The worldly view Leveraging the return on my educational investment

Author: Adam Clayton

As far as investments go, nothing, except perhaps a house, weighs more heavily on an average person than a college degree. To spend more than two hundred thousand dollars over four years while we could be working puts us a few hundred thousand dollars and four years of work experience behind where we could be. However, we pay perhaps only two thirds of the investment into our education, with the other third of the cost to educate a single student coming from donations and returns from our endowment. Approaching the end of my Middlebury experience I feel a tinge of regret, and perhaps shame, for not having understood that I was beholden to others who had ensured such an opportunity would remain available to me.

Instead of looking at myself and wondering how I could change for the betterment of society, I have decided to project this realization onto others, and hopefully force them away from the mistakes I made. You see, college was not the most academic of learning experiences for me. The very nature of classroom learning was unappealing, and syllabi render books on subjects I would have enjoyed into unappealing requirements. Skim-reading books and writing papers in one or two days is common for all college students, but it is kind of ridiculous to do when I am given the opportunity to take four courses on nearly any academic subject I like.

Frankly, this college and many others are too lenient on its students, especially when the college is financing somewhere between 33% and 100% of our individual cost. Academic achievement requirements at this school are beyond minimal, because having done what I consider minimal work for a class one ends up with a grade of around a B. But to be put on probation or suspension one needs to fail classes and have a GPA that correlates with the petrol prices of yesteryear. Given that someone else is financing our education for almost twenty-five thousand dollars a year, the same amount of money someone at the bottom of the military ladder makes a year, should we not be required to work much harder and achieve much, much more?

Class is the integral part of your college experience, and if one tries hard in class and on his assignments, he is given ample opportunity to excel, even if he is not the brightest of people. This opens the door to internships and jobs where the same mentality will get one noticed in a company full of lazy and arrogant, yet completely ignorant young people. But giving teenagers this advice is usually not enough, and it never worked on me. What is really needed to make sure this college's investment in each individual student is realized, is a much more intense and demanding expectation of our student community. Higher minimum grade requirements and a more exposing grading system is a stick that I wish I had been beaten with.

Another possibility would be required student jobs or community service that taught both important skills and a little humility while helping the campus, as well as an understanding about what the amazing facilities and cleaning staff does to keep this college beyond our expectations. When our society is willing to fund your education to the same amount of money it gives a soldier in Iraq, college is not just what you want to make of it, but what you have to make of it, and not with the sole expectation of getting an investment banking job. College is about bettering yourself academically and emotionally, but the real goal of that is to better the communities we live in be it locally or globally, and a good place to start doing that would be right here.