The Adventures of John P. Student
An extremely fictional story
It was a sunny September day at State University, where eighteen-year-old John P. Student was beginning his first day as an English major. John was so excited! He had been reading op-eds in national newspapers about what his humanities education would consist of: genuine intellectual community, deep and probing conversations about big questions, a deep immersion in the best that has been thought or said. He could become an excellent writer. He would work hard on interesting, meaningful assignments, which he would then turn in to professors, who would read his papers with sympathetic absorption, providing abundant, thoughtful feedback that would help John grow, not just as a writer and a thinker, but as a human being. John was so excited that he didn’t mind, really, that he would be about $25,000 in debt by the end of his four-year degree. There’s more to life than money, and John didn’t want to be a narrow bean-counter who only views education as a means to a paycheck.
And so, on Thursday morning, John headed out to his first class. It was an English class—a first-year writing course. He was frustrated that he had to buy a $100 e-book full of features that his professor would never use, as well as a subscription to an overly-complicated piece of writing software. And he was frustrated, too, when the online learning management system didn’t work. He was surprised, too, to see that his professor was not a professor at all but a twenty-five-year-old graduate student who shuffled around wearing leather flip-flops, tube socks that rose almost to his kneecaps, bright red mesh basketball shorts, and, incongruously, an untucked and baggy button-down dress shirt. (John’s instructor would later note, in a sarcastic and resentful tone, that he did not have enough money to purchase business-casual clothes because he made just $25,000 per year.)
Still, John’s expectant smile stayed on his face as the instructor discussed a litany of intricate course policies. The 25-page syllabus for the class, in fact, was about five pages of actual content surrounded by twenty pages of complex bureaucratic boilerplate. John’s heart started to sink when he realized that most of these policies were essentially designed to force reluctant students to participate in a class in which they were assumed to have no interest. (A quick glance at his fellow students, half of whom were watching TikTok clips as the instructor droned on, confirmed that this was probably necessary.) And, at the end of the class, the instructor more or less told the students that, as long as they turned in every assignment, they would receive an A in the course. (As he found out over the next few weeks, many college professors handed As out like candy.)
But no matter! Every college education has one dud class in it. Next, John headed to his Literary Theory class. His professor, a wild-haired man of perhaps seventy years old, was ten minutes late and burst into the classroom, sweating and ranting already about how hard it was to find parking. The students, who had been sitting in silence, looked up from their phones. The professor was wearing diaphanous pajama pants and was clearly going commando, a fact that the students immediately communicated to one another through a series of silent glances and eyebrow raises. The professor launched into a long and meandering monologue that started with a brief discussion of the structure of the class, morphed into complaints about the professor’s workload, then wandered into a ten-minute-long story about the time that he dodged the draft in ’71, which turned into a passionate argument that COVID-era mask mandates were a plot by the government, which provided the foundation for the professor to provide an acrimonious description of his recent bitter divorce. But through his entire monologue, all of the students’ eyes were on his tissue-paper-thin pajama pants, and it was the only thing that any of the students could talk about when class was finally dismissed, ten minutes after it was supposed to be.
John then headed for the last class of the day, a course in American poetry. His heart swelled when he saw that the professor for this class, Dr. Bookworm, was there early. She was dressed professionally and had a confident, knowledgable air about her. Her class was thoughtfully constructed and genuinely challenging. John stayed behind after class to talk with Dr. Bookworm and noted that six or seven other students did, too. They could all tell that Bookworm was the real deal, and by now they all knew that the real deal was not exactly everywhere on this campus. But, as John got to talking with her, he realized that she was overworked and overwhelmed; as she was one of the only competent professors in her department, every student wanted to work with her, and furthermore, she was asked to be on every committee, task force, and interdisciplinary project. From far away, her upright posture and sharp dress made her look formidable, but when you got close, you could see that her eyes were always red-rimmed.
John didn’t know anyone at State U, so he had a solitary lunch of three tiny, greasy chicken fingers with an insultingly small portion of crinkle-cut fries and a plastic tub of barbecue sauce, sold for just $171 at the Student Union. As he sat alone, pondering his day, he pulled out his phone and texted his cousin, Susie Nursing. Susie was just starting her nursing degree at a local for-profit college.
John: Crazy first day at the university. How’s the first day at nursing school?
Susie: Eh. Kind of sucks. The buildings here are all super ugly. But the professors seem nice enough. I hate that I have to go into student debt to pay for my education, but the average wage for a graduate is around $70k and it just goes up from there. So it’ll be worth it.
John found Susie’s attitude depressing. He wasn’t just going to college to learn how to make money! He was going to college to have a real intellectual experience.
John: That’s great! I’m glad for you.
Susie: How about you?
John paused, wiping his chicken-grease fingers on the flimsy single-ply paper napkin.
John: I’m mostly excited about the student clubs.
Reader, I will not bore you with an account of John’s attempting to join a student club using the ancient and overcomplicated website that the University required all clubs to use. (Most of the clubs listed on the website, as it turned out, were defunct.) I will just fast-forward to the end of the semester.
