What’s the Point of College?

In the following excerpt, Derek and David Deming examine the three eras of American undergraduate education.

Derek Thompson: A question that I have for you that’s going to basically animate this entire conversation is: What is college for these days? What is college for in an era of artificial intelligence, at a time when costs of college are rising, when some people feel like the benefits of college are declining, and when, as a matter of public survey opinion, college is less popular than it’s been in basically any period of recorded history? What is college for these days?

And one way into answering that really big, broad question is history—that the role of college is not in 2026 what it was in 1926, much less in 1826. And in a recent essay, you talked about what you call the three eras of undergraduate education in American history. I want to walk through each of those three areas and start off this conversation with a little bit of a history story. What was the first era of college? When did it start? Why did it end?

David Deming: Yeah, so thanks for teeing me up, Derek. At least at Harvard, this is the subject of a recent convocation speech I gave. The first era of undergraduate education began in 1636, when the university was founded. And the founding gift of Harvard was a gift by John Harvard of 400 books to the Harvard Library. Now, 400 books doesn’t sound like a lot, but it was actually about two-thirds the size of Emmanuel College at Cambridge, which was John Harvard’s alma mater. So that was a founding gift that was roughly two-thirds the size of an established, elite British university. So overnight, Harvard became a repository of knowledge that was scarce. And a lot of our founding story was built around providing access to people to knowledge that was scarce. The first printing press in the American colonies was housed by President Henry Dunster’s house in Harvard Yard. And for a long time, it was the only printing press in the American colonies. 

Another interesting fact is that when our library caught fire in the 1700s, the Harvard Corporation, which is the governing body of the university, sent students home and said, “Go study in your local communities.” And that was because without access to these books, there was no reason to be on campus. So at the beginning of this university, and many other universities, access to knowledge that you can’t find anywhere else was the founding purpose of the university. But that didn’t last forever. As early as the late 19th century, early 20th century, access to knowledge proliferated. So our library was no longer the only library, our printing press was no longer the only printing press, and knowledge proliferated, and the world became more complex. So the great presidents of Harvard and other universities—in our case it was President Eliot, President Lowell—recognized this and said, “Actually, we’re going to open up the curriculum. We’re going to create more electives. People can study. People can specialize.”

And the second age, I think, became the era of expertise. And that’s really the modern university, Derek, as we understand it, which is a flourishing of disciplines—studying philosophy, history, English, economics, biology—and developing deep expertise in those different areas, bringing in faculty who are the world’s leading experts in a narrow domain to teach students and curate their access to expertise and curate their learning journey. So that’s where we are right now, which is, we are, I believe, at close to the end of that second era.

Thompson: There’s two themes that I’m picking up from this story of the first and second era of undergraduate education in American history. The first theme is about the transition from, let’s call it, scarcity to abundance of information—that information and the ability to transmit information used to be scarce, and then it became abundant. So the value of undergraduate education had to move from information to something else. And you’re saying it moved toward expertise, the ability of individuals to go deep on a single subject and to transmit that deep, deep knowledge to other people.

I remember a couple of years ago, I did a lot of reporting on this idea of the end of the Renaissance man, that the students of the 17th and 18th century, they learned a little bit of physics, they learned a little bit of biology, they learned a little bit of literature, and they were incredibly well-rounded without necessarily being deep experts in anything because the Scientific Revolution was so young that it was difficult to be a deep expert in anything. Is there a way that you think the age of experts, while it clearly led to many of the wonderful things about the world today, is there a way that it was also a step back, that something was lost in the fact that people became more narrowly focused in their education rather than more broadly well-rounded and you saw, therefore, the death of the Renaissance man?

Deming: Yeah, I agree with that diagnosis. And the way I would say it is that it was a step forward for scientific research, for research in general, to develop deep expertise and then apply it to different domains in a complex society that requires that. The fact that we don’t just have family doctors anymore: We have radiologists and cardiologists and oncologists, and then if you live in Boston, you’ve got interventional cardiologists and lots of different types. So the proliferation of expertise and the narrowing in is actually the key to a lot of human progress. So that’s a very good thing, but I think it had a trade-off. It had a downside, which is that it fragmented us. So the more specialized you are as an academic, the less you really understand the intellectual life and the culture of other disciplines. So if you look at the way undergraduate education worked, and still does to some extent, there is a general curriculum.

In the early days of Harvard, everybody studied the same thing. It was a narrow classical curriculum, as you mentioned. So that’s enabled Renaissance men or Renaissance women because you could be broad. So then instead you come to a place like this or any other university, and you hone in on something, and you become an expert. That’s great for society. It’s great for producing great research, but it also pushes us away from each other. So I think it pushes against some of our communal instincts and pushes against, in some ways, the idea of a university. So what I think we’re seeing is as that expertise—again, expertise is important; it’s very important. The question is whether the university is the only place you can get it. And I think that used to be much more true. So now the question is: What is the value of a university in a world where you have other ways to get access to expertise besides this education?

Thompson: So era one is the era of the library, the era of scarce information. Era two is the era of the faculty lounge, the era of expertise. What is era three?

Deming: Well, I don’t know. We’re building it as we speak, but what I think it is, I think it is, in some ways, a return to the founding purpose of a college or a collegium, which is the medieval college, which is a learning community of scholars, of students, people learning together, learning the kinds of things and building the kinds of skills and habits of mind and virtues that can really only be built in community. So there’s an academic side to it; there’s also a social side to it. But the question is, if you want to learn how to work well in a team or how to be a leader or how to be led, how to give and receive criticism, those are things that you really can’t learn from behind a computer screen, can’t learn on your own.

Also with virtues. You cannot learn virtues like integrity or honesty unless those are tested in community with other people. In some sense, whether they’re costly to you. You have to behave with integrity even if it’s personally costly. You can’t learn about justice or fairness unless you have to adjudicate competing legitimate claims to resources within a community. I think what this means is that this is a thing that we can still do uniquely, which is we have, in the case of Harvard, some of the most talented young people in the world coming here for four important years in their lives to learn together and to learn from experts, from faculty, so that won’t change. But I think we need to double down, reemphasize the communal aspects of learning to build skills and habits of mind and virtues that, again, we can’t get from behind a computer.

This excerpt has been edited and condensed.

Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: David Deming
Producer: Devon Baroldi
Additional Production Support: Ben Glicksman