Saturday, March 3, 2007

Through The Lens of Time

Professor Bainbridge provides a link and expresses his opinion on young students and their educational choices by noting:

I'm reminded of a saying: students are one of the fewer consumer groups that derive more utility by consuming less of the good they've purchased.
I'm not an economist, yet,......but I will posit that The Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility does not apply to adult students. We are returning to college for a specific goal, as all students are, but, at our age, we know what we don't know, and we want to learn as much as we can. Looking through the lens of time, we KNOW that the questions of life can be, partially at least, answered in the halls of academe. But, it takes a few adventures on the path of life to fully comprehend that the ignored questions of our youth do not go away if ignored. They simply recede, or do not present themselves to us until much, much later. We can argue that a narrow exposure to education may help in terms of gaining admission to law school, or medical school, but it fails to give us the perspective needed for the really big questions that will come to us all.

I'm going to get the questions right this time.