College educations are valuable ““ your real major is life

Sitting in a sea of caps and gowns and listening to the speakers
congratulate his class, the soon-to-be UCLA graduate took a moment
to reflect on his future. 

Big mistake. 

Having lived through the experience of being a freshman in both
high school and college, he was about to become a freshman in
life. He had thought about grad school and jobs, but all of
that seemed far away and vaguely menacing. He tried to find
comfort in the skills and knowledge he had acquired in school, but
sensed that most of the information he’d inhaled during
pre-final all-nighters had immediately flown from his head after
each test. As he squirmed in his seat, his stomach began to
twist itself into a knot, and a voice in his head screamed,
“Don’t make me leave!”

Looking back on that day fifteen years later, I can see how
right I was ““ and how wrong. Yes, I had forgotten a lot
of what I learned in classes. And yes, graduate school and the
daily grind of a job can be their own forms of hell, especially in
the beginning. But it turned out I had knowledge and skills I never
realized, from disciplines I’d never thought I studied in
college. 

In hindsight it’s clear that my real college major was
life, and this was my core curriculum.

Relationships 101: Life on the outside ““ of college, I
mean ““ is all about relationships. It’s not just who
you know but also whether people get to know you ““ especially
your inner strengths: character, leadership, good judgement or
whatever else they may be. An ounce of good sense about people
is worth a pound of resumes. Fortunately, college is about
relationships too. You’ve built them with friends,
classmates, professors and others in the
community. You’ve had some big successes and learned
from mistakes. You know something about listening, respect and
empathy. 

The Big Sandbox: Supposedly world-wise elders sometimes
demean college activities by saying they take place “in a
sandbox.” The idea is that what happens on campus isn’t
real because, compared with outsiders, students have less at stake
and operate with a safety net. While there is a kernel of
truth here ““ sometimes more is at stake on the outside
““ the premise is a hoax. Life in college is the real
deal. If you’ve participated in campus activities, you
can be confident that you’ll see a lot of the same human
dynamics, strategies, opportunities, risks and challenges in the
years to come. 

Advanced Drone Avoidance: On graduation day I worried that
joining the workforce would have to mean selling my soul. A
great many college graduates seemed to have jobs that involved
shutting off their inner selves in order to make a decent living as
a corporate drone. Later I discovered I was partly right: a
lot of people were unhappy or in denial. But I also found that I
knew more than I had thought on how to handle the
situation, due to what I had learned in college. No
one class had focused on “maintaining sanity and identity
while at work,” of course, but most humanities and social
science classes had highlighted brave souls who threw off the yoke
of conformity and lived life on their own terms.

Armed with these examples, I was ready to build a career that
was meaningful to me. Whether you know it now or not, you may
be ready too. Fifteen years ago, as I sat in the sun on graduation
day, I had high hopes. But I had only the murkiest vision of
what was to come, and a lot of reasons to be wary. Little did I
know how my real college education would light my path.

Hoffman graduated in 1988 and is the founder and president
of Create the Commonwealth, a nonprofit organization that studies
and promotes democracy and civic engagement.