By BARRY SCHWARTZ
The modern university has become a kind of
intellectual shopping mall. Universities offer a wide array of different
"goods" and allow, even encourage, students -- the
"customers" -- to shop around until they find what they like.
Individual customers are free to "purchase" whatever bundles of
knowledge they want, and the university provides whatever its customers demand.
In some rather prestigious institutions, this shopping-mall view has been
carried to an extreme. In the first few weeks of classes, students sample the
merchandise. They go to a class, stay 10 minutes to see what the professor is
like, then walk out, often in the middle of the
professor's sentence, to try another class. Students come and go in and out of
classes just as browsers go in and out of stores in a mall.
This explosion of choice in the university is a reflection of a pervasive
social trend. Americans are awash in choice, not only in the courses they take,
but also in the products they buy (300 kinds of cereal, 50 different cellphones, thousands of mutual funds) and in virtually all
aspects of life. Increasingly, people are free to choose when and how they will
work, how they will worship, where they will live, what they will look like
(thanks to liposuction, Botox, and cosmetic surgery
of every description), and what kind of romantic relationships they will have.
Further, freedom of choice is greatly enhanced by increased affluence. In the
last 40 years, the inflation-adjusted, per capita income of Americans has more
than doubled. The proportion of homes with dishwashers has increased from 9 to
50 percent, with clothes dryers from 20 to 70 percent, and with
air-conditioning from 15 to 73 percent. And of course, no one had cable TV,
home computers, or the Internet in 1964. This increased affluence contributes
to freedom of choice by giving people the means to act on their various goals
and desires, whatever they may be.
Does increased affluence and increased choice mean we have more happy people? Not at all. Three recently published books -- by the
psychologist David Myers, the political scientist
Why are people increasingly unhappy even as they experience greater material
abundance and freedom of choice? Recent psychological research suggests that
increased choice may itself be part of the problem.
It may seem implausible that there can be too much choice. As a matter of
logic, it would appear that adding options will make no one worse off and is
bound to make someone better off. If you're content choosing among three
different kinds of breakfast cereal, or six television stations, you can simply
ignore the dozens or hundreds that get added to your supermarket shelves or
cable provider's menu. Meanwhile, one of those new cereals or TV stations may
be just what some other person was hoping for. Given the indisputable fact that
choice is good for human well-being, it seems only logical that if some choice
is good, more choice is better.
Logically true, yes. Psychologically true, no. My colleagues and I, along with
other researchers, have begun amassing evidence -- both in the laboratory
and in the field -- that increased choice can lead to decreased
well-being. This is especially true for people we have termed "maximizers," people whose goal is to get the best
possible result when they make decisions. Choice overload is also a problem for
people we call "satisficers," people who
seek only "good enough" results from their choices, but the problem
is greatly magnified for maximizers. Much of the
relevant research is summarized in my book, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. Here are some examples:
These examples paint a common picture: Increasing options does not increase well-being, especially for maximizers, even when it enables choosers to do better by some objective standard. We have identified several processes that help explain why increased choice decreases satisfaction. Greater choice:
To illustrate these last two points, I recall buying a
bottle of wine to accompany dinner when I was vacationing with my family in a
seaside cottage in a small town in
What are the implications of an abundance of choice for higher education today?
College students don't have to worry about choosing 401(k) plans, and most of
them don't have major health issues to make decisions about. Nonetheless, the
world of the modern college student is so laden with choice, much of it
extremely consequential, that for many, it has become overwhelming, perhaps
contributing to the rush of students to university counseling services.
When I went to college, 35 years ago, there were
almost two years' worth of general-education requirements that all students had
to complete. We had some choices among courses that met those
requirements, but they were rather narrow. Almost every department had a
single, introductory course that prepared the student for more advanced work in
the field. You could be fairly certain, if you ran into a fellow student you
didn't know, that the two of you would have at least a year's worth of courses
in common to discuss. In the shopping mall that is the modern university, the
chances that any two students have significant intellectual experiences in
common are much reduced.
About 30 years ago, somewhat dismayed that their students no longer shared
enough common intellectual experiences, the Harvard faculty revised its
general-education requirements to form a "core curriculum." With this
new curriculum (which is currently undergoing another revision), students take
at least one course in each of 11 different broad areas of inquiry. But among
those areas, there are dozens and dozens of courses from which to choose. What
are the odds that two random students will have courses in common to discuss?
At the advanced end of the curriculum, Harvard offers about 40 majors. For
students with interdisciplinary interests, these can be combined into an almost
endless array of joint majors. If that doesn't do the trick, students can
create their own degree plan. And within majors, at least many of them,
internal structure has largely disappeared. Students can begin almost anywhere
in the curriculum and end almost anywhere.
Harvard is not unusual.
Within classes, the digital revolution has made access to information
unbelievably easy. The Internet and the "digital library" can be a
term-paper writer's blessing. But they can also be a curse. With so much
information so readily available, when do you stop looking? There is no excuse
for failing to examine all of it.
And outside the classroom, the range of recreational and extracurricular
activities afforded to students has become mind-boggling. As elite universities
compete with one another for elite students (an example of social waste that I
think rivals the SUV), the institutions engage in an arms race of amenity
provision -- fitness centers, indoor rock-climbing walls, hot tubs that
accommodate dozens of people at once, espresso bars -- in their effort to
attract every student they want. The result is a set of choices of things to do
outside of class that makes one's head spin.
There are many benefits to expanded educational opportunities. The traditional
bodies of knowledge transmitted from teachers to students in the past were
constraining and often myopic. The tastes and interests of the idiosyncratic
students often were stifled and frustrated. In the modern university, each
individual student is free to pursue almost any interest, without having to be
harnessed to what his intellectual ancestors thought was worth knowing.
