My college career

I learned a lot about how colleges work (or don’t work). I had been given a full-ride scholarship to Ricks College, a two year college, and left after a year and a half to get married. I probably could have insisted on staying to graduate, but it didn’t occur to me. My husband had a job in Utah, so I gladly went to live there instead. It’s probably a good thing I didn’t continue in school at that point; I was pregnant within a month after marriage. Morning sickness had me in its grip for several months, and then I was on bedrest for six weeks. After our baby was born, my husband decided to return to college himself. We moved to Pennsylvania; he enrolled the two of us adults in Shippensburg University, where he already had three years completed. He registered us both by telling them, “I need these classes to graduate, and my wife needs to take classes on the opposite days so we can care for our baby.” I was taking gen-eds anyway, with one German class thrown in.

Gen-eds are general education courses, a list of basic required classes, without which a person could not be said to be college-educated. They’re designed to ensure that a person can write effectively, do a modicum of math, and has learned at least some history, science, and culture. At the two-year school I had previously attended, they required American history, physics, biology, a language other than English, and religion. They strongly encouraged physical education, dance, sports, exercise, the study of health and wellness. They also offered money management and time management classes. Ballroom dance was by far the most popular physical education class; it filled up immediately.

I had passed my humanities class without studying much at all; I had a music and theater background. I had taken college-prep classes in high school; my high school and college physics classes were very similar. After taking Mr. Earl Jensen’s biology class in high school, I took college biology while sleeping through it. I took two years of German in high school, and a semester of German at Ricks. I enjoyed astronomy.

Ricks College was a church-run college with a select group of students from all over the world, about 7000 people when I was there. Shippensburg University was a publicly funded college in the Pennsylvania state system. Gen-eds at Shippensburg were largely the same types of classes as at Ricks. I took geology, communications, German, and world history. My husband worked nights and attended classes three days a week. He then took a summer class and graduated. There was no graduation ceremony for him, because it would have cost us money.

He had already had a ceremony, anyway; before we ever met he had “graduated”. That is, he had walked across the stage and received an empty folder that should have contained a diploma. His parents had come and cheered him on. And then he told them he had been asked to leave the school, because he flunked, because he was drinking like a fish. His father had thrown up his hands and refused to speak to him again until after my husband changed his ways.

Many years later I finished my associates degree, a two year degree in General Education. By then we had been enrolling our children in college classes online and in person for several years. I enrolled in Clovis Community College in New Mexico. I took health and wellness, a class that both measured my health and required regular exercise to pass it. Research paper writing was a required class, even though I was teaching my children how to write research papers. My last class was accounting, a four-credit class teaching double entry book-keeping on paper. It was useful to know how double entry book-keeping works, and I actually enjoyed the fiddly details of making sure the numbers were entered in the correct places and totaled correctly. But no one in my world now does book-keeping on paper. It’s all digital. The computers crunch the numbers and spit out totals far faster and more accurately than I could. Plus they’re searchable.

At last I had an associates degree. I could put the initials after my name if I wanted. I didn’t care about the prestige, and after finishing I had no desire to return for a bachelor’s degree.