During my handful of years as a college instructor, I repeatedly heard a phrase that drove me up the wall: “The student is the customer.”
You, a student forced to spend more than ever on a college degree, might be attracted to this idea. And on a purely transactional level, I understand you are technically exchanging money for services.
But this consumerist ideology frames you as a passive recipient of a product called “education,” and if you go in there thinking you’re dropping $50,000 and four years in exchange for a job, I guarantee that you will miss out on the whole point of the thing. Which is to earnestly engage in the incredible, fascinating, routinely humiliating, completely fraught, and ultimately liberating process of learning.
To that end, here are some words of advice…
