Elitism in Academia: Why teachers sold us the university lie?

“What are you going to do next?”

My father told me, during this terrifying and sobering time of my life: ‘University used to be the privilege of a double minority – kids with money spilling from their nostrils and kids who lived like church mice. Those with nothing were either Einstein reincarnate, or worked until their fingers bled. Those with money, well, some of them were dull as dishwater. In ways it was unfair, but even I entered the system, and you wouldn’t have seen real African giraffes without it.’

It was ultimately a flawed system, but, like everything, it had its grey areas. Regardless, it reserved higher education for the select few.

Nowadays everyone gets a pat on the head and a welcome pack for joining the higher education party. It seems a strange phenomenon has occurred, in which universities are ‘advertised’ by teachers as the elitist choice. Yet so many universities are now in existence that this elite air is earning the feel of smoke and mirrors. All students buy into this advertisement and want their share of ‘elite’ life, because presently, thanks to equal opportunities, we all have a right to it, but it’s a life that, in this age, often falls flat.

At my own school, the notion that university was every student’s pinnacle of life was enforced ferociously. By the final year, focus on academic ladder-climbing had reached such a stifling peak that an hour was weekly set aside for UCAS applications, giving students plenty of opportunity to play a dozen games of Tetris, instead of researching university courses, when teachers were not looking. Those who were not applying were simply asked not to turn up. So much for inclusive learning.

In and of itself, the elitism associated with attending university – period – causes a string of societal issues. Universities ought to be available to all, but it should be a well-informed decision made by an applicant who sees a university course as the best path to lead them to the career of their dreams; in many cases this is not what happens. Every once in a while I find a Facebook status like this:

Really? Surely you have some kind of inkling? No, no, I went to university to chew the library books.

As a student of literature, my views may seem very much like the pot calling the kettle black, but at university I do suffer prejudice for my choice of degree, usually at the hands of scientists, adamant I should not be there wasting time and money when I ought to be working my way up the ladder the normal way. The problem with that, I explain with an unaffected smile, is I know exactly what career I want – I will be neck-deep in the publishing industry by the time I’m thirty, and for that, you idiot, don’t you know I need contacts? After three years at university I will have met all the stuffed shirts I need to make or break a dream career; in the workplace it might have taken a decade.

The hard truth is many people I know would have been better off discovering themselves outside of the supposed Mecca of ‘student experience,’ but this perverse elitism, which claims everyone is entitled to a bite, sucks in more souls than a Dyson. I am not elitist. What I am is practical, and even though it’s swell and all, giving the underprivileged a shot at a better life, there are so many people who seem to have been the victims of higher education’s pressure and let others, quite literally, lead them to that cliff and push them off. Not everyone can get the Nobel Prize job, but then again, not everyone truly wants, or needs it, either.

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Photo: flickr/marsmet471