Choosing Slow: The Enduring Case for Residential Higher Education

Shortly after my wife and I married, we sold our second car to afford our first house. Suddenly car-less, I began relying on a bike to navigate town. At the time, I was racing bikes competitively, so I enjoyed the challenge of getting places as quickly as possible while juggling it all – working, coaching, graduate school, and leading youth at our church.

And then we had kids.

My first instinct was to increase efficiency. A second car could win back 15 minutes each day. Moving closer to work might save another 10. But when everything told us to move faster, we made a different choice.

For the past six years, my children and I have biked to work, daycare, and school together - daily, from at least March 1 until December 1, through Iowa's particular mix of meteorological humility. Beyond the arsenal of winter gear and the perpetually chapped lips, we have developed a shared appreciation for the hard, slow option.

At an (often agonizingly) sluggish four miles per hour, the world reveals itself. There are micro-conversations with the co-masochists dotting the sidewalk, dismounts for THE BIGGEST BEETLE EVER, and pauses under trees for the unanticipated cloudbursts and their ensuing rainbows. These are not interruptions to the commute – they are the commute. They are, I've come to realize, the curriculum.

A car’s climate-controlled cockpit is a remarkable technology for getting somewhere, but it is a poor tool for becoming someone. The bike (or feet, if you prefer) exposes you to nuance – the springtime return of a bird’s song and exchanging rueful smiles with a neighbor who’s just been given a difficult diagnosis. We were not given time to optimize; we were given time to inhabit.

I’ve come to suspect our commute is teaching me something larger about how people grow. Modern life is designed to compress time and eliminate inefficiency, but healthy formation is stubbornly resistant to that logic. It requires repetition, patience, and the unplanned encounters that only happen at human speed.

The New Efficiency Temptation

My job title is a mouthful; it's easier to call me a futurist. I spend plenty of time wrestling with the implications of artificial intelligence for education and the workforce. I'm not going to sugarcoat it: AI is radically transforming both in some genuinely unsettling ways. It has already become harder to defend the value of certain longstanding academic skills.

But in increasing measure, I am hopeful. This disruption may actually clarify education’s purpose. If machines effortlessly handle the rapid retrieval and synthesis of information, the central question shifts. Education is no longer primarily about what you can produce, but who you are becoming.

The qualities that rise in value are the ones computers cannot replicate: empathy, resilience, judgment, and the ability to sit with uncertainty. These capacities develop gradually in communities where people learn to navigate responsibility, conflict, and belonging.

The Residential Curriculum

This is what I think of as the residential curriculum – what happens when eighteen-year-olds who have long been the best student or star athlete are placed in proximity with others who are equally certain of their own exceptionalism, equally fragile, and equally in need of being known.

Christians have long understood that we become who we are through the habits we form and the people we learn to love. The questions that arise in these environments rarely appear on a syllabus:

“How do my unexamined assumptions shape how I hear my roommate?”

“When my identity as a cellist, a nurse, or a boyfriend is suddenly upended, who am I then?”

“How will I, with my mix of skills, values, and convictions, contribute something meaningful?”

Their answers aren’t found quickly or in isolation. They are discerned in the unique laboratory between the dependence of childhood and the independence of adulthood – a space with just enough safety and just enough risk to make genuine growth possible: during shared meals, late-night conversations, and disagreements that must be resolved face to face.

The Winding Discovery of Vocation

I used to envy my friends who always knew what was next – medicine, law, or the trades. I’ve never had that certainty. Nearly 14 years into my professional career, I now find deep joy in the methodical discovery of what I am being made to do. It has never come as a revelation, but an accumulation of conversations and corrections. It has required showing up, every day, in all the elements: both sun rays and sleet.

I think my children are learning this, too - not because I have explained it to them, but because of the way I see them interacting with God’s world. They are learning that the beetle is worthy of admiring, that every neighbor is worthy of attention, and that a headwind can quickly become a tailwind.

Why Slow

I am not making a romantic argument for inefficiency. I’m almost certainly a bigger automotive enthusiast than you, and I have the receipts for the thousands of dollars I’ve spent shaving seconds off bike races.

But the development of character, vocation, and the capacity to love your neighbor as yourself – despite all the world’s advances – will never be accomplished quickly. Students must live, learn, disagree, reconcile, and grow alongside one another day after day. It is in this unhurried collection of ordinary moments that they will they discover their calling.

Like our bike ride to school, it may not be the fastest, but it may be one of the best ways to become the kind of person who knows where they are going.