The Most Valuable Return on Your College Investment

This piece was originally featured in Cogitare’s Fall 2022 Print Edition

School work is important. Classes are important. Tuition is pricey, and time is limited, which means it is important to work hard and waste little. I say this because I’m about to argue for what might seem like the opposite – that, put in perspective, the school in school is not nearly as worthwhile as the people in school. 

I intend to paint with criminally broad brush strokes and make some fat generalizations. Here’s my point precisely: We should always value interaction and relationship with other human souls over academic success when the two are in conflict, for relationships will be the most valuable return on your college investment.

When you bump into another human, you are bumping into an entire alternate universe of beliefs, sins, and experiences completely alien to yours. Given our college setting, you could not escape them if you tried. That’s special. Just as special as your academic opportunities here. You won’t have such a dense, ever-present matrix of constant people forever. Why is that a perk? Why should that be taken advantage of? 

First, because people are the best way to learn things – all sorts of things. Things are fine and good to learn about in abstract, explained by a professor or seared into memory by a quiz, but things only have legs once they have legs. People, with all their beauty and frustration, are the embodiment of ideas in the real world. 

What will you remember from this place? What will sear your soul? Research from cognitive scientist Daniel T. Willingham indicates that people forget most of what they learn from classes. Disembodied information fades. The average adult holds twelve different jobs now, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. For the majority of us, grades and even choice of major will end up embarrassingly irrelevant. 

We remember what we think about, Willingham claims. What do we think about? We think about stories. We think about social interactions. We think about things that frustrate us or amuse us or move us. Human beings tell some pretty rocking stories, provide our only acceptable social interaction, and have a unique ability to be frustrating, amusing and moving at the same time. 

Spend time laughing with them, crying with them, arguing with them, asking them about their universe. Conversation is thinking embodied, and memory is the residue of thought. Hunt substantive and insightful interaction, and you’ll have a much richer arsenal of memories than any classwork can offer. 

Second, people are the best use of your time because they’re the best way to prepare for the most real job you will have: loving well. Any well-earned degree that takes more sweat than the struggle to love selflessly is a performance degree in cymbal-clanging. 

People are weird. It’s easy to love the ones you like. Have you tried loving the ones you don’t? Oftentimes, the more alien someone is, the more you can learn from them. To love a like-minded neighbor is to learn the length of a well-kept yard’s worth about love. To love a Martian is to learn 177.22 million miles’ worth about love. This takes energy. Spacecraft aren’t cheap, but if our goal here is to learn to listen and love well, we might do well to start investing now.

Too often college represents a pause from responsibility to people. We students live without family or economic community, and so we live without being needed. This place, with all its clubs and communities, is designed to work without you. But people need need. Spend time listening to people and meeting their needs and you will be a more virtuous, satisfied person. The happiest people on campus are not the people that stress about school. They’re the people that stress about people.

But what about academic excellence? The biblical concept of a tithe may apply here. No matter how poor we are, God wants the first fruits. Give Him that precious portion with faith in his sustenance, and we will be provided for. Can the same not be said of our time, even our school time? 

God wants us to offer ourselves to others. As Hebrews 6:10 says, God “will not forget your work and the love you have shown him as you have helped his people and continue to help them.” Grades can be sacrificed on this altar. Even if GPA is necessary for a future monetary situation, trust that God will provide even when you’re giving the first fruits of your time to other eternal souls. 

The Behemoth is fed from the hills, the constellations are brought forth in season, people are raised from the dead, the church rapidly spreads, and a prof stamps your piece of paper with a letter neither of you will remember. Will you care when you’ve earned your silver crown of glory? “I wish I would have turned that assignment in on time” is suspiciously missing from the utterances of the seasoned and the wise.

Worldly success is worthless. Soul growth isn’t. We study at a place specially equipped to help with both. School work is important. Classes are important. But, for the love of God, don’t pass up the people around you. Invest wisely.