I’m spending the holiday weekend with my three closest buddies from college—a doctor, an assistant dean of our alma mater’s schools of computer science, an owner of an employee placement company, and a founder of a college counseling company.
There are a lot of benefits to college that you can’t read about in guidebooks, things that aren’t factored into US News Rankings or other proposed measures of a college’s worth. And one of those things will be the people you meet while you’re there.
You’ll meet a lot of new friends while you’re in college, many of whom you’ll likely drift apart from once college ends. That’s a normal part of growing up.
But you’ll almost certainly have a few that stay in your life, people who stand at your wedding and play with your kids and congratulate you when you buy your first house one day. That’s a pretty great collegiate benefit. And you don’t have to go to a prestigious (or expensive) college to enjoy it.
Sure, you’ll need to do a lot more than just make friends to get the maximum value from your time and money while you’re there. But like the learning and the discoveries you make about yourself while you’re there, the friends that stay in your life are part of those benefits. The four years are important. But it’s what’s left over at the end of college that really makes college worth it.