The Value of My College Education
Started a new school year today, although the students aren’t back yet. That’ll happen over the next couple of days. But the start of the year has me thinking back. 15 years ago I started my senior ear of college at Fordham University. I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, because I absolutely would not trade my college experience for just about anything. And since now it’s my job to help high school students prepare to have similarly rewarding experiences, I have to think about why it was so valuable to me.
Certainly there was an academic component. I built a strong foundation in my coursework that helped me get into grad school. I barely had any adjuncts or TAs in four years of classes. Heck, my roommate from junior year is a veterinarian, my roommate from senior year is a medical doctor, and two of my editors-in-chief from the newspaper went on to get doctoral degrees. Lots of my friends were no less brilliant for not getting time-consuming and expensive terminal degrees. (Some folks might say that makes them even more brilliant, but that’s just my student loan debt talking.) Rubbing against all that brain power in classrooms and in late-night conversations was a great experience that sped up my thinking and development on a lot of topics.
But the truth is, I was a humanities major. I could get Plato’s Republic out of the library a lot cheaper than I got it from the campus bookstore, let alone the tuition. With the Internet today making more video lectures and discussion for a possible, the truth is that someone who is truly interested in learning the material for the sake of learning the material, rather than getting a credential to tick off a box on a job application, can do so without the actual college experience.
I still feel like I got a lot of value from college. There is a social element, of course. I met many of my best friends at Fordham, and 15 years ago I started dating Pattie. 12 years of marriage and one wonderful daughter later, that seems to be working out. College can’t help but introduce you to a bunch of people, and if you play your cards right you’ll find people you can connect with. There are lots of people in the world, though, so if you keep your eyes open you could probably make friends without college, too.
The thing is, it was easier for me to learn that material and easier for me to make those friends because the traditional college experience was, for me, its own little isolated world, a microcosm that brought a lot of people into a relatively confined environment and forced them to bounce off of one another. It accelerated the processes. And because it was a small world, I could explore many different sides of it. In college, I was an academic. I was a journalist and writer. I was a program planner. I wrote a screenplay; I co-wrote a play and got to have it staged. I lived on my own for the first time without having to worry about every single detail that being independent requires. I got to grow up, figure out who I wanted to be and build up some resources to help me become that person. For me, it worked, and that’s why I will forever be grateful to Fordham.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.