Recently there was a video montage of my college graduating class that was circulated by the alumni association. It was fifteen minutes of video snippets and interviews, mostly during Senior Week and Commencement many years ago. Watching it felt like peeping inside a time capsule: young ambitious students, relatively equal numbers of men and women, of diverse racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic backgrounds, who have completed four years of studies at Harvard and are ready to step into the real world as adults.
What have they learned? What have they yet to learn?
They say that liberal arts education isn’t about teaching you stuff; it’s meant to teach you how to think. And when I think back to my personal experience, college definitely checked that box. I absorbed critical thinking skills and gained this facility without even realizing it. My brain didn’t necessarily have more facts or tidbits of information; it was rewired.
That rewiring happened in an artificial setting. Especially in the elite colleges where on-campus residence is a critical part of the college experience, students are protected from mundane issues of room and board. A lot of students live on campus and have their meals prepared and available in dining halls and cafeterias. The mundane domestic aspects of life are outsourced, presumably to help students focus on their studies and their college “experience”. (Perhaps this is why so many of us think back to our college years so longingly… it was adulthood without any of the adulting.)
So when I look at these video clips of graduating seniors, I see the faces of young adults who have just lived through the most formative years of their life — the most formative for their individual identity and for a sense of “self”. But I see faces that, for the most part, haven’t yet learned or experienced one of the most certain and vital aspects of being human.
What they haven’t learned.
There is nothing more certain in this world than birth and death. One hundred percent of humans are born and one hundred percent of humans eventually die. One hundred percent of humans, once born, require care (they usually require a lot of care for a lot of years). And almost all aging humans require some care nearing the end of life, and increasing numbers require care for much longer, as a result of extended life expectancy.
In simple terms, caregiving is the most vast and certain responsibility, or “thing that must get done” in society. And yet, I’d venture to guess that the vast majority of college students sail through their four years without grappling with their individual or collective caregiving responsibilities. That was certainly the case for me.
Let’s explore a few possible explanations: We could argue that these early years of adulthood are precious and deserve to be protected from worries about caring for children or aging family members. Or, perhaps colleges aren’t the appropriate vessels for discussing such “private” matters as caregiving for family members. But most likely, colleges and especially elite higher education institutions were simply built by and for men during an era when they would go on to have wives to tend to such “domestic” matters. After all, it really hasn’t been long that women have participated in higher education alongside men, and for decades (and arguably still yet), women have been elbowing their way into territory that wasn’t theirs, playing the game as they found it.
Whatever the explanation, the end result is that students build their individual identity and their place in broader society in an artificial setting that doesn’t contend with our individual and collective caregiving responsibilities. And a few years later, just as they are meant to be entering the “prime” of their career, they run head-first into that hefty responsibility if they have kids of their own. It often feels like an unexpected surprise.
Reality check.
For those male and female students that graduate from elite liberal arts colleges in near equal numbers, this reality check will disproportionately hit more women, and with more impact. Where there is a void in societal discourse and corrective forces through education, traditional norms and gender biases will perpetuate to fill that void. Women will take on much of these caregiving responsibilities.
To state the obvious… this is unfortunate.
First, women bear the brunt of caregiving, mostly unpaid or underpaid, and largely without recognition. A global pandemic shut down so many institutions, but when life (and the economy) had to go on, it did so by relying heavily on the caregiving labor of women.
Second, we lose an eminent opportunity to normalize caregiving by men. If a male student didn’t see it modeled in their own families or communities growing up, wouldn’t it be formative to see it embraced by peers, professors, and mentors at an esteemed higher education institution?
Third, we are failing to acknowledge caregiving responsibilities at a time when young adults are forming foundational habits and attitudes around work. We are perpetuating a culture of assuming that we just have to fit more and more work into our finite 24 hours in a day. Caregiving is work. It is mental, physical, emotional labor. It takes time, energy, and oftentimes ingenuity. So when we reach a stage in life when caregiving is part of our daily responsibilities, it is only logical that something else would have to give. But we are conditioned to believe that caregiving needs to be squeezed into the space in between, out of view from the more publicly esteemed forms of work.
Fourth, a second-order consequence is that we will continue to promote leaders who have not carried the responsibility of caregiving at some point in their lives. This, in turn, will perpetuate organizations and organizational culture that don’t accommodate or honor the unpaid caregiving that their members do off hours. When we look at our country’s leaders, President Joe Biden is actually a rare exception; he was a single dad to his two boys after the death of his wife.
And finally, we miss an opportunity to embrace caregiving as a communal duty to one another and to our country. Caring for children or aging adults shouldn’t be viewed solely as a private endeavor or responsibility. If we fail to recognize caregiving as promoting the public welfare of our society as a whole, we are ignoring that part of the human experience that is an equalizer for us all.
What could caregiving look like on campus?
To be honest, I have no real sense of a “solution”. Do we revive some form of Home Economics as a mandatory part of the core curriculum? Do we form an extracurricular program whereby students volunteer to provide care to the young, disabled, and elderly in the community? Do we enact a mandatory service program where caregiving is an option alongside various forms of military service? It’s worth doing some brainstorming here.
When I look at newly graduating college seniors, I hope that they will all look ahead into their future and understand — and fully embrace — the likelihood that caregiving of some sort will be in their future, and the future of their peers. Virtually no one is immune from needing care or needing to provide care for a loved one. Perhaps we should be more forthright and acknowledge it.
College - the type you describe - is absolutely grown up camp. I agree caregiving / parenting / values around these things were not even a thought, let alone a discussion.
Working in a University mental health center, one of the biggest challenges I saw students manage is when they were caregivers for younger siblings, parents, or older relatives. Part of the difficulty was relating to peers without these responsibilities, as it stood outside of the developmental norm for this stage of life, like you mentioned. It does seem that society would be served by more of us acquiring not only caregiving skills, but shared societal value of these skills and efforts. Your suggestions are thought provoking ones!