An idyllic campus unfolds on the pages of the glossy Duke booklet my high school self is thumbing through. Pictures of beaming, diverse groups of students adorn the pages, interspersed with text: "innovation," "experience," "collaboration," "adventure," "opportunity" and other banal buzzwords of the university-industrial complex. I reach the back page and peruse a list of Duke's dizzying array of majors, minors and certificates. I circle more than a dozen that catch my eye.
Two years later, as the time comes to declare my major—yes, one major and no minors or certificates—I feel as though I am somehow not enough. Maybe I’m betraying the starry-eyed high school senior so eager to take full advantage of Duke’s curricular offerings.
Whenever introductions are made amongst Duke students, it's always the same spiel: name, year, hometown, major. "Hey, I'm Rohan, and I'm a junior from Long Island, New York. I'm doing ICS and Sociology with a certificate in Markets and Management Studies." Duke students are so used to doing these introductions that we develop a particular cadence to our listing of credentials. When it comes time for me to introduce myself, I don't have a similarly lengthy laundry list to share: "Hey, I'm Matthew, and I'm a sophomore Political Science major from Richmond, Virginia." I find myself wondering whether I should look into a second major or explore the myriad certificate options. But then I remember the approach I’ve chosen—specializing in just one major and selecting various classes that interest me from other disciplines—and reassure myself that this is what’s right for me. Still, I wonder why it’s such a lonely path.
The major-plus-all-these-other-bells-and-whistles phenomenon has reached epidemic proportions at Duke. It probably doesn't help that college admissions are more competitive than ever and that each of us had to proffer a ridiculously padded résumé to even stand a chance of admission to a place like Duke. This acquisitive mindset has a tendency to carry over into college where the pressures of the job market and student debt add to anxiety over the "value" of "investing" in higher education. It's only rational for students, here at Duke but also at other universities, to seek to maximize that value through as many majors, minors and certificates as they can cram into a four-year undergraduate education.
The desire to maximize, however, engenders a significant cost. Instead of satiating our intellectual curiosity or trying out a friend's all-star professor recommendation, we check requirements off a list. Along the way, we lose the real meaning of an education at a place like Duke. The drive to burnish the résumé with as many credentials as possible stands at odds with the true purposes of a college education: the expansion of the mind, the development of critical thought, the capacity to understand people who think differently and engage with their ideas.
The obsession with academic credentials is more than an unfortunate reality, the sort of lingering problem we wring our hands over and soon forget. It's a disease that saps the joy from learning. I'm diagnosing Duke with credentialitis.
I know some students are actually passionate about their multiple specialties and that the major-minor-certificate structure gives meaning to their education. Sometimes, two majors can dovetail nicely with each other. Other times, students will major in one field that they're interested in for their careers while also pursuing their passion for a purportedly less practical field.
But what strikes me most about credentialitis is the tremendous opportunity cost of pursuing academic cherries-on-top. Course selection is truly a zero-sum game: every course taken to fulfill a requirement means one fewer course you can freely choose. The four undergraduate years are likely the last time we will have a friendly expert to walk us through a scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II, ask us critical questions about the experimental design in a study of sea turtle conservation or challenge us to rank the principal drivers of conflict in Darfur.
Ten courses represent more than a year’s worth of time dedicated to a second major and five courses is a lot of academic freedom to give up for a certificate. Do you really need that extra Innovation and Entrepreneurship certificate? Did Steve Jobs have one of those?
No, you might be thinking, Steve Jobs was a college dropout. But before he left Reed College, he took a calligraphy class that he later credited with inspiring the elegance of the Macintosh operating system. For Jobs, the apparent frivolity of taking college classes that actually interested him ended up paying massive dividends. Every Apple customer reaps the benefits of his academic exploration. There’s unforeseen value in seeking out everything the university has to offer.
This unforeseen value carries an inherent risk: maybe that calligraphy class you took in college won’t actually connect to anything of practical significance in your professional career. For striving students who calculate the costs and benefits of every academic credential, that risk is deeply troubling, the payoff too distant and uncertain to be worth it.
Duke is a school of strivers. We work hard in our classes and dream no small dreams about the careers that beckon from beyond the borders of this gothic kingdom. In the striving for things to come, I can’t help feeling that we lose something in the here-and-now: the excitement of constructing arguments based on new evidence, the joyful struggle of writing code or composing music for the first time. Once we cure our collective case of credentialitis, maybe we’ll slow down from the hectic pace of academic life that leaves us all exhausted and delight in learning for its own sake. One can dream.
Matthew King is a Trinity sophomore. His column runs on alternate Mondays.
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