Daily News of Los Angeles
Thursday, June 19, 2008

By C. L. Max Nikias

Dear Young Person Planning to Skip College:

As 3 million young Americans have graduated from high school in recent days, my thoughts turn to you, part of the 1 million graduates whose plans do not include college.

A cynical radio personality mused recently about how a young person could do well to simply lie about having a degree: Claiming to have attended college is less expensive than attending college, and few employers confirm college attendance anyway.

If you skip college, you could gain full-time pay and experience over the next four years. You could buy books that interest you and read them at your own pace. You could act on your personal preferences in peers and study topics.

But here is what you would miss out on:

You would miss a chance to spend four years outside your comfort zone, regularly being confronted by persons who are not like you. Their dissimilar beliefs and backgrounds and intellectual styles would slam your own deepest assumptions into a scorching, refining crucible.

At college, you would be prodded to spend a semester or more abroad, in places that would challenge you culturally and impact your career prospects, whether you wish them to or not. We'd encourage you to pursue a double major (or at least minor) in a field entirely unlike your own.

We'd exhort you to attend special events that illuminate the most timeless human values through the arts and humanities.

We'd ask you to perform some original research or works of creativity. This would not be simply to pad your résumé, but to help you grasp how you are a contributing part of a nation that is the world leader precisely because of its imagination and innovation.

As a result, we believe you would be as ready as possible for a world of change: a mature adult able to live in a society whose culture, commerce and demography will resemble neither today's world nor our best predictions. You would be better prepared for jobs that do not exist today, ready to capitalize on new possibilities, possibilities that are being created, in all humility, at America's universities.

By pretending to have a college degree, you can get past employers' demands for a minimum credential. By attending college, you will see that college is far more than a credential and that the person that you can become is more meaningful than the person you may want to pretend to be.

You have been asking yourself, "How could I have afforded to go to college?" The only reasonable response is, "How could you afford not to?"

C. L. Max Nikias is Chrysostomos L. Max Nikias Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Southern California.

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