The purpose of college is often questioned. Is college meant to train someone to be a competitive job applicant? Maybe the point of college truly is just to expand your horizons and to experience intellectual growth. What if the point of college is just to meet the person you will spend the rest of your life with? The real purpose of college encompasses all of these reasons. College is meant to prepare students for every facet of life. And the best colleges and universities put students in the position to find jobs, knowledge and future loved ones. A true university experience should also teach students how to interact with their environment, which often leads people off dry land. Therefore, colleges such as Brown University should require every student to pass a swim test before graduation.
Interacting with water is an essential part of life. We live on a planet about 70 percent covered in water. While 30 percent of the planet is still a huge amount of land, chances are that a person is going to at least come into contact with a body of water at some point in his or her life, whether an ocean, lake, river or pool. There is absolutely no reason for someone who goes to the beach to be able to analyze the ionic composition of the water and the effect it has on the body, but not be able to wade in past their knees.
Swimming is great for you. It’s one of the best forms of exercise and can lead to a healthier body while preventing several medical problems. However, just because something is healthier does not mean one should be forced to learn how to do it. We should learn how to swim because it can truly save lives. In America, about 10 people die each day from unintentional drowning while engaging in non-boat related activities. About 20 percent of these victims are children under the age of 14. Therefore, the people who are drowning aren’t just kids. They are people in high school, college or older who need to be taught how to swim.
Some people will argue that swimming isn’t very useful, but how is learning how to swim any different from wearing a seatbelt? Both are preventative measures, taken even though it’s not as if one has a high chance of getting into a car crash every time he or she goes for a drive around the block. Wearing a seatbelt, while a minor inconvenience, offers essential insurance. It’s impossible to know whether you will ever end up living next to an open body of water or if you will ever randomly end up walking along a river on a slippery evening. Also, it’s important to realize that the places one could drown aren’t just localized on the coasts and are common across the country.
Over the last 25 years, schools around the country such as Princeton in 1990 and the University of Chicago in 2012 dropped their swimming requirement. Brown can help reverse that trend. Columbia, Dartmouth, Cornell, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Notre Dame all continue to require a swim test as part of their core curricula. Brown already has the resources necessary to join these institutions, making the addition of a swim test to the curriculum relatively effortless. The Katherine Moran Coleman Aquatics Center is home to a 56 meter by 25 yard pool that is open for recreational swim every weekday from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Allocating part of the pool for a few different half hour time slots throughout the week would not be that invasive, nor would it be expensive. The class could be taught by student volunteers from several different varsity aquatic sports. Offering a free swim class would help properly prepare students who enter college without the ability to swim.
One key criticism of learning how to swim is that not everyone has had the same exposure to swimming, and level of experience is highly correlated with race. Just because not everyone has the same background does not mean that the need for swimming should be ignored. Academically, not everyone has the same academic background either, having been exposed to different materials and opportunities, such as Advanced Placement courses. But rather than ban courses that correspond to high school AP courses, these courses are still offered to everyone, many of which are even mandatory prerequisites for various areas of study.
A swim test as a graduation requirement is not intended to prevent anyone from graduating — it is meant to give people an opportunity to learn how to swim. An inability to swim, while dangerously detrimental for an individual, is also often propagated to future generations. If parents can’t swim, they won’t teach their kids and are less likely to emphasize the importance of learning how to swim to future generations. In doing so, this burdens future generations. A swimming handicap not only creates excessive fear of water, but it can also lead to social alienation by preventing children from interacting with their peers in aquatic settings.
A basic swim test where individuals swim a couple of laps may be a small barrier to graduation, but it opens up possibilities later in life. According to the American Red Cross, the majority of drowning deaths are preventable with basic swimming and water safety instruction. By requiring a swim test, Brown can increase the probability that our college degrees go to people whose lives will not be tragically cut short as drowning victims. Especially while attending college in the “Ocean State,” the least one can take away from the experience is the ability to swim.
Andrew Feldman ’15 can be reached at andrew_feldman@brown.edu unless he continues to write articles from inside the pool, in which case his computer will probably end up getting wet.
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