The Consolation of Philosophy
At 5 p.m. yesterday, thousands of local high school seniors were hunched over their computer screens, logging on to the Web sites that would tell them whether they were accepted to the college of their choice. For some of them, the news was good — all their hard work had paid off, and they made it in to their first choice school. For others, the initial reaction was disappointment, and with it came a recalibration of future plans and dreams and maybe even a tear or two.
To the first group, congratulations. But it is to the second group that our thoughts go this morning, for in life setbacks are inevitable, and the test of character is how a person handles them. Some of our greatest or most successful Americans — Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Thomas Edison, Benjamin Franklin — never went to college at all. Others — such as Ronald Reagan of Eureka College, Martin Luther King Jr. of Morehouse College, and Warren Buffett of the University of Nebraska — earned bachelor's degrees from lesser-known, non-Ivy League institutions.
The current president of Harvard, Drew Gilpin Faust, is a graduate of Bryn Mawr. The president of Stanford, John Hennessy, is a graduate of Villanova University and the State University of New York at Stony Brook. The president of Columbia, Lee Bollinger, is a graduate of the University of Oregon. The faculties of Harvard and Yale and Amherst and Williams are made up of a great many people who were not admitted to those schools as undergraduates. And Harvard Business School and Yale Law School and the top medical schools are populated by a great many graduate students who went to lesser-known institutions.
What matters, in other words, is not what college you get in to, but what you make of your education, wherever it is. For all the hard work and standardized testing, the college admissions game still has a large element of luck involved, especially in these years when the children of baby-boomers are applying in great numbers. The sixth-century Roman writer Boethius, in "The Consolation of Philosophy," writes, "a wise man should never complain, whenever he is brought into strife with fortune; just as a brave man cannot properly be disgusted whenever the noise of battle is heard, since for both of them their very difficulty is their opportunity."
If nothing else, today's high school seniors can take solace in at least one advantage they had over their predecessors in previous generations. Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, they don't have to wait by the mailbox for acceptance or rejection letters to make their way through the mail the old-fashioned way.
