College Decisions

I will be beginning my online college courses next week, and that being the case I wanted to write a post explaining my journey from “not going to college” to “enrolling in an online college program”. It all started last October…

I wrote this post on August 21, 2006:

"I... don't plan on going to college… I plan to farm

“College is certainly thought of extremely highly now[a]days. I've discussed with my parents how people will either think that I'm dumb or that I'm wasting my intelligence (wouldn't that be a flattering opinion?). However, I think the wisest way to think about college is how we think of most things. If it looks like it will be beneficial, then invest in it; but it is a waste of alot of time and money to go to college simply to "go with the flow" if it doesn't seem to be beneficial. Therefore, I have decided to invest the time and money in building a business and beginning a family instead of going to college."

Such were my plans until November of last year. I had no intentions of taking even online courses, for a couple of reasons. The first was the time requirement; I wanted the four years that would be required for college studies to be devoted instead to building my farm business. The second reason was the expense. I saw no purpose in sinking at least $15,000 dollars or so into a degree that I might never need, when the same money could go so far if invested in the farm.

For some reason that I can’t recall, I took the ACT test in October. Shortly before my 18^th birthday we received my scores, which opened up some opportunities that we had not considered before. We slipped in an application to the University of Alabama (UA in the rest of this post) and another college or two, just before their deadlines, and waited to see what would happen.

It has been a wild ride from there. I was accepted to both UA and my local community college, and offered a full scholarship to either one. We knew that the program would have to be online, as we certainly were not considering college instead of farming, so we drove down to UA and talked to several contacts there. To our chagrin, we learned that the program we were considering (New College), though much more open than traditional programs, still required about half of the credits towards a degree to be taken on campus.

At that point we gave up on UA. We instead looked into a Business program at Wallace State, the community college just down the road from here, which was mostly online. Wallace is just a two-year college, so for the last two years I would have transferred to Athens State, which has an online General Business program but does not offer General Education courses. This would have required me to re-apply for a scholarship when I transferred and was much less appealing than the scholarship that UA had offered.

Our expectations were turned on their head again shortly after Thanksgiving. One evening I was browsing UA’s website and looked at their Business college. There I found a link that said “Online Program”. In that serendipitous way we discovered that UA does, indeed, have some online programs, one of which is General Business. The program is completely online, which seemed like a tailored fit to my situation, and I enrolled in the program. Ironically, not one of the 6 people that we talked to at UA, all of whom knew I wanted to earn a degree online, made any mention of the possibility of my doing so.

Once our need for an online program was met, we spent a few weeks working through the requirements for a scholarship. Scholarships are intended for on-campus students, so my case was presented to the Scholarship Committee. They agreed to grant me the scholarship despite my Distance Student designation; as far as we know, I am the first scholarship online student.

Those are the facts, but they don’t reveal the massive change that it took for my parents and I to decide that pursuing a college degree was the appropriate course for me. I wish to follow the Lord’s leading in all things, and we really felt that these opportunities were doors opened by God and should be utilized. Our decisions were made with much thought and prayer- and struggling, at times.

I plan to continue growing the farm during my years in college, and I hope that the farm is earning enough profit to support a family by the time I graduate. God has blessed me with a multitude of opportunities; my duty for the next few years is to work as hard as I can to make good use of them. As Theodore Roosevelt (one of my heroes) exhorted: “I wish to preach, not the doctrine of ignoble ease, but the doctrine of the strenuous life.” I expect the next few years of my life to be more strenuous than anything I have experienced, and I have worked to make them so.

Now that we have decided that I will pursue a college degree after all, we find ourselves more honored by some of our extended family. I mourn our culture’s perception of college as the determining factor in whether one is “smart” or successful. My circumstances could have easily led me along the path I expected, of building my farm exclusively. If I had pursued that course, I believe some of my family (having deemed me lost) would have immediately started talking to Smokestack about the importance of college.

At any rate, cultural acceptance played no part in making my college decisions. Our culture also looks down on large families, farming, and homeschooling, so I’ve plunged too far over the ideological cliff to make any peace with the culture, anyway.

I’d like to close with two quotes, both from a President of the United States. Both received a college education, but the latter had a far more rigorous and impressive college career than those seen today. Don't worry, the first quote had no influence upon my decision making, but it serves to illustrate our society's beliefs about college education:

"Education is the currency of the Information Age, no longer just a pathway to opportunity and success but a prerequisite." Barack Obama

The second quote: a Biblical view of knowledge which looks at education with a proper perspective.

“A thorough knowledge of the Bible is worth more than a college education.” Theodore Roosevelt