Despite the catastrophic job market, at least current students can use the present-day crisis as a teachable moment. No matter how bad things may be, the university must strive to create positive educational debates and experiences.
It is not the responsibility of the university to provide answers to student's questions of morality and identity. But a university has a responsibility not to stifle debate; rather it must enable students to feel free to ask questions. The university must encourage graduates to comfortably tolerate ambiguity and diversity of beliefs amongst their fellow students and within their own hearts. In this tolerance of diversity, of course, there is an implied moral system to some degree, just as there is in Kohlberg's prioritization of moralistic abstractions. The modern university that values ethical questioning must allow for multiplicity of opinions. This tolerance is not cross-culturally universal in its nature. But for an American university, located in a diverse world, a school that seeks to prepare students for a global community and a mosaic of cultures in America, part of the learning process for students must be having a certain kind of open-mindedness or at least the ability to engage in dialogue with others with different opinions.
All students embark upon a journey self-exploration in college. As they stretch their ability to learn about others, and try on new personas, they must allow others to do the same. As the university serves all students it cannot permit narrow-mindedness -- of opinions and even of specialization in academic study. Breadth and depth must be fostered in course offerings and interdisciplinary learning. A...
Even if a student returns to the morality of his or her parents at the end of the voyage of intellectual and personal discovery through the university, to learn requires change and reconsideration of values (Colby et al. 2003, p. 107).
Learning how to make active moral judgments, rather than simply receive knowledge is part of the educational process. College students proceed from dualistic judgments to be less secure assessments of right and wrong (Colby 2008, p.109). If a teacher were to try to define the difference between high school and college education, he or she would likely say that a high schooler learns how to balance an equation, but the college student learns the why's of what the education is trying to describe, and how to construct an experiment on his or her own. The same is true of morality -- a college student must begin to articulate the why's of his or her value judgments, and subject his or her cherished values to a series of moral dilemmas and experiments. "The capacity to override or change personal habits," including habits of thought, when they are no longer productive or adequately reflect one's present reality is the sign of maturity and a critical thinker (Colby et al. 2003, p. 107). The fact that moral judgment and reflection tend to be less common in the busy nature of daily life, at end of the formal educational journey, is all the more reason to prompt reflection in the classroom, and to make special efforts to create a diverse student body, culturally as well as demographically, and to force students out of their comfort zones.
