Column: Incentivized ed

Are you pre-med? Well, if you are, you're not alone. Nearly 400 other students in your class are also aspiring towards the Hippocratic oath.

I make an example of pre-med students to demonstrate a point about academic life at Duke. Students always seem to have an outside incentive for doing something, whether it be taking a class, getting a summer internship or even choosing one's extracurricular activities. The greatest incentive of all is the big paycheck waiting at the end of the tunnel, just beyond the Duke degree. In general, pre-med students are no different--just like the multitudes of students who think that law and business are the only other viable career options.

College is the place where students should be debating life's greatest questions. We have all been given a tremendous opportunity to study at one of the finest institutions in the nation, yet Duke students continually hesitate to engage the material they learn beyond the graded confines of the classroom.

Undoubtedly, many of these incentives are necessary: People need to pay bills. The powerful American middle-class ethic has a firm grounding on this campus. For very wealthy students, it is an ethic of self-preservation and status; for the not-so-wealthy students, it is one of intense desire to have things they did not growing up. These are both completely understandable and viable motivations.

I believe cautiously in capitalism insofar as it can efficiently provide goods and services to the people that desire them most. However, I do question what capitalism's incentivized ethic has done to students. Arguably throwing away centuries of tried and true economic theory, I think that Duke students are cheating themselves by modeling their educations after some predefined destiny that is supposedly in their self-interest. Duke obviously has an interest in the perpetuation of this set-up, as the next graduating class will be the next generation of wealthy alumni. Why else would orientation make it seem as if the only worthy career goals for Duke students are medicine, law and business?

Our incentivized education permeates undergraduate life at Duke, focusing students on grades, highest starting salaries and future comforts rather than wrestling with the difficult concepts and issues that arise in class, the same ones that will stay with us throughout life after Duke. It is no wonder that something like one in six Duke undergraduates is an economics major. However, the job market for products and services should not be the sole determinant of our educations. We should not let the value that the market sets on majors and careers be the sole influence of our decision-making on what majors and careers are valuable. Surely the study of philosophy or literature is just as worthy as a double major in electrical engineering and computer science. But for a substantial number of students reading this sentence, the previous statement is laughable. What does this conscious reliance on the market to define what is valuable say about the state of our society today?

Theologian Paul Tillich wrote a book entitled "The Courage To Be," in which he advocates that we must develop the courage to choose ethical principle over our own comfort, "affirming our own being in spite of those elements of our existence which conflict with our essential self-affirmation." A vast majority of the college experience consists of choosing if we want to follow our principles and passions or if we want to take the "easy" way out, the way that may be highly profitable in the short term but likely to leave us unfulfilled in the grand scheme of life.

For the most part, college students feel the need to live lives of comfort because it is easier. We can put off engaging, difficult conversations with our peers and trade them for a monotonous diet of sex and booze. It's so much easier to drown our problems in euphoria than actually spend time contemplating the deepest problems our world faces, perhaps even risking our own mental well-being. Yet all the while, we avoid facing these struggles that should truly define a college education. We put off finding what truly motivates us to get out of bed each morning, always sacrificing that ideal to make someone else happy.