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College Graduation

[Today’s run: 3.5 miles]

In about two weeks we hope to be attending #1 son’s graduation from college with a B.A. degree.

I enjoyed my college years.  I did a year at a small Christian school in Arkansas then four more at Iowa State.  Not being very enamored with my major field, I went back for another year to get  a Bachelor in my minor field also.

While at Iowa State I enjoyed working at the university post office.  Then I got a job with a physics research group.  I got to fill up big floor-standing thermos bottles with liquid nitrogen.  And I played with computers and generally had a good time.  I liked a lot of my classes; some I didn’t like.  I lived with a roommate in near-campus housing most of the time and then for awhile in a lonely farm house on the windswept prairie.

I enjoyed the church group I hung around with.  They put up with me OK.  I always have my moments of acting like a jerk, but somehow it didn’t scare them all away.

While my kids were growing up they complained about high school.  Neither one of them liked the school in our town and both escaped early and got GEDs instead of following the regular track.  They tell me there were a lot of drug problems in the school.  So my wife and I would talk up College.  “College is different”, we would say.

But college really didn’t work out so well either. My parents were the first of their families (I’m pretty sure) who graduated from college.  Their children, my generation, there were four of us and I think we ended up with 8 degrees between us.  And for the next generation, college just hasn’t clicked.  I think some of it, maybe a lot of it, is the tremendous expense involved.

And some is probably that the insipid nature of high school has crept up into the college scene.  The very things my kids hated about high school: pointless classes, political correctness, social politics, just make it less about learning and more about surviving.

But #1 Son has survived and is closing in on graduation and I’m so happy for him!  He’s been accepted to graduate school  (which means he likes it enough to keep going).  So maybe a bit of what I enjoyed in my 6 years of college he’s started to enjoy in the last year or two.

I think maybe my generation hit a sweet spot:   1950’s parents with faith in education, college was  not too expensive,  and not yet overly corrupted with marxist theory and gender/race studies.

Three cheers for #1 son!

4 replies on “College Graduation”

The folks are excited about coming down for Tom’s graduation. As you mention, there just haven’t been many of those lately. I think Adrian and Courtney have two-year Associate degrees, but that’s as far as it will probably go. Lauren’s husband Cody has at least a bachelor’s, I believe. All the kids have excellent work ethics and find jobs that pay well, so that’s a good thing.

Thanks for not saying I’m the college dud of our generation, even thought it’s true! 🙂

I remember taking out a loan for – I think – around $1500 to cover the cost of a year at JBU the second time I gave it the “old college try.” We’re a very far cry from that now.

If I found a good job out of high school (after the steam trains) I would not have gone to college. Grad school was during a recession so it was easier than finding work, honestly. Now, three decades later, I see how hard I work and my pay compared to others who work much harder for less and I conclude that college (both times) was the best investment I have made. (Don’t tell my boss!) The bonus was all the electives that I thought at the time were a total waste of time – and I would have avoided if I could – ultimately left me with a broader view of the world. (This is before Google – now people can download lectures and watch YouTube (TED etc) instead.) One thing the Internet can’t do: I did meet interesting people from all walks of life – which isn’t easy in Iowa outside of a university setting.

And I didn’t mind learning about Marx as I also learned about critical thinking – in those darned electives.

That’s a good point about the electives.

For me, I had never been around computers until my first year of college. I had to take a computer programming course as part of the mechanical engineering program. And that really was interesting to me and led to my career. And most of the computer courses I took were electives. It made it possible for me to go back and get the computer science degree with just another year.

I also took foil fencing as an elective… so I had college credit for poking people with a stick. I mean, how good can life get?

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