Prof. Jim Lang’s essay On Not Drawing Conclusions About Online Teaching Now — or Next Fall raised some interesting considerations that have become especially salient in our COVID-19 world: the expectations of first-year students and what they think the college experience is and the value of online teaching as it relates to the college experience. Lang focuses on how the move to online learning in the fall 2020 semester, as a result of the pandemic, undermines those expectations for a traditional “college experience.” I believe his arguments are good ones, and I appreciate that he takes to task those who would say that online teaching is bad for the students based on how it was experienced during the spring 2020 semester.
I am left wondering how and by whom the “college experience” is defined and determined? (And why do we think it ought to be the same for everyone? Does it have to be? Is there a reason we need to strive so hard for sameness?)
Even though my own child has recently completed college (as a traditionally-aged, commuter student – we lived too close to campus to justify paying to live on campus), and I work in higher education in an office that engages with first-year students very directly, I still feel bewildered by how we define “the college experience.” I sense that there are different definitions for students, parents, and those of us who work in higher education – and those definitions change depending on the social and cultural capital one brings with them to this discussion.
I didn’t attend college until I was well into my 30s. My child was on the tailend of elementary school; I was running a licensed massage therapy clinic part-time; answering phones as a student worker part-time; and managing a full-time credit load. My expectations for my experience were quite simple: go to school, do a ton of cool reading, become a better writer, maybe make some friends (if there was anyone older to do that with), and get a degree so I was “more marketable” when I made the full switch from massage therapy to whatever else came up on my horizon.
As a first generation student, I had no familial expectations for attending college in the first place – so having any expectation about what that experience was supposed to look like could only be fed by outside sources. And, in some cases, the institution told me how I was supposed to feel (the “label” of being a first-generation student – a discussion for another time).
In all honesty, I didn’t harbor any specific expectations for the experience my child was supposed to have when she decided to attend college. But, I know so many other people do have a specific idea of what this looks like for their kids.
Where do we get these expectations from? From the experiences our parents or family had in college? From movies and TV? What part(s) of our society and culture determine what this experience is supposed to be? And, are those expectations universal?
Pivotal Passages 