Moreover, the advent of the digital age has opened up the intellectual world to
all students, even those at resource-poor institutions.
But this freedom comes at a price. Now, students are required to make many
choices about education that will affect them for the rest of their lives, and
they are forced to make them at a point in their intellectual development when
many students lack the wisdom to choose intelligently. In my own experience I
see this manifested in several ways. Advisees ask me to approve course
selections that have no rhyme or reason behind them and that the advisees
themselves can't justify. Students are eager to have double or triple majors, partly,
I know, to pad their résumés, but also because they can't figure out which
discipline they really want to commit to. And I learned some time ago that
"What are you doing when you graduate?" is not a friendly question to
ask many college seniors.
In addition, students are faced with all this curricular choice while also
trying to figure out what kinds of people they are going to be. Matters of
ethnic, religious, and sexual identity are up for grabs. So are issues of
romantic intimacy (to marry or not to marry; to have kids or not to have kids;
to have kids early or to wait until careers are established). Students can live
and work anywhere after they graduate, and in a wired world, they can work at
any time, from any place. Of course it is true that students have always had to
make these kinds of life decisions. College is an unsettled, and often
unsettling, time. But in the past, in virtually each of these areas of life,
there was a "default" option that was so powerful that many decisions
didn't feel like decisions, because alternatives to the default weren't
seriously considered. Nowadays, almost nothing is decided by default.
The result is a generation of students who use university counseling services
and antidepressants in record numbers, and who provide places like Starbucks
with the most highly educated minimum-wage work force in the world, as they
bide their time hoping that the answer to the "what should I be when I
grow up" question will eventually emerge. Choice overload is certainly not
the only reason for the anxiety and uncertainty experienced by modern college
students, but I believe it is an important one. I believe that by offering our
students this much freedom of choice, we are doing them no favor. Indeed, I
think that this obsession with choice constitutes an abdication of
responsibility by university faculty members and administrators to provide
college students with the guidance they badly need.
In an important respect, the "liberation" of the university
experience mirrors the embrace of choice in American society at large. The
dominant political trend in the last 25 years, influenced by the principles and
assumptions of neoclassical economics, has been to stop trying to have the
government provide services that serve the welfare of citizens and instead
offer citizens choices so that each of us can pursue our own welfare. The push
to privatize Social Security, to offer senior citizens choice among
prescription-drug plans, and to offer parents choice in the public education
their children receive -- these are all instances of the view that choice
cannot help but make people better off. And so it is with the modern
university. What I have tried to indicate is that though all this choice no
doubt makes some people better off, it makes many people worse
off, even when their choices work out well.
If enhanced freedom of choice and increased affluence don't enhance well-being,
what does? The most important factor seems to be close social relations. People
who are married, who have good friends, and who are close to their families are
happier than those who are not. People who participate in religious communities
are happier than those who do not. Being connected to others seems to be more
important to well-being than being rich or "keeping your options
open."
In the context of this discussion of choice, it is important to note that, in
many ways, social ties actually decrease freedom of choice. Marriage,
for example, is a commitment to a particular other person that curtails freedom
of choice of sexual or emotional partners. Serious friendship also entails
weighty responsibilities and obligations that at times may limit one's own
freedom. The same is true, obviously, of family. And most religious
institutions call on their members to live their lives in a certain way, and to
take responsibility for the well-being of their fellow congregants. So,
counterintuitive as it may appear, what seems to contribute most to happiness
binds us rather than liberates us.
Yet more than a quarter of Americans report being lonely,
and loneliness seems to come not from being alone, but from lack of intimacy.
We spend less time visiting with neighbors. We spend less time visiting with
our parents, and much less time visiting with other relatives. Partly this is because
we have less time, since we are busy trying to determine what choices to
make in other areas of life. But partly this is because close social relations
have themselves become matters of choice. As
Universities should acknowledge the role they have played in creating a world
of choice overload and move from being part of the problem to being a part of
the solution. The "culture wars" over the canon that rocked college
campuses for years have subsided, and most of us were not sorry to see them go.
It is deeply troubling to face up to the fact that you and your colleagues
can't agree on something as basic as what a college curriculum should consist
of. There were no winners in these wars; they subsided, I think, because people
got tired of fighting them. And they subsided because giving students
choice seemed like a benign resolution of what were sometimes virulent
conflicts. Some choice is good, we thought, so more choice is better. Let
students choose and we never have to figure out what to choose for them.
But offering more choice is not benign. It is a major source of stress,
uncertainty, anxiety -- even misery. It is not serving our students well.
They would be better served by a faculty and an institution that offered choice
within limits, freedom within constraints. The poet and essayist Katha Pollitt observed some years
ago that the real reason why battles over the curriculum were so intense
-- the reason that the stakes seemed so high -- is that faculty
members knew that for the vast majority of students, the last serious book they
would ever read would be the last book they read in their college
careers. I think we are less likely to turn our students off to the life of the
mind if we offer them curricular options that are well structured and coherent
than if we simply let them choose whatever they want on their own.
There is a New Yorker cartoon that depicts a parent goldfish and an
offspring in a small goldfish bowl. "You can be anything you want to be
-- no limits," says the myopic parent, not realizing how limited an
existence the fishbowl allows. I'd like to suggest that perhaps the parent is
not so myopic. Freedom within limits, choice within constraints, is indeed
liberating. But if the fishbowl gets shattered -- if the constraints
disappear -- freedom of choice can turn into a tyranny of choice.
Barry Schwartz is a professor of psychology at
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Section: The Chronicle Review
Volume 50, Issue 20, Page B6