ARCHIVE :: JANUARY 2003 :: ON CAMPUS

Educational
Value

It's Up to You to Get
Your Money's Worth
Out of College

By HARLAN COHEN
Special to The Wall Street Journal

There’s no question about it: College is expensive.        

The average cost of tuition, room and board at a four-year public college is $9,663 annually this year, and rising fast. At a private college, it’s $25,052—or more than $100,000 for four years.

Is it really worth that much money? The answer is entirely up to you.

College isn’t so much an expense as it is an adventure, one where your choices determine how rewarding your experience will be.

It’s sort of like buying a ticket to an amusement park. College is filled with exciting attractions, scary turns, interesting characters, unique experiences, even emotional roller-coasters. And choices. Lots and lots of choices. If you make good choices and take advantage of the opportunities, you’ll have an exhilarating time. If you don’t, if you simply drift through campus for four years, you’ll walk away on graduation day feeling like you got cheated out of the price of admission.

Pick Up a Map

 If you’re going to spend four years in an academic theme park, start by picking one where you like the “theme,” where the surroundings excite you. There are thousands of colleges to explore, some in big cities, small towns, along sandy beaches, snowy mountains, tropical spots, and frigid tundra. There are small colleges that boast the benefits of nearby cities, and big colleges that boast the benefits of small-town life. The theme you choose will help define your college experience. And if after a couple of years, you need a change of scenery, you can always take a semester or two abroad, often with little additional cost. You’ve got the Parkhopper pass.

No matter what environment you choose, you’re likely to find even more choices when you get there. So before you go anywhere, pick up a map. That is, find someone to guide you—an academic adviser or mentor who can help you choose your courses, plot a strategy and set priorities. (Often, freshmen are assigned a faculty adviser when they enroll, but you can always choose someone else). Otherwise, you could end up wandering aimlessly and wasting time and money. Amanda Isen, a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says she never got good guidance from her adviser and feels like she kept taking wrong turns. A large college like UW certainly offers more choices and resources than a smaller school, but the choices can be overwhelming if you don’t have the right people to guide you. Ms. Isen is contemplating transferring to a smaller college where she can get more attention.

Andrew Glickman spent his freshman year at a large state school in Florida, but says “a lot of people sit around and get lost in the crowd.” He has since transferred to Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. Northwestern, a private school, is a lot costlier, but the appeal for him there is the smaller classes, the quality of the education, and the location (20 minutes from Chicago). Andrew is enrolled in NU’s journalism school, a small college within a college. The attention and guidance, he says, make a huge difference.

Have Fun

 At least half the adventure in college is what you do outside the classroom. These are the side attractions—the things that fill up your time between classes—but they often become a college graduate’s most valuable and memorable experiences. Erin Abrahams, a University of Michigan alumna, has fond memories of the many cultural attractions in Ann Arbor, Mich., such as her college’s a capella singing group. She discovered them on a trip home to New York, where the singers were competing at Carnegie Hall. She went to see them perform, and then went back to campus to hear them again and again and, yes, again. Other students take advantage of discounted tickets to the theater, movies and collegiate sporting events. At Northwestern, for instance, a football season ticket costs students just $36, which is about what nonstudents pay for a single game. (Caution: Northwestern football games can cause nausea and discomfort. But the victories have a way of being memorable.)

Besides sports and culture, take a chance with courses outside of your major. Some colleges offer classes in music (I took guitar), martial arts, fine arts, poetry, pottery, sports, dance, wine tasting, and even the history of rock ’n’ roll. These are generally free for students, or offered for a small additional price. And while they offer all the adventure and fun of learning something new, there’s none of the queasiness associated with exams and grades. Lately, I’ve also seen a lot of colleges adding recreation centers with equipment rivaling costly private gyms. Access to the gyms is typically included in the cost of tuition, so failing to use them is just letting money go to waste.

And if that’s not enough, campus clubs and activities often include trips to conferences or conventions, where the college pays for your travel expenses. They even give you money for food. This year’s college-newspaper convention was in Orlando, Fla., a town famous for, well, you know.

Yes, college is expensive, but it’s what you do in college that determines whether it’s worth the price of admission. You can walk out with just a souvenir T-shirt and a ticket stub. Or you can have the adventure of a lifetime. It’s all up to you.

Now, this is the part when I start singing, “When You Wish Upon a Star ...”