‘[A]n undergraduate education merits nothing less than a lifelong warranty.”

When I read this statement by Sanford Pinsker, an emeritus professor at Franklin & Marshall College (in Lancaster, Pennsylvania), my first reaction was outrage.

One of the greatest challenges we face as educators is working with students who think their success is someone else’s responsibility. “You didn’t tell us we had to …” (It was written in the instructions.) “I didn’t know we were supposed to …” (If you been in class the day I said it, you would have known.) “My mom told me I should …” (Excuse me, is your mom in our class?)

But I’m not writing to condemn Pinsker’s essay. I can’t possibly disagree with this:

At its best, a college education produces trained minds who know when somebody is speaking rot. Put another way, a liberally educated person understands that pursuing the truth, wherever it may lead, is a lifelong process. The result focuses on the two questions that matter above all others: Who Am I? and How Should a Good Person Live? The first speaks to the individual soul; the second to one’s responsibility to help make a better, more just world. All too often, parents think of college as an investment that will pay enormous dividends in their children’s future.

The problem with offering a warranty in the envelope with the bachelor’s degree (about which Pinsker is not really serious) is this: If you work hard at it, you can get pretty good grades for four years and not learn much of anything.

Before you succumb to outrage, let me explain. First, there are the kinds of “goofy” courses Pinsker criticizes in his essay — “courses so tied to vagaries of popular culture (Madonna, the Sopranos) that they surely won’t last and probably shouldn’t have been offered.” The students who seek out as many of these as possible are making their own bed, and they will lie in it. Second, there is a fair amount of cheating that goes on, although educators and administrators work hard to stop it and to instill a sense of honesty and integrity in the grade-obsessed students who are prone to cheat. And third, there are honest students who truly are so focused on meeting the requirements to get an A that they actually fail to absorb the material — because learning is not their goal; the grade is.

How Much They Have Learned (or Failed to Learn) 

The vast majority of our students who complete the bachelor’s degree really do know a lot more than they did at the start of the process. Some of what they have learned is how to live on their own, to meet deadlines, to balance workloads, to compromise, to negotiate with crazy roommates. These too are part of the undergraduate experience.

But some have done everything they could to cut corners, to make a passing grade with the minimum effort, to fill their schedule with courses that allowed them the maximum time for socializing. They have worked the system — sometimes with their parents’ encouragement and blessing — so that they qualify for the degree on paper, but not in their hearts and minds.

I wish parents would ask their kids “What did you learn today?” instead of “What mark did you get on that test?” I wish the students would ask each other: “Did you encounter any new ideas in that class?” or, “Did it make you think hard?” instead of, “Was it easy?”

If universities gave graduates a warranty with their degree, there could be no loopholes in the system — no cheating, no soft courses, no overworked or undertrained teachers. Pinsker is focused on courses in the liberal arts (not the sciences) when he suggests students should seek out “courses worthy of at least a ten-year warranty.” For him, the trash education results because the trash courses exist.

I disagree. It takes a concerted effort for a student to load up his or her schedule with trash courses. By talking with professors and other students, it’s usually possible to find out which courses are fluffy and not very challenging. Sure, you might choose badly a couple of times in four years. But for the most part — especially after your first semester — you should be able to find out which courses are worthwhile before you sign up.

If you avoid those courses and choose fluff instead, I don’t think that’s the fault of the university.

Journalism Education Could Pass Muster 

When I apply Pinsker’s “worthy of … a ten-year warranty” advice to journalism, I think a lot of our courses meet the test — and beyond. Ethics, for example. The examples are new, but the tenets are the same as they were in my journalism ethics course 20 years ago. The Reporting course also offers the same basic principles of truth, accuracy and the inverted pyramid. In journalism, we do have some core courses that could withstand even a lifelong warranty.

With the continuing changes in journalism practice and journalism businesses, though, we must continually experiment with new approaches and new subject matter. Having a 10-year warranty shouldn’t mean the student from 10 years ago is angry because many newsrooms have switched from, say, Quark to InDesign. The standards of broadsheet page design have changed as well. If the student completed a good print design course, however, he or she should have the mental tools to adapt, to change with the times.

In this field, imagining a 10-year warranty is almost frightening. No one knows what we’ll see in 10 years — the past 10 years have taught us that!

Yet as I try to prepare young journalists for exactly the world they will be entering — an unknown, a place where change must be expected — I try to teach them skills that will last a lifetime. These include the ability to evaluate, think for themselves, teach themselves to use new tools, ask questions, solve problems, be curious, find examples to learn from and build on, never be satisfied with shoddy results.

Above all, they need to take responsibility for their own work and their own career. A warranty? So they can come back later and complain it’s not working out? Huh-uh. No. That won’t make education better, and it certainly won’t produce graduates who can succeed in a world where they’ve got to keep on learning, forever.