Viewpoint: Colleges must encourage students to check their privilege

Universities hope to mold young people into productive individuals who will get jobs and build successful careers, but there is something very important that they are not all doing: creating empathetic people who will work for much needed social change.

Institutions of higher education have the capacity to combat the privilege that has become all too prevalent at universities across the country. By requiring students to take a course that focuses on social justice and off-campus, experiential learning in a different community, there is a real opportunity to combat privilege and create better people.

Places like the University of Michigan and the University of Missouri offer minors in community action, social change and public service. And at Santa Clara University in Santa Clara, Calif., taking at least one course in experiential learning for social justice is required to graduate.

Students can choose from a wide range of courses offered by almost all of the academic departments and can take the course at any time during their undergraduate work. The course requires a specific amount of time to be spent off campus in a community that is nearby, but in a very different type of environment.

“Students become more aware of their own privileges and value more what they have,” says Dr. Lucia Varona, a professor in the modern languages and literatures department at Santa Clara University who has 24 years of experience teaching community based learning.

“Many students find their calling in the community, others clarify stereotypes they have been growing up with, and even some find themselves in the suffering and hopes of the people they meet and befriend in the community.”

When it comes to discussing privilege, it is easy to exchange opinions on what does or does not constitute being privileged. However, if and when a student is required to leave their college campus and enter a community or area where they witness poverty — among other disadvantages and unfavorable conditions — their own personal privilege becomes evident.

Tori Figge, a rising junior at Morningside College in Sioux City, Iowa, volunteered with one of her track teammates at at MidStep Services, a non-profit that helps those with disabilities.

“This was a bit out of my comfort zone because I have never really been around those with mental, physical, educational, or vocational disabilities. It broadened my horizons to say the least and after my hours were up, I still found myself checking back in with some of the residents I got to know during my time there,” Figge wrote in an email. “You see growth in yourself that you can’t see in the classroom.”

The importance of understanding and acknowledging personal privilege cannot be understated, especially as it becomes such an integral part of improving race, gender and socioeconomic relations.

But, it very much functions in a way that requires hearing and understanding other people’s experiences that are distinctly different from one’s own. Once a person is able to look beyond their own privilege, they are able to see how their own world compares to that of others and hopefully enact change to ease those inequalities.

There are certainly other advantages to experiential learning, one being the opportunity to see outside of the bubble in which many college students become entrapped on their respective campuses.

“It is also important to burst the bubble that SCU creates. Students easily start believing that SCU is the world,” says Varona.

Universities are doing their students an injustice by not forcing them to experience what life is like outside the campus. As fun and exciting as college campuses are, they are not the real world.

Those who become acclimated to the bubble and are never forced to step outside of it will face a rude awakening when they leave after just four short years.

While higher education is very much about educating students in their respective fields of study, it should also be about educating their conscience.

By requiring students to take a course has a social justice aspect, colleges can and do educate their students more holistically. Social injustices and inequalities are arguably some of the most important problems that we have to solve and the potential to solve those problems lies within all students of today.

Varona says, “Almost all, stop taking for granted all they have and begin to question what they can do to change the world.”