentials. He does this through his freedom of intellectual teaching that gives him the right to pursue other endeavors by scientific projects without restrictions.