Helter Shelter
I’ve always been a little slow to realize how fast daughter Jess is growing up. When she started kindergarten, I kept trying to stuff her into clothes from Baby Gap. When she got her driver’s license, I thought she should still be driving one of those plastic Little Tikes Cozy Coupes.
Now, Jess is a year-and-a-half away from college. I’m sitting here with a stack of college guidebooks on my desk, swimmy-headed from reading college websites, and I can’t shed the thought that wife Brenda and I need to put Jess’ Easter basket together, because our baby girl just loves a nice Easter basket.
Whether I like it or not, the college shopping is snatching me through a time warp. The last time I thought hard about college—and the money it takes to go to college—I was 18, on my own and seriously short on funds. Broke as I was, I got myself into the University of South Carolina at Aiken (USCA). I was able to pay for college with the help of grants, loans, a work-study job, a weekend jazz-band gig and about a hundred bucks a month from Social Security survivor’s benefit money. I also got a grant-in-aid from my utility companies, which funded my experiments on their electric, gas and water meters. Long story short, I was able to get through two years of college, feed myself and pay my bills with an income of about $4,000 a year.
Well, don’t you know I was surprised to learn that a year at a somewhat-above-average liberal arts college now costs about the same as a brand new fully-loaded Lexus? That put me to thinking: would it be better to send daughter Jess off to college, or just get a second mortgage, write her a check for $150,000, and let her sink or swim?
I’m straining to think just how much useful knowledge a busload of college professors can squeeze into a young adult’s head in four years’ time. I had a couple dozen teachers in college, but only one of them did me any good. That teacher was Franklin B. Ashley, the chairman of the English department at USCA. Ashley taught me how to ignore my square and soulless English teachers and come up with my own way of putting words on a page. Everything else I learned in college is long forgotten, and was probably useless when I learned it. I don’t speak French or dissect frogs anymore. If I do any psychology or philosophy, it’s stuff I could’ve done without college. If I need to catch up on obscure geography and history, I can Google those. If I need some advanced math or science done, I can call my friend Bill, who used to work for NASA.
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When I talk to other college-shopping parents, most of them tell me the same thing: almost everything they learned in college has evaporated from their brains. The only schoolhouse skill they still use is typing.
Now that I think about it, every bit of useful knowledge I have in my head got there in spite of school and schoolteachers. During 12 years of public school and 3.9 years of college, I had one good teacher. The others were somewhere between adequate and painfully boring. That’s good, though. In my second year of college, when my English teacher told me to read John Milton, I read Hunter Thompson instead. Whether I was in school or out, I let my mind wander and trusted myself to get interested in things that I would stay interested in all my life. It worked pretty well. I’m still interested in the things I do, and since I dropped out of college, I’ve never been bored.
Having done all this reflection, I’m wondering what college gives and what college takes away from a young adult these days. For 200 bucks a day, college had better deliver something special, because I could retire on 200 bucks a day.
I know, I know, I’m going to have to send daughter Jess to college. In the 21st century, every kid who’s not planning on a career greasing a Tilt-A-Whirl or shoveling elephant poop has got to go to college.
As much as it troubles me, I know I’m just going to have to turn my daughter loose sometime next year and see where she goes. Sooner or later, she’ll have to learn how to play life’s Whack-A-Mole game all by herself, without me standing next to her, holding two hammers and ready to jump in if the moles start coming too fast.
Between now and the day that Jess sets off on her own, I’ll do my best to enjoy the last two softball seasons here at home, the last two summer vacations, and the last chances to scare the skin off any high school boys who I think are up to no good. After that, all I can do is hope that when Jess gets to college, she’ll arrive smart enough to know that she shouldn’t let school and teachers get in the way of her education.