It had been a long, long semester. John did not know that writing assignments could be so meaningless: discussion board posts (and vacuous replies), “argumentative papers,” “reflection essays,” reading logs, annotated bibliographies, and “metacognitive journaling.” In fact, in the reading log for his writing class, he wrote, “I don’t think you’re actually reading these journals at all. If you are reading this journal, please write a comment or something so that I know I’m not just writing for no-one.” He received an A on the reading log, along with the following feedback: “Great job! You raise some really interesting points.”And so how could he not generate a few of his reading logs and discussion board posts with Claude? His peers were all clearly doing it, and anyway, writing all of this nonsense made his brain feel like it was liquefying.
The Literary Theory class was better, but not by much. The professor certainly knew his subject, but he failed to effectively use PowerPoint every single day. The classroom’s digital projector was his sworn enemy, and it resisted him like a desperate bronco. (John did the math to discover that he had paid about $3.63 in tuition every class day—around $162 over the span of the semester—to watch his professor fumble with PowerPoint.) The professor also had a profound enmity with Zoom, the learning management system, email, and a number of other technologies that had been in prominent use for at least five years.
Dr. Bookworm was a great teacher and clearly brilliant. She was also a relentless critic of the poetry they read, a surgically precise reader who delighted in “splitting the lark,” as she called it. A series of poets who John had loved—Ginsberg and Whitman in particular—were dissected by her merciless scalpel. Each class made John feel a bit queasy, as if he had been some sort of dupe, a contemptible moron, to love these poets in the first place. He began to feel that analyzing poetry took all the fun out of reading it, even if he did find himself becoming a sharper and more capable reader in Bookworm’s class. Alone in his dorm room, he took to binging old episodes of The Drew Carey Show on YouTube instead of reading for fun.
Now it was a cold and gray December, and the deadline to sign up for the next semester’s classes loomed. But John hadn’t yet signed up for any. Some of the titles looked kind of interesting, but John just wasn’t sure that another semester was worth the money. He had come to State U expecting genuine intellectual community, deep and probing conversations about big questions, and opportunities to become a great writer. But he still didn’t have any close friends; classroom discussions were halting and awkward, especially because John seemed to be the only one interested in participating; and the feedback he had received on his writing was cursory and dismissive, despite John’s consistent A’s. He felt lonely and ignored, a meaningless cog in a vast bureaucratic machinery that chugged along entirely regardless of him.
He decided to go his Literary Theory professor’s office hours. The professor was nice enough, even if he was scatterbrained. He had recently published an impassioned essay in a popular magazine, The Gist, arguing that a humanities education was more vital now than ever, and that universities like State U must increase funding for humanities programs in the age of AI.
John sat down, noting the stacks of paper, the dried coffee stains on the desk, the pockmarked sofa.
“Professor, I’m thinking about dropping out. It’s not that the curriculum is too hard—actually, I feel like it’s too easy. But most of all, I just don’t really feel like I’m learning very much. The whole college experience seems just sort of… ramshackle.”
Dr. Literary Theory shook his head vigorously. “No, no,” he said. “You can’t drop out. A college education in the humanities is more important now than ever.”
“But why?”
“Well, first of all, a humanities education offers you the ability to read the Great Books and grapple with big, philosophical questions.”
“But couldn’t I just read those books without paying all of this tuition?”
“You could, but you need the guidance of a professor. Otherwise, you’ll become an autodidact, an undisciplined mind.”
“I could take online courses through Great Courses or MOOCs or YouTube. There are tons of great podcasts and Substacks and magazines and books that could guide me through the whole process.”
“Two objections. First, being in college gives you the time and space to pursue your studies. If you leave college, you’ll need to work to support yourself, and you won’t be able to spend so much time per week seriously engaged in intellectual pursuits.” (John thought, ruefully, of the hours he spent navigating outdated websites, attending required meetings and workshops, doing mindless and meaningless busywork for his classes, working his part-time job at the campus Subway, and participating in the other vagaries of campus life.) “Second,” the professor continued, “Great Courses professors won’t give you feedback on your papers. You won’t improve as a writer.”
“But I could just start posting and participating in online communities, where I’ll get feedback that will help me improve as a writer. Or I could join a local writing group. For free. By the way, when will you give me feedback on my last paper?”
“I’ll get it to you a month or two after the semester’s over. Anyway, yes, you could just write online and engage with others, but people online don’t really know you. They don’t care about you. It’s not a real community.”
“Do you know my name?”
The professor paused, a look of mortification stamped upon his features. “Wilson?”
“Student. John P. Student.”
“Right. Sorry, Wilson. I have a lot of students. Anyway, look. Without a college education, you won’t be able to get a good job. Nobody’s going to respect you. And anyway, you can’t drop out. The Department’s enrollments look terrible, and the University administration is thinking about cutting our hiring even more. If more students drop out, the humanities will be in real trouble.”
