College as a Civic Duty
The relentless story of the COVID-19 pandemic holds many insights into who we are. One in particular worries me deeply, for to me it reveals that we’ve ventured very far down the wrong path. That a global pandemic, having taken 750,000 lives in the U.S. and more than 5 million worldwide, has not only failed to alter our course but rather seems to have driven us further in the same destructive direction is terrifying. The path I’m referring to: We’ve abandoned our commitment to the common good.
Far too many Americans are prizing individual choice and personal “freedom” (at least when it comes to mask-wearing and vaccinations) over the good of their communities, their country, and the world. We have forgotten—or are choosing to ignore—that freedom comes with responsibility. It feels like forever ago that our country saw this virus as a common enemy we were united to conquer. The self-centered, divisive reaction to the pandemic flashes like a giant low-fuel indicator, warning that our supply of common good is dangerously depleted.
But there IS a common good, and we must defend its existence and restore its value. The common good isn’t a collection of benefits for individuals. It’s a commitment to community. It’s pay-it-forward acts of kindness that come from understanding that society depends upon our caring for one another. It’s pursuing a path not only for personal gain but also for the good it will do for people you’ll never meet—or for the planet. The common good is what leads some into lives of service and what should lead all of us now to reject the politics of fear and allow us to see others not as enemies or competitors but as fellow humans.
Higher education has borne the negative effects of this erosion of the common good, and it has contributed to it. To my mind, it also has the power to help restore this critical value in society. It’s a long play, but one to which colleges and universities must rededicate themselves.
It’s November, and the frenzied college admissions season is in full swing. Every day a news outlet (or something disguised as one) publishes another “Is college worth it?” piece, and the ridiculous yet hugely profitable college rankings see new imitators every year, each one more awful than the last. (To be blunt, U.S. News & World Report is the most culpable, and its negative impact on higher education is clear: The rankings mislead families and have distorted the college admissions process and the public’s perception of higher education more broadly, and they mostly penalize institutions for pursuing more equitable policies).
In all of this, over and over, considerations of the “value” of a college degree—as well as the case for free college—swirl around “ROI,” which is defined almost entirely by whether one can get a degree without drowning in debt, and then get a job that pays well. What’s sorely missing here, as with our COVID response, is the common good. We are preoccupied—obsessed, actually—with the individual result of a college education, and so narrowly defined at that, rather than focused on a greater sense of the purpose of higher education. We should be asking why, not what’s the ROI.
We used to know this, and we would do well to remember. In 1946, President Harry S. Truman established the first federal commission on higher education, and that commission recommended sweeping changes to, among other things, develop curriculum “attuned to the needs of a democracy,” to grow college attendance rapidly, to eliminate racial and religious discrimination, and to expand federal support for higher education through scholarships and general aid. Such efforts would “strengthen our Nation and enrich the lives of our citizens,” Truman said.
Two decades later, the Democratic Party platform of 1964—offered as “a covenant of unity,” no less—assigned enormous responsibility to education. “We believe that knowledge is essential to individual freedom and to the conduct of a free society. We believe that education is the surest and most profitable investment a nation can make.”
But today, we don’t read much about that important role, and the public perception of higher education is pretty dismal. Those of us who’ve spent careers in higher education—in leadership roles and in communications, in particular—bear some of the blame for that. To compete for students, to justify the high cost of college, to try to combat the rankings distortions, and more, we’ve focused marketing campaigns and a lot of storytelling on institutional distinctiveness, competitive positioning, and student outcomes. Those are important, no question, but those strategies have contributed to the prevailing notion that you go to college to get a job, get ahead, or both.
Public perception of higher education matters, as that perception influences public dollars—which, in turn, make a huge difference. A recent report by the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association showedclearly that state funding on institutions and students (in the form of financial aid) has direct impacts on student enrollment, retention, completion, and post-college success. The report examined student success in detail, also noting this:
“While individuals accrue significant benefits from earning higher education credentials (e.g., higher wages), evidence suggests that the public benefits accrued by society are greater than the private benefits enjoyed by individuals…. These public benefits, such as increased democratic engagement, reduced crime and health-care costs, lower poverty rates, and higher state tax revenues…are a primary reason states collectively allocated more than $100 billion for higher education in 2019…and have established goals to increase educational attainment rates.”
The good news is that we have a chance to re-focus on mission and global impact, because today’s students are demanding it. They are wary of institutions in general, and they view their associations with institutions and with brands as expressions of their individual identities. So, they want to know an institution’s mission and its values, and they expect to see that institution living up to its mission and demonstrating its values regularly. Higher education PR professionals should hear that as a call to action. Your communications strategy needs to start with purpose, and that purpose is at once specific to your institution and universal: It is the common good that higher education serves.
This purpose resonates profoundly and personally for me. Education—and a courageous Presbyterian missionary from Missouri—saved my grandfather, putting him on a path from his home in Japanese-occupied Korea in 1913, to a school in China and then to Park College (now Park University) outside of Kansas City. And his path, in turn, set a course not only for my family, but for an entire country. My grandfather, L. George Paik, returned home after completing graduate studies in the U.S., serving as a faculty member and a college president before taking on the role of Minister of Education for South Korea in 1950.
The country had been devastated by the war; as my cousin wrote in a poignant piece at the height of the pandemic last year, about 40 percent of school buildings had been destroyed, and schools across the country were closed. My grandfather ordered them to reopen, telling teachers to teach from life and teach outside, anywhere they could. By the spring of 1951, two-thirds of children were back to learning in class. Today, thanks to that war-time unified resilience and resolve and the decades of Korea’s dedication to education that followed, it’s hard to imagine Korea as anything but the powerhouse of innovation, technology, and culture that it is, nor as anything but a world leader in education.
Back in 1951, Paik had a vision for Korean education that spoke to what he saw as its purpose. “I don’t want students to memorize,” he said. “I want them to experience. I want them to develop self-judgment. I want to teach our students that isolation is not independence, that chauvinism is not patriotism.”
My hope—and my urging—is that higher education reassert its role and reclaim its identity as not just good, but necessary. Institutions can collaborate in demonstrating their collective public benefit; they can tell more stories of students’ sense of responsibility to use their education for good; and they can remind us all of the power of purpose that drives us, as President Lyndon B. Johnson did in signing the landmark Higher Education Act of 1965 in a ceremony at Southwest Texas State College, his alma mater. He said: “Here the seeds were planted from which grew my firm conviction that for the individual, education is the path to achievement and fulfillment; for the nation, it is a path to a society that is not only free but civilized; and for the world, it is the path to peace—for it is education that places reason over force.”
