Dear Groucho Marx,

You may remember that you once remarked, "I don't care to belong to any club that will have me as a member." Well, Mr. Marx, I don't care to go to any college that will admit me as a student.

Colleges seem to sort themselves neatly in my mind into colleges that are boring (Morningside, I'm looking at you) and colleges I have no prayer of getting into (like for instance, University of Rochester). I'm sure there are colleges in between. I'm sure some boring colleges are more interesting than they would seem and some impossible colleges will, in fact, take me. But I'm gonna be honest, I hope it's the latter option that comes true.

Yeah, while we're here on the topic, I'm gonna take myself a minute to complain. Skip ahead if you like. The idea of college is like an anxiety attack in a bottle. I shouldn't have gotten that B in math class-- I should have studied those few hours more. I should have taken 4 years of German instead of that stupid journalism class. Better yet, I shouldn't have screwed around with choir, I should have taken Spanish, too. I should have left room for AP Chemistry, even though I don't expect to like regular chemistry. I should have joined more clubs as a freshman. I should join more clubs now. I shouldn't bother with art next year. I can't major in linguistics, I have to get a job. I probably won't have time to take all the classes I want to take, like music theory, and history, and linguistics, and psychology. I should read more books!

That last sentence was "I should read more books!" I'm down with reading more books.

The thing is, those petty awards like grades and major letters will eventually be meaningless. (I mean, the pins will hang out on some forgotten piece of felt in my mom's attic for years and she might pull it out someday to when my kids are over at Grandma's house, and we can all take about one minute to feel nostalgic, and that will be worth something. Maybe I better hold out for that one minute of supremely limited fame.) Even now, those letters and grades are pretty meaningless. Learning things is great, because it allows you to learn to think. Being able to think well is very useful for things like developing coherent ideas, and solving complex problems, and being fascinated with this complex and interesting world we live in. Getting golden starts does not promote fascination and curiosity.

Ideally, everything we learn in school would promote fascination and curiosity and develop the ability to think critically and elegantly, and ideally, grades would perfectly reflect what we had learned and therefore the results of that learning, and then they would be useful. As it is, they do a barely adequate job of it. Colleges must assume they have most of the value they ought to have, and for that reason, we must continue the menial quest for meaningless rewards.

Ho-hum.
Claire

P.S.  I got college propaganda from Beloit with the word ho-hum in it, and well used, too.