Jeffrey Hart in the Dartmouth Review asks the question, “What is a College Education?” I’m going with the theory that it’s different things to different people. For some it’s the ladder they use to get themselves up and out of a place they don’t want to be. For others it’s more of a bridge that’ll get them from the comfortable-enough spot on this side if the river over to that much more interesting bit on the other side. College also makes a magnificently indefinite way station for anyone needing to maintain a safe holding pattern for a while.

I have always considered college to be the place and time in one’s life where the learning of both necessary and not-so-necessary information happens; where one learns to learn; and where one gets to grow up and figure oneself out a little in that half-baked time of life between being a teenager and being a full adult.

I read a post by Ben Casnocha a year or so ago that has always stuck with me. In it he ponders whether college is “worth it.” Four or more years of college is not a little thing, financially speaking. So does the entire experience make it worth the enormous expenditure?

I come from a family of education junkies, of both the formal, university-stamped variety and the self-taught Renaissance man version. The result of having been raised by educated wolves is that I have always been of the opinion that you can never learn enough, be that independently or in a lecture hall.

That being said, I am also of the firm opinion that college has more to offer than simply a book education; I would go so far as to say a good half of one’s college education has nothing whatsoever to do with lecture halls and textbooks. College is pretty much the only venue where a person can be allotted the socially acceptable time and space to ponder and grow.

Even if only as a means to a figuring-yourself-out end, I still maintain that college is worth it. Although, I did adore the book learning, and reading the course catalog every term like it was an exquisite menu created with exactly me in mind. And I loved the lab tables. And the libraries. And those gargantuan lecture halls, capable of imparting knowledge to multitudes. But now I’m all growed up, and should I ever return (eventually I’ll cave and allow myself to be pulled back) I’m sure that college for a fully-formed adult being is not at all the same as college is for a nineteen-year-old.

Posted by Alexa Harrington