This is probably not the first time you’ve heard this claim, but let this be the time you really take it in: education is no longer for the purpose of growing one’s knowledge. Instead, it has become a commodity. It has become a tool for getting people where they want to get on the social ladder, without actually growing and learning the way that they could if they were to focus on what they were truly learning as a means of growing.

I love Duke, and I know that I have learned more than I can quantify since starting here, but I cannot say that I am naive to what a Duke education means. The Duke letterhead certainly holds a great deal of weight for graduate schools or higher level careers, but that weight is the cynic’s “price,” not a true value. This is not a Duke-specific problem, but rather a collective action problem for all of society. People no longer have the pistol of knowledge in their holster, and instead they focus on keeping a high GPA and doing the activities that will give them the most recognition. This is a problem within all educational institutions and corporate America. 

When applying to a job, employers look at your GPA and extracurriculars because we as a society have deemed these things to be representative of knowledge regardless of what someone with that resume actually know . Prior experience is of course valuable and needed in jobs and many jobs still do value your technical skills, but GPA remains an overly important metric to which we blindly ascribe significance. Over-emphasis on this number incentivizes people not to learn but instead to keep the number on their resume as high as possible. This has many implications, one of which being that people are not truly learning at the caliber that they need to out of the fear of failure. People are encouraged to take easier courses, to go the shorter route, and in the end get a higher number on their GPA. This is not to say that universities do not offer the more challenging courses and that many majors require them, but this is just to highlight that if given the choice many times the students will go the easier route. This also undermines the point and goal of a liberal arts education as many students will take the easier courses for required credits that lie outside of their major, to fulfill, say, a required ALP credit.

GPA was intended to be a good predictive metric for a student’s ability to perform in the classroom or the workplace—and it was also supposed to reflect a student’s level of engagement with their education. At one time, a high GPA from any college represented (at least better than it does now) a mastery of material in courses, and while I still agree that it does in part measure that, I think that it is flawed to rely on this number entirely. As courses are made easier to boost GPAs, and students avoid classes that are harder, what GPA represents becomes tainted. This of course does not apply to every discipline or class, and every student at Duke has taken challenging courses at some point, but when the choice presents itself, I feel a student would pick a less intensive course over one with more readings and more challenging assignments. 

Any education at Duke is widely considered a good one, but if students are only taking the easier courses, what are they actually gaining other than the letterhead? Even in what is considered an “easier” course, students should still be gaining something—right? Unfortunately, we all know that’s not how it works in practice. In many easier courses, students skip class readings or use AI to do their work for them, getting nothing from the course but the lecture itself (assuming that they are actually listening.) Many students probably cannot even name what happened at the lecture two days prior (I think we’ve all been there). This also includes using these AI tools too frequently, creating a class of students that are too reliant on a bot that can read a work for them, instead of doing so themselves. In this way the student may end the class without even possessing the skills that the course was meant to install within them.

Through course evaluations, students can also use their market power as consumers of higher education to shape the difficulty level of courses that are offered. Professors may be fearful to grade harshly or give harder material out of fear of a negative course evaluation and bad rating on Rate My Professors. If students have a difficult time in class/if the class is hard, they are more likely to rate it harshly and encourage other students to stay away from those courses in light of an “easy A.” In this way, the power lies with the students to control what a professor may say or do in some cases. 

But what students are missing from the classes they are choosing to skip—or make easier—is vital. Even if the content itself is not applicable, the skills that they would be gaining from the more challenging course is. The intense readings, difficult problems, and tight timelines help us the critical thinking skills and environment that would be needed to excel in an intense job.

So what does this all mean for us as college students? The reason we are here is to grow. We are meant to dig deeply into course materials to better understand so that we can be equipped to live full and interesting lives. Not equipped with a high GPA and a corporate position, but equipped to read between the lines. To look within ourselves for answers and understandings, to think deeply about ways that we can improve society. This can only be done in a society that puts less value on a number for GPA and focuses more on evaluating what students truly know and bring to the table. Education that is no longer a commodity.

by Dae Edge