Rethinking College Beyond Credentials

In recent years, American higher education has increasingly come to resemble a marketplace. Families talk about tuition as an investment. Students weigh majors by salary data. Colleges emphasize outcomes that can be quantified, compared, and ranked. Within this landscape, the meaning of a liberal arts education has grown less certain — and more contested.

Philip Glotzbach, the longtime president of Skidmore College, has spent much of his career trying to explain what gets lost when education is reduced to a transaction. He often describes the prevailing mindset with a metaphor that is both blunt and memorable. College, he says, is increasingly treated like an ATM.

“You spend four years making deposits into the slot,” he once explained, “and then four years later, you withdraw a certificate.” The problem, he added, is not simply economic. “We don’t really have a relationship with our ATM… and we don’t find richness in that relationship.”

The image captures a broader shift in expectations. If college becomes primarily a mechanism for credentialing, then its deeper developmental role becomes harder to see. For Glotzbach, that developmental role is the core of the institution’s purpose. College, he argues, is not primarily about acquiring knowledge or securing employment. It is about becoming capable of directing one’s own life.

Education as a Developmental Window

Glotzbach frequently describes the undergraduate years as a uniquely structured period of personal experimentation. “College is so much more than that,” he says of the transactional model. It is “an opportunity… to discover what it means to be an adult.”

He often frames this idea in everyday language. College, he suggests, offers students a chance to “test drive your new adult self.”

The metaphor resonates because it captures something unusual about the stage of life college occupies. Few environments allow young adults to experiment with identity, responsibility, and values while still surrounded by a community explicitly designed to support growth. For Glotzbach, that environment is not incidental to education; it is its primary function.

Two Kinds of Freedom

At the center of his philosophy is a distinction between two types of freedom. Many students, he observes, arrive at college thinking of freedom primarily as independence — the absence of oversight or restriction. But that version of freedom, he argues, is limited.

The more meaningful form of freedom is the ability to accomplish something significant. It requires discipline, relationships, and the development of judgment.

To illustrate the difference, Glotzbach sometimes invokes the example of an astronaut. The astronaut’s life is defined by rules, training, and physical constraints. Yet those constraints make extraordinary achievement possible. By contrast, someone entirely free of obligations may have choices but lacks the capability to act on them.

In this sense, college is not primarily about removing limits. It is about developing capacities.

Preparing for a World Without Easy Answers

This emphasis on capacity shapes Glotzbach’s understanding of the liberal arts. He argues that the challenges graduates now face rarely fit neatly within disciplinary boundaries. Climate policy, for instance, requires scientific understanding, economic reasoning, ethical reflection, and political negotiation. Problems like these, he notes, are often described as “wicked” because they resist simple solutions.

Students trained narrowly in a single domain may struggle to navigate such complexity. A liberal arts education, in his view, prepares students to integrate knowledge across fields — what he sometimes calls making “synthetic moves.”

He also emphasizes that a degree should not be mistaken for mastery. “You’re not finished when you get your undergraduate degree,” he says. “You’re just starting.” He often compares graduation to earning a black belt in martial arts — a sign not of completion but of readiness to continue learning.

Thinking in the Age of Automation

In recent years, Glotzbach’s attention has increasingly turned to how technology is reshaping cognition itself. Digital tools now make it possible to outsource tasks that once required sustained intellectual effort. While he acknowledges their usefulness, he worries about what happens when students rely on them too heavily.

“It’s very tempting to outsource to AI,” he says, “but then you… haven’t developed those skills.”

He frames this as a developmental risk rather than a technological one. Education, he argues, should produce individuals capable of evaluating information independently. Without that ability, people may become dependent on tools they do not fully understand.

He often recounts a story about lawyers who submitted AI-generated legal briefs containing fabricated citations. The episode, in his telling, illustrates what happens when professionals fail to verify the outputs of their tools. The lesson is simple: technology can assist judgment, but it cannot replace it.

Learning Through Difference

Glotzbach’s philosophy also emphasizes the social dimension of learning. He often describes diversity not as a demographic achievement but as an intellectual necessity.

“You need friction,” he says. “You need friction.”

Exposure to different perspectives, he argues, forces students to question assumptions and develop more sophisticated views of the world. He frequently tells the story of two students — one raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, the other a Jewish student from New York — whose early arguments eventually evolved into friendship and mutual respect. For him, the story illustrates how colleges can foster dialogue across deep divides.

The Campus as a Teaching Tool

Glotzbach believes that the physical design of a campus can reinforce or undermine these educational goals. He often cites Josephine Young Case, a mid-20th-century Skidmore leader who argued that buildings should reflect the “unity of knowledge” and encourage connections across disciplines. Case warned that architecture could impede academic life if it reinforced separation rather than interaction.

Glotzbach has taken that warning seriously. Projects like interdisciplinary science facilities and redesigned library spaces, in his view, are not merely infrastructural improvements. They are expressions of an educational philosophy that values connection, curiosity, and shared inquiry.

For all his emphasis on discipline, Glotzbach does not imagine development as linear or tidy. He often jokes that students are entitled to “one bonehead move” during their college years — a mistake significant enough to prompt reflection but not so severe as to derail their future.

Behind the humor lies a serious premise: growth requires risk. Education works not by eliminating failure but by helping students learn from it.

The Argument for Formation

Glotzbach’s ideas ultimately amount to a defense of education as formation rather than transaction. In a culture focused on measurable outcomes, this argument can seem abstract. But for him, it is deeply practical. A society facing complex problems, rapid technological change, and deep political division, he argues, needs citizens capable of independent judgment and cooperative action.

The purpose of college, in that context, is not simply to prepare students for their first job. It is to prepare them for the lifelong task of directing their own lives.

And that, Glotzbach suggests, is a form of freedom that cannot be purchased, downloaded, or awarded. It has to be learned.