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Originally Posted by Corneo
I had a discussion with my roommate the other day about the reason for going to college. His reason for going to college was so he can learn from the experiences of college. He said that some people lose that mentality along the way, some students just focus their time into their school work so they can graduate and start having a career. I told him that I was the latter.
Granted I am a little bias to other majors that are labeled "cake majors". I don't see how some parents or students themselves would pay thousands dollars of college tuition to study something that isn't quite marketable as a career.
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You present these things as if they're distinct things, and the one best reason is to get a mareketable degree.
I don't really see "the college experience" as a good reason to go to college, but there's certainly nothing wrong with getting something out of the social aspects of college life. I do think that it seems a bit backwards for someone who isn't there to learn to be criticizing those who are.
I think either extreme, though, misses the main point, which cello outlined earlier, which is that college is there for you to learn, to been an adult educated in a variety of subjects. There's nothing wrong with getting a marketable degree, but that way of looking at it is treating college like a trade school. Probably half of my World Lit class is just taking up space, not really interested in learning any more than the minimum needed to get through the course.
I wish students, both the "college experience" people and the "marketable degree" people could see what a marvelous opporunity this is. My problem as an undergraduate at USC was not having the time to take all the courses I wanted to take, not having enough time for all those lit and history and science and sociology courses that I just couldn't fit into my schedule.
There's a movie, "Springtime in the Rockies," which has a rich man waking up after a bender that resulted in a blackout to find that he's somehow ended up with an old man who is now his personal valet. We find out later on that the old man had been in college. For forty years. His father's will left a trust that paid for his living expenses and college tuition for as long as he was in college and making progress towards a degree, but cut him off the moment he graduated. So he just kept taking courses, changing majors every few years and making sure he never had the credits to graduate. He finally had to leave because there were no courses left he hadn't taken.
For the remainder of the movie, he acts as a kind of expository shortcut, because he knows everything.
I've always thought that that was a man who knew how to make the best of college.
Gilda