Gary Gutting College

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The article “What Is College For?” by Gary Gutting claims that the major function of college is maybe higher learning is to increase academics, and to be able to get a valuable skill or a job in the real world. College is also there to increase “intellectual culture” (Gutting). This is his primary reason for why he thinks people should attend college, because college would give people a sense of culture. College does give you the skills in your desired field, but according to Gutting, the main reason for college is to give you some culture and tools to think for yourself. He states “There would be no need to support, a great expense, the highly specialized interest of, for example, physicists, philosophers, anthropologist, and art …show more content…
If going to college for the experience of making new ideas and broadening a person’s culture then have fun living in debt for the rest of a tough life, while working a minimum wage job. Colleges nowadays are a business with the sole purpose of making money and pumping out people into society with degrees. Many articles claim that colleges are now businesses and they use student loans to pay their bills according to US personal finance. (Kasperkevic) The tuition alone is outrageously expensive compared to the 1970s when people could work a part time job and pay for their college on their own. To verify this, ask anyone who went to college in the 70s or before. It has gotten so bad that even if a student takes out private student loans; if that student dies the paying of the loans falls to the family members. Filing for bankruptcy is not even an option to avoid paying private loans back. So, no matter what the colleges are going to get their money. So I think college should be taken with a practical approach. Gutting is not very practical when thinking about the future, because to him the experience of college and the opening of your mind is all that really matters. If having a practical approach of going to college to study a valuable major with a goal of getting a great job is not the reason to come to college, then perhaps the years spent can be better spent somewhere