Thomas Ehrlich and Ernestine Fu have written a new piece for Forbes in which they suggest that college should be a time for students to find themselves as people, not just party and prepare for a career.

Why College Students Need To Self-Reflect

Who am I? Who do I want to become? What’s my relation to those around me? What are my responsibilities to others?

Undergraduate years should be a time for students to reflect deeply on questions such as these. In the process, they will gain a more grounded sense of their own identity than they had before college. Whether students are transitioning from adolescence to adulthood or are adults planning a shift in their lives, college is an ideal time for thoughtful reflection on these and related issues.

But this kind of reflection happens too rarely in college. All too often, undergraduates have an instrumentalist view of college, viewing it solely as a way to prepare for a career, and perhaps have some fun along the way. They wear their academic honors and achievements like a soldier’s decorations, rarely looking deeply at their inner selves. Self-reflection is not on their radar screens.

College students will gain enormous quantities of information, but the sum of that information will be only a tiny fraction of the world’s knowledge. Much of that fraction might, in fact, prove wrong or at least irrelevant before students even had a chance to return for their class reunion.

We believe that college students should expect to graduate with the knowledge and skills to engage in a career they will find satisfying, or at least to lay the intellectual grounding for graduate work to serve that purpose. But more important, college students need to find themselves. They need to become comfortable in their knowledge of who they are and how they want to relate to the larger world beyond. If they do not like what they find when they look in the internal mirror, it is hardly likely that others will like them either.

Multiple, structured opportunities are required to ensure that students have the time, the space, and the motivation to engage in self-reflection.