On the way back to his dorm, John thought about whether he should stay in college or not. He could drop out, but what then? What job could he realistically get with no degree at all? An English degree wasn’t the most employable, but it also wasn’t the least employable. He could get an entry-level white-collar job, probably, or go to law school, and if he dropped out, he couldn’t do any of that stuff. Realistically, he could maybe work at Panda Express or Starbucks or something, and eventually become a manager. But maybe not: maybe he’d stay barista forever.
John went on Google and looked at the lifetime earnings data. He found that college students tend to earn $900,000 more over their lifetime than high school graduates. $900,000 was a lot more than $25,000. So John went over to the MyStateU website, logged in a few times, and signed up for another semester of classes. Maybe this time he’d find another Bookworm. His phone buzzed. It was his cousin, Susie Nursing.
Susie: Crazy last day of the semester at nursing school. How’s University, Mr. Brainiac?
John: Eh. Kind of sucks. The buildings here are kind of ugly, and the other students are kind of checked out, and so are the professors, it feels like. I hate that I have to go into debt since it doesn’t really feel like I’m getting an education. But the lifetime earnings for a graduate are like $900k higher. So it’ll be worth it in the end.
The next year, by a strange coincidence, on the very day that John finally changed his major to business, his Literary Theory professor published a new essay in the Higher Ed Courier: “How University Administrators Are Conspiring with Tech Companies to Destroy the Humanities.” Nothing that he said in the essay was, strictly speaking, wrong.
But, of course, he couldn’t pay the cashier with cash. As a first-year student, John had been told that he needed to pay for everything with StateBux, which were loaded onto his MyStateUCard. Getting StateBux was easy. First, you had to log in to your MyStateU account, pushing your way through the college’s new six-factor authentication protocol. Then, you scrolled down for a bit and clicked on “State Bux,” which would redirect you to the MyStateUCard website, where you had to sign in again and go through the six-factor authentication one more time. Once you got into that system, which was clearly designed and built in the late nineties, you simply verified your Student Identification Number, entered your routing and account numbers, deposited cash (minimum $50), and then printed (at your own cost—10 cents a page, which could only be paid using StateBux) and signed a waiver and Permission Form allowing the college to deposit the funds on your behalf. After that, it was as easy as faxing in the signed waiver and Permission Form and waiting 4-6 business days. Easy peasy!
While I enjoyed reading this, it doesn't really match up with my experience in undergrad humanities. I attended a state school, and I really liked my classes! I learned a lot from listening to my professors lecture, and I still remember some of the specific things they said, after all these years (less so from listening to my classmates during seminar, but pedagogically speaking those are more about stepping into the process). My professors gave specific and helpful comments on my writing, both critique and encouragement. Some classes were better than others, and I have critiques about the program as a whole, but I value the experience.
Of course, it's been fifteen years since I was in an undergrad literature course. Things may have changed, and parts of this story did resonate. I did have to partake in some bad Blackboard comment assignments (in my education classes, mostly, and some basic-requirement-fulfilling science courses, but not in literature). And that aside about the campus-specific currency brought back some bad memories which I had buried pretty deeply.
I also wonder about the efficacy of John P Student's autodidact plan. Will participating in online communities give him actionable feedback on his writing? Sort of. He'll get metrics, and those tell you something. He'll get positive feedback, and some high-level negative (mostly from people trying to go viral by dunking on him), but will anyone enter his writing at the line level and try to help him improve it? I don't think so. That would be weird and probably unwelcome! Yes, I do recognize the irony of what I'm doing here. But there's no way around it.
This essay is meant to be read as an indictment of the modern university system, but the truth is that it's a critique of our economic system, and a misguided one at that. John P., here, (and the author of this essay) seems to want to have two things: (1) a tailored, bespoke educational experience of the kind available to European and American aristocracy of the 18th and 19th centuries, and (2) have it be free/cheap, to suffer no financial costs, and to get a nice job at the back end of it.
You really can't have it both ways. For one thing, the American job market usually demands that students have ready skills (or at least signal intelligence and problem solving). When times are riding high (as they were in 2021-2022 during the boom of Covid hiring), companies are willing to train (my brother-in-law got a job in a programmer training company at Capital One -- his starting salary was $90,000 per year, at age 22). When the job market is tighter, recent grads without skills to hit the ground running (i.e. humanities majors) are not going to be snatched up.
For another thing, universities are expensive to run. If you want universities to be less expensive, you have to be willing to make the cuts in payroll, the most expensive contributor to cost of any university. I have not heard anyone make the calls to cut professor pay -- that would do a long way in reducing tuition costs.
Nearly two-thirds of Americans go to college. You cannot send over half of American 18-year-olds to college and expect it to be cheap. If John P. really wanted a scintillating education, maybe his parents should have saved up to send him to a better school, or better yet, hire him a private tutor. That was the preferred educational mode of the European aristocracy whose lifestyle John P. somehow feels entitled to.