The Purposeful Graduate

Book excerpt: American higher education is more expensive than ever and the rewards seem to be diminishing daily. Sociologist Tim Clydesdale s new book, however, offers some rare good news: when colleges and universities meaningfully engage their organizational histories to launch sustained conversations with students about questions of purpose, the result is a rise in overall campus engagement and recalibration of post-college trajectories that set graduates on journeys of significance and impact. The book is based on a study of programs launched at 88 colleges and universities that invited students, faculty, staff, and administrators to incorporate questions of meaning and purpose into the undergraduate experience. The results were so positive that Clydesdale came away from the study arguing that every campus (religious or not) should engage students in a broad conversation about what it means to live an examined life. This conversation needs to be creative, intentional, systematic, and wide-ranging, he says, because for too long this core liberal educational task has been relegated to the margins, and its attendant religious or spiritual discourse banished from classrooms and quads, to the detriment of higher education s virtually universal mission: graduates marked by thoughtfulness, productivity, and engaged citizenship."