I went out to dinner with my family for my youngest sister’s birthday last night. Toward the end of the dinner I started a discussion about whether or not the college you go to really matters educationally. My argument was that there is nothing meaningfully different between being educated at the College of Charleston (where I went) and being educated at Harvard.

Here’s my side: If I studied and worked hard at a class and got an A at CofC I would’ve gotten an A in the same class at Harvard. The reason for this is that the beauty of college is that it is entirely up to you. The teacher isn’t there to coddle you; he/she just presents the information and then you absorb it, synthesize it, and create new thoughts pertaining to it all on your own. Because the impetuous is on you, it doesn’t matter what setting you are in (Harvard or CofC). It isn’t like the kids at Harvard get the real version of Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason while I, at CofC, got a fake version. We all had the same book and our education, therefore, was incumbent on how hard we tried to understand that book (note: no one in the entire world actually understands that particular book). Being at Harvard doesn’t grant you special insight into Kantian philosophy or anything else. It all depends on how hard you work, how much effort you put forth, and that is entirely independent of what school you attend.

My entire family basically disagreed with me, particular one of my sisters who went to 3 schools for undergrad and one more for graduate school. Here’s their side of the argument: The quality of the education you receive at Harvard is better than what you’d receive at CofC. They pointed out all the people they knew who also attended CofC who were less than stellar scholars shall we say. These people graduated despite being not all together concerned with academic pursuits. My family argued that these people would not have been able to skate by like they did at CofC at a university like Harvard. Thus, they argued, there is a difference between getting an A at Harvard and getting one at CofC. Also, they believed that this fact meant that the caliber of students at Harvard is better and hence the class discussions would be of a higher quality. Furthermore, they pointed out that the best professors are pursued by schools like Harvard so the professors at those institutes are superior. Pointing to personal experience my sister said that she took the same class that used the exact same book at Wake Forest, Converse College, and Presbyterian College. She held that the class at Wake required more of the students through labs and exercises and test that were more difficult than the ones at the other two places (she graduated from PC and said that was nearly as good at Wake). So in their mind, getting an A at Harvard was better than getting an A at CofC.

Ok now here’s my retort to all of that: First of all, while the professors might be highly thought of in academic circles, they gained that notoriety by publishing articles. When Harvard hires them, they do it so that this professor or public figure will continue to publish articles and have his/her notoriety associated with their university. So their job isn’t to teach, it’s to publish. Hence, the whole ‘the professors are better and provide a better education at Harvard’ argument flies out the window because in reality teacher’s assistants are the one’s doing the bulk of the work associated with ‘teaching’ while the professor writes his/her next book. Second, the idea that the class discussions are better at Harvard is also false. Compared to the student body at a state school like CofC, the Harvard campus is pretty monotonous: rich, from New England, overachievers. A discussion at a state school would bring in opinions from all sorts of people with all sorts of different backgrounds and therefore the discussion would be more realistic (ie reflecting the views of actual people) and therefore better.

Now onto the crux of the argument. Sure some people at CofC do the bare minimum and skate by. Hell there was a class or two (or three or four) where I did the bare minimum and still got an A or a B. But that’s where the mirage of ‘more prestigious’ universities and colleges rears its ugly head. The problem with CofC is that if I barely tried or if I really exerted myself and studied as hard as I could, I got essentially the same grade. But that doesn’t mean the quality of my education is equal despite the similar grades. If I busted my hump, the quality of the education I received was far greater than if I did only what was required. Therefore, if you bust your hump at CofC or PC or Converse or wherever, you would meet the higher, more stringent standards of a place like Wake or Harvard or Yale or wherever even though no one actually put those higher, more stringent standards on you. Put another way, if you do the maximum amount it doesn’t matter if the bar was set low or high because having done the maximum amount you would’ve cleared either bar. Hence the only real advantage of a ‘more prestigious’ school is that through higher standards it forces you to work hard by ensuring that anything less than your best effort will result in a poor grade. But all that advantage does is weed out slackers. If you worked hard and got an A at CofC you still would’ve gotten an A at Wake or Harvard by putting forth the same amount of effort because the maximum effort exceeds both low and high standards. Therefore, where you go to school doesn’t really matter and I’ve proven my initial point.

Now here’s where things get really interesting because it isn’t enough to just say that a hard earned A is a hard earned A no matter where you go to school. I believe that the advantage ‘more prestigious’ schools have, which I just mentioned in the paragraph above, is actually a disadvantage and therein makes getting an A at College of Charleston better than getting an A at Harvard.

Education-wise, I hated high school. I hated it because everything was meticulously planned and everyone was looking over your shoulder. As a result I refused to try hard and my grades were very average (My senior year in English class I never read one word of Silas Marner or Wuthering Heights and happily took zeros on all the quizzes for those two book. As punishment for this, the teacher made me sit in my desk facing the back wall.). Conversely, I loved college because you could take whatever class you wanted and no one was breathing down your neck about what you were doing. If you didn’t want to try hard the professor just didn’t bother with you. If you did want to try hard the professor would make every effort to ensure that you fulfilled your potential. High school is basically educational boot camp at best and educational jail at worst. College, on the other hand, is educational freedom.

This is where the distinction comes in. At Harvard you are free to pick your own classes, but once in that class you are forced by their rigorous standards to put forth the maximum effort or else you’ll fail out. At CofC you are not only free to pick your own classes, but you’re also free to try hard or just skate by. Given this situation, Harvard students do not personally make the choice to try hard because the institution simply commands it. If you’re a CofC student, however, you can use your own free will to decide, in the face of temptation (when I went there it was 70% women and voted by High Times as one of their ‘best’ colleges), to try hard. Anytime someone freely opts to do the right thing instead of doing the right thing because they were forced too, the person freely choosing is better than the person being forced. That’s just a basic philosophical principle, which, by the way, I learned at CofC, and it proves that an A at CofC is better than an A at Harvard (with the caveat that you put forth the maximum effort in earning that A at CofC) because you freely decided to do all the work that a Harvard student getting an A would have been required to do.

(Note: My high praise for CofC only applies to the years 2004 and earlier. Few things anger me more than the fact that now CofC has become USC East. A school that once prided itself on having barely any fraternities is now flush with guys wearing their sunglasses backwards. I find this unacceptable and will never give CofC any money until the situation is rectified and beatniks like myself are once again the dominate social force at CofC.)