Who Needs College?

This fall, I’m taking myself back to school. Sort of.

It’s now been 30 years since I graduated with my bachelor’s degree and 25 years since I finished my master’s. Those were big milestones, but wrapping up my formal education was more of a beginning than an end.

Completing my college education was really the start of my lifelong pursuit of learning. I wasn’t much of a book reader until I went to college. College also taught me to love lectures. One of the intellectual highlights of my undergrad years was an unassigned late-afternoon lecture I attended where a professor laid out the evidence for who had authored each of The Federalist Papers. I was fascinated.

But just as much as college taught me to love learning, it also made me love the ritual of preparing for a new academic year. Specifically, purchasing new textbooks and other assorted school supplies. Notebooks. Pens. Pencils. Highlighters. Post It notes. Floppy disks (yes, I’m that old). Index cards that I rarely used.

That annual yearning to go back-to-school shopping is what really started once I graduated. To this day, I still get a little jolt of excitement when I walk into an Office Max, or Walmart, or Costco in August and see the array of available school-related merchandise.

Most years, at back-to-school time I still even pick up a few notebooks or highlighters even though I am no longer enrolled in a class. After all, even if these purchases end up collecting dust on a shelf, the sale prices are hard to pass up.

There’s something else about college semesters I’ve always appreciated. Semesters are structured. For each class, the instructor hands out a syllabus during the first class session proclaiming, in writing, the reading and homework assignments due, the exam schedule, and the papers and projects to be completed.

At least in my case, when reviewing all of the syllabi and mapping out what needed to be done, there was a good bit of picking and choosing when it came to not only prioritizing what work I would do, but what work I would do at all.

What reading could I blow off? What extra credit work could I ignore? What was the least I could do and still succeed in the class?

Once I attended a few class sessions, and became better acquainted with each instructor’s expectations (some were more laid back about the reading, and rarely if ever lectured to it; others were sticklers and during class would call on students to purposely embarrass those they suspected hadn’t read the assigned text), my anticipated workload could be adjusted downward.

As I later went on to teach college courses, I’m not proud to admit that this was my approach. But the truth is that, as an 18- or 20-year-old, it was my modus operandi.

By the time I returned to the classroom as an eager graduate student in my mid-twenties, however, my work ethic had improved considerably. I actually went to the college bookstore weeks before classes started to buy my books and get an early jump on the semester.

This bit of nerdom proved to be extremely smart, given the multiple novels assigned for the English class I was taking. I never would have read those books if I’d waited until the weeks when they were assigned.

I don’t necessarily need to be enrolled in a college or university to continue to learn and grow.

Also, by that point, as I had been in a professional job for three years, I had begun to live by my calendar. When I started graduate school, scheduled meetings and phone calls were replaced by class sessions and deadlines for papers to be written and group projects to be completed.

Now, decades later, I’m back to a calendar full of calls, meetings, and work deadlines. But I miss having lectures and labs to attend, books to read that I may or may not have discovered or read on my own, and the knowledge that if I do all the work, in a few months I’m going to have more knowledge.

I’m ready to go back to school!

It Started with a Facebook Ad

It was awfully funny in the 1980s when Rodney Dangerfield went back to college and became both a student and collegiate diver (and got help from Sally Kellerman to “straighten out his Longfellow”).

It was even funnier in the 1990s when Homer Simpson went back to college and expected it to be like Animal House or Revenge of the Nerds. Instead, he fell in with a group of socially awkward geeks and emerged from the experience arguably even dumber than he was before.

And it was a lot less funny in the 2010s when Chevy Chase went back to community college.

But none of these depictions of adult learners stirred me to do something about the absence of higher learning in my life.

It was a Facebook ad.

In spring 2019 an ad popped up in my feed for a free online course on the history of baseball offered through Purdue University Global. On a whim, I signed up and then promptly forgot about it. Weeks later, I was surprised to receive an email letting me know when the class would begin and providing the log-in instructions.

For better or worse, I was back in school.

