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Maybe it is parental pressure; maybe just a congenital urge but somehow we feel it is necessary to focus on a major and a career to get the maximum impact from a college education. It is about making a living. But if college is in place to prepare one for what lies ahead in life, reason would dictate that we stop long enough to better assess what our lives are really like. Maybe college is also about having a life.
Let’s start with a normal, 24 hour day and a typical job. Most jobs occupy about 8 hours a day so that leaves 16 hours. We’ll optimistically add a solid 8 hour sleep which leaves about 8 hours of unassigned time. So that’s about 40 hours during the week for you to do non work-related stuff. Now let’s add the weekend of no work, a few vacation days and holidays and 20-30 years of retirement. This would suggest that most of our adult life is not spent on the job so why should we spend our college years solely focused on the smallest part of our adult life? The answer is simple…we shouldn’t. Here’s why.
If all you know is job related, that may not increase your lifetime earnings but it will reduce the quality of that life in unimaginable ways. For starters, what you may love at age 25, you may loathe at 45. What is a job when you are 25, may vanish by age 45 for lots of reasons, not the least of which may be technology. College should also provide you with the tools to switch careers and to free you from the possibility of being trapped for all time in a job you dislike or with a skill that the economy and technology have relegated to the category labeled “irrelevant”. But there is more. Even if you do like your job, people who only know how to do one thing, usually wind up spending more time in their comfort zone. The work day extends beyond the norm and increases to 12 or 15 hours or more and slides into weekends and vacation time. As the assault on unassigned time continues, social life and family suffer collateral damage.
Remember that 8 hours a day of unassigned time during the week and that special two days we call the weekend? Why shouldn’t your education be directed at enriching that time? There are lots of other roles awaiting you out there; school board member, volunteer work, art, travel, concerts and parenting. The list is endless and all are geared to enriching the lives of the participants. College should prepare you for this as well. Whatever you choose to do for a living, if you pay attention to your comprehensive education needs in college, I would hope that when 5 pm rolls around, you start getting “nudgy” because you have tickets to a play or concert or a social event sponsored by your student’s school or youth group. This is the stuff of a real life, a meaningful and truly rich life. And when your own young son or daughter asks, “Mom, why is the sky blue?”, the last thing you should want to say is, “Go ask your father!” Become an educated person with some answers and an endless array of interests.
Well-educated people are more free to do as they wish throughout life. They understand the forces that influence their lives and they are in a better position to do something about it when things don’t go well. So when you consider college, first check the time sheet of life and act accordingly. Life is surely more, much more than a fat paycheck, and the ticket to that enriched life often begins at a place called college.
Posted On
11/26/2008 6:14:51 PM
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