There was a time when going to college was considered a major accomplishment. I don’t know when that was, but it preceded me by a number of years.

A recent letter written by an urban newspaper reader suggests half the students in college today shouldn’t be there. He states,
“Administrators, academics, publishers, bankers and the sports industry all have a vested interest in increasing the undergraduate population. The quality of education being delivered to a majority of students is closer to remedial high school rather than college.”

That sounds a little extreme to many folks, but I saw it happen over a period of years. I got my degree from a land grant university and started teaching vocational agriculture in 1966.
I taught classes, graded papers, changed jobs and went back to the university for a graduate degree four years later. The professors were kind enough to give me a graduate assistant’s job, and I helped grade some student papers.

I noticed many of those papers weren’t very good. Wait a minute, I thought. These kids aren’t any better than the ones I had in high school. The poorer ones!

That’s when I realized that most of the kids in high school were expected to head for college. You can see it in the classes and in the grading system.

Whatever happened to the days when college was an option, but not the expected one? Those were the days when college was important for some, but not for everyone.

My own family is a good example. We grew up on a farm and weren’t expected to attend college. My parents wanted us to go, but they didn’t expect it.

My two oldest brothers became farmers. They were smart and good at it. Another brother in my family may have been the smartest kid in the clan, but he didn’t want to be a farmer. And, he didn’t want to attend college.

My mother took him to see a college administrator and tried to encourage him, but it didn’t work. She might as well have sicced the dog on him.

Some of my family went to college, but nobody expected it. It’s just as well, I think. Those who didn’t go are at least as smart and successful as those who did.

My wife Connie’s family is totally different from mine. All of her brothers and sisters attended a university and graduated. Her dad was a doctor, and his sister was a teacher.

Connie’s mother grew up in the coal-mining region of Ohio. She never attended college, but several in her family did, hard as that might have been. One of Connie’s aunts attended Muskingum College in New Concord, but dropped out during World War II.

“I got a good job in Columbus, so I quit college and moved there,” she told me. “I should have stayed at Muskingum until I graduated.”

“How long were you in college?” I asked her.

“One semester,” she said.

Readers with questions or comments for Roger Pond may write to him in care of this publication.