A course on baseball history didn’t promise to enrich me with much new knowledge. After all, I’d read dozens, if not hundreds of baseball books. I even did my master’s thesis on New York City newspaper coverage of Babe Ruth.

Fortunately, I couldn’t have been more wrong. The course delved into the business of baseball, women in baseball, and modern “money ball” analytics. And it was extremely well done. The professors were enthusiastic, the online platform worked as promised, my fellow students took the class as seriously as I did, and the entire experience was first-rate.

Every week I was not only excited to log in to the lectures, but I was also motivated to do all of the reading (including the “suggested additional reading” I routinely blew off as an undergraduate).

When my family went on vacation, I took my laptop and textbook with me, and sat at the patio table of our rented beach house doing work for my course, happy as a clam (an unboiled clam, that is). The fact that it was a non-credit course and wasn’t for a grade made no difference to me. I was learning, and it was glorious!

Fourteen months after completing that course, I’m ready to jump back in.

One option that’s not in the cards for me at this point is to actually enroll in a college program, whether for another degree or a professional certificate. There’s no time or money for that this year, frankly.

But there’s also the reality that I don’t necessarily need to be enrolled in a college or university to continue to learn and grow. We now live in the age of free online courses (e.g., the baseball course I took from Purdue), streaming documentaries, and educational podcasts.

Then there are books. In my case lots of books. It’s been said that there’s a difference between accumulating books and actually reading them. And, between library used book sales, time spent browsing the shelves at Half Price Books, and grabbing $1.99 eBooks from Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I long ago passed the point where I had bought more books than I could possibly read.

This is a shame because some really great titles have been languishing on my shelves and in my eReader. And they deserve my attention.

A Do-It-Yourself Semester

So, this fall I’ve built my own semester. And I’m going to engage in a season of learning.

Here are some of my ground rules:

My semester will cover multiple subjects.

Just like an academic semester, I’m not going to go deep in one area only. I’m going to build my knowledge on multiple subjects: logic, western civilization and history, literature, mathematical models, project management, and Microsoft Excel. Below, you can find the link to my planned semester.

Relevant professional skills will mix with learning for learning's sake.

Mostly, I’ll be acquiring knowledge this fall, but I’ll also focus on building skills I can use in my career right now. For instance, I’ve always been a bit of a novice at using spreadsheets. Through a series of LinkedIn Learning courses, I’m going to fix that!

On the other hand, there’s probably not much skill acquisition likely to come from my reading a new-to-me Mark Twain book I’ve never cracked the spine of after picking it up at a library sale.

With my new skills and knowledge, unlike Homer Simpson, I'm going to become "SMRT!"

None of the resources will cost me any additional money.

A big part of what makes my semester possible is that there are so many ways to learn available to me. Even during this time when I, like many of you, am largely homebound.

I'm making a distinction, however, between resources that won’t cost me any additional money and those that are totally free. This semester is not free. I bought the books I’ll read. I subscribed to the streaming service where I’ll watch a documentary. And I have a premium LinkedIn account, which includes LinkedIn Learning.

Of course, I could have assembled a semester using totally free resources. I could have drawn on books borrowed from the library, free online courses, documentaries available on YouTube. You may want to do this yourself. But I opted to use resources that were available to me, as opposed to resources that are freely available to everyone.

All learning will be flexible.

Life, work and non-work, will certainly rear its ugly head over the course of the next three-and-a-half months. I’m accounting for this at the outset. Of course, life also interceded during my college semesters, but then I didn’t have the responsibilities on my plate that I have now.

So, while the schedule I’ve mapped out creates necessary learning tension, I’m not going to beat myself up if I can’t stick to it. I’ll jump ahead when I can, push out what I can’t get done, and so forth. The goal is to stay engaged, keep learning, and, above all else, have fun!

Breaking Out My Notebook

So, here’s my schedule for the fall semester. I’ll check back in at the end to let you know how it went, what I learned, and what I learned about myself. As I’ve not committed to writing any papers this semester (though I will be taking copious notes), that blog will be the written proof of my learning.

What are you going to do this fall to keep growing? I’d love to hear what you’re up to.

Now, it’s time to do some reading!