Quality

We have become a culture of excess.

Few care about quality anymore. It's all about quantity. Who cares what quality of diamonds you have as long as you're swimming in them? We're blinded by the glitz of multiple degrees or jobs or achievements. Never mind that nine of the ten clubs a student was involved in during college were the functional equivalent of underwater basket-weaving; she was involved in ten clubs. Never mind that nine of the eighteen credits she took every semester did little to enrich her mind or prepare her for life after college; she took eighteen credits per semester and had good grades, on top of her involvement in those ten clubs.

This mindset is fatal to our education system and our workforce. We work and work on so many things that really don't matter, least of all to us, but we have to work on them because we have a certain credit requirement or core class requirement. These requirements are not bad things, per se--I would argue that in principle, they're good things, since they enrich the mind, but in combination with the prevailing mindset of equating quantity with achievement, they become problematic.

Why is this a problem? Why does it matter if the quality of education is slightly lowered to improve quantity?

Let's look at it this way: if Ford makes a lot of cars, but sacrifices quality control, would that be better than making relatively fewer cars that had working seatbelts or brakes or airbags? How is it much better for universities to send poorly-equipped students into the world, thinking that they've somehow been "educated" because they've been involved in so many things they really didn't care about?

As a college student in a system that increasingly tends toward quality over quantity, I think it's a little ridiculous that we focus so much on how many things people do, sometimes to the detriment of how well they do them. I've been guilty of the same; in all honesty, it's easier for me to list off my credentials and try to impress with how much underwater basket-weaving I've done. I don't want to give the impression that everything I've done has been for the sake of quantity instead of quality. I don't think it has. But in our culture, it's still easy to want to have that laundry list of cool stuff I've done so I can try to fit in.

Is it bad to want to do lots of cool stuff? Absolutely not. But why do we do it? And what have we really learned from it? Are our experiences shaping us into better people, or are they just another thing in the long list of stuff to do so I can get hired or get into grad school? If we just do things because that's what's expected, I think that's quantity over quality, and I also think it's not truly educating us. In a few months, we'll forget the things that don't matter to us. That's not a good thing, but that's the way it is. As I see it, quality of education is achieved not through how many classes I've taken, or even through how many different sorts of classes I've taken. That's quantity. Quality is about how much I've been enriched as a person--that is, how much my mind has been exposed to new and different ideas, and how much it has mulled them over and accepted the ones it likes and taken the ones it doesn't under consideration. Quality does not lend itself well to outright and unreasoned rejection of a new idea. Unlike quantity, quality can't be measured. Quality in education is perhaps best defined as a state of mind as opposed to an absolute amount of information.

So can quantity compensate for low quality? No. A lot of underwater basket-weaving is still underwater basket-weaving, and it will never be scuba diving. From my perspective, I would rather have a résumé consisting of a few great scuba dives than a few hundred weaving sessions. The stories will be better, too.