Last week I relayed to my graduate students that I was behind Ursula K. Le Guin in the grocery line. But none of them knew who she was. The grocery checker knew; he recommended The Wizard of Earthsea which is one of her books I’ve yet to read. Sometimes I wonder about higher education. People are so busy studying their chosen field they miss a broader education.

Financially there’s a difference too: after six years of post high school study, I was out enough money to have started the housing-renovation career I always fantasized about — also nearly all my cousins and friends who passed on college, are financially more stable than I will ever be.

As it turns out, my education wasn’t for money or a dream career or even about saving the world through counseling. It was about the changes that took place in me while in the experience of academia itself, changes I’m fairly certain would not have materialized otherwise.

Near the end of graduate school I had a high-school-graduate boss who, overnight, was promoted from a clerical position to a department director. She claimed that the only thing college was good for was to show you could finish something.

That and knowing what to say and when to say it.