I know what you’re going to say. It should be college. But collage sounds so much more upscale, like being a valet or a concierge.
I am a product of the state educational system. I got to go to college when it was really expensive, $83 a quarter for a full load. That didn’t include textbooks, though, which could run you a hefty $100.
I’m not so sure I really needed to go to college. At least not four years of it. Still, someone supposedly much wiser than I thought that anyone who wanted to go into public relations should have a bachelor of arts degree and there was no way I was going to land my plum job without one.
Of course, it helped that my mom told me that I had two choices when I graduated from high school. I could either get a job and pay her rent or go to college and live at home for free.
Hhm, let me think on that. So in April of 1976, I decided to go to college. Back then you didn’t have to take SATs or fight your way into a college of your choice. I enrolled at Green River Community College and voila! – I was a student there.
Unlike many students at GRCC, I never had to think twice about what I wanted to major in. It was a slam dunk: Journalism. It’s all I ever wanted to do. I suppose the other students who dreamed of being a welder were doing the same thing there. Some of my friends still had undeclared majors near the end of their two year stint, one had even gone to Green River for seven years on the GI bill and still hadn’t decided what he wanted to do.
Me, I mostly didn’t want to have to get a real job. My mother made my choice so easy. I must say, college really suited me. I know some people don’t really think much of it, particularly these days. But this was back when you could seek a liberal arts degree and it was still hip.
The focus wasn’t on churning out thousands of mindless civil, electrical and mechanical engineers, scientists and mathematicians. If that were the case, they could have just put a bullet in my head, manually, and I would have been a happy camper.
I was never meant to be a boring brainiac. I still can’t add more than a couple numbers together in my head and don’t really care to. They invented calculators for reason. Thanks Texas Instruments!
They haven’t created anything that can do what I do, yet. Even today, in this world of computer everything, they can’t figure out how to make a machine randomly assemble a bunch of worlds into sentences, paragraphs and pages. One day I’m sure they will, but for now, I am still useful in this world as, yes, a Story Laureate.
Some of the lessons I learned back then are still with me, ingrained into the cortex of my noggin. For example it was my GRCC journalism mentor Ed Eaton who taught me that it’s “adviser” not “advisor” and that you always say “more than,” not “over” a number. One through nine is always written out, 10 and up is expressed in digits.
Merrill Samuelson at the University of Washington taught me to double check the spelling of a person’s name – always. I got an ‘F’ once on an assignment for misspelling the interviewee’s name. I still double and triple check it to this day.
Looking back, I really wish I had gone to the U of W for four years not two. I should have bypassed Green River. It’s not that GRCC was a bad place to go, I loved it there and I got into a lot of mischief while still finding time to go to my classes and get my homework done.
But the UW, wow! It was so much bigger and there were so many more options. And no, I’m not talking about the fact that there were 15,000 female co-eds there. That’s another story entirely.
Rather, I’m talking about the educational experience. If I didn’t need college to become a PR guy, then I certainly needed it to expand my horizons and most important, the way to think.
I’m really surprised anyone can emerge from college with an liberal arts degree and be a conservative. That’s not to say conservatives are closed-minded. I have right-learning friends who are certainly as smart as I am and very open-minded.
It’s just that you learn to think much more critically about the world. You begin to understand that everything is connected, that problems of the poor spill over to create problems in the economy and that the economy isn’t driven by a bunch of fat cats in ivory towers counting their money, but by the middle class that has discretionary income, purchasing products and services that increase employment and creates job growth.
I was fortunate. I got to take classes like Bible as Literature, The History of the Atomic Bomb, Sociology of Deviance… it was like putting a puzzle together in my mind, rearranging all the pieces to create new puzzles that never existed before.
I admit, I was sad to see students shun liberal arts degrees and instead declare majors in the high dollar professions, using a four year college like a technical school. Just what we need, another lawyer in this world. Or another engineer. I mean, how many trains are there in the U.S., anyway? 🙂
But what goes around comes around as they say, and having a liberal arts degree is hip again. Many employers are even preferring it over a business degree these days. Why? They found out that liberal arts majors bring new ideas to the table, having that unique ability to mix and match information, synergizing it into something completely new.
That’s exactly what this world needs right now, people who make things up. It’s worked for me all these years, and it’s great to see that businesses are finally figuring it out too.
In the Emerald City, dreaming of coeds,
– Robb