College Education Quotes

It was depressing, very depressing. I worried about how I would make a living. I didn't want to stay on the farm. It didn't offer the challenge I wanted and yet, without a college education, I felt that I was really out of luck. ~ Clyde Tombaugh

After all, you can't hang out at the park with your kid and shop for coordinating head scarves and flip-flops (or whatever else Bethany does to fill the endless expanse of nonworking days) without a college education.
Oh, that's right. You totally can. ~ Megan McCafferty

My dad was in the army. World War II. He got his college education from the army. After World War II he became an insurance salesman. Really, I didn't know my dad very well. He and my mother split up after the war. I was raised by my maternal grandmother and grandfather, and by my mother. ~ Al Pacino

-Too often college Bible classes end up like this-

With eager knife that oft has sliced
At Gentile gloss, or Jewish fable,
Before the crowd you lay the Christ
Upon the lecture table.

From bondage to the old beliefs
You say our rescue must begin,
But I want refuge from my griefs
And saving from my sin.

The strong, the easy and the glad
Hang, blandly listening, on your word;
But I am sick, and I am sad,
And I want Thee, O Lord.

(From Amy Carmichael's 1950 bio of Thomas Walker of Tinnevelly, India - poem written in about 1905 by Canon Ainger) ~ Canon Ainger

They [students] had two common, strongly held expectations: the college should exhibit the behavior it expected from students and hold true to its espoused values. ~ Gregory S. Prince, Jr.

I imagine that one of the biggest troubles with colleges is there are too many distractions, too much panty-raiding, fraternities, and boola-boola and all of that. ~ Malcolm X

One cannot get rid of a good education, nor, unfortunately, of a bad one, which often is such because one has not wanted to defray the expenses of a good one. ~ Denis Diderot

When I finished my college education my agent said to me ... 'The key to beauty is to be always educating yourself, always learning something new, always doing something new and to have something to talk about.' And I never forgot that, and I think that's how one ages beautifully. ~ Cheryl Tiegs

The need for a college education is even more important now than it was before, but I think that the increased costs are a very severe obstacle to access. It is an American dream, and I think that one of our challenges is to find a way to make that available. ~ Roy Romer

A college education is not a quantitative body of memorized knowledge salted away in a card file. It is a taste for knowledge, a taste for philosophy, if you will; a capacity to explore, to question to perceive relationships, between fields of knowledge and experience. ~ Alfred Whitney Griswold

My expectations from the university were perhaps too idealistic. I had dreams of learning things about innovation and discovery in the field of technology, but all of it hit the ground hard, when I faced with the pathetic reality of the so-called higher education system. To my surprise, I found myself stuck behind the walls of meaningless facts, figures and rankings. It occurred to me that, it was not actually a place for education, rather it was a place where you go to get your head filled with useless undigested information, that you'd probably never use throughout your entire life. It was not education, and moreover, it was definitely not science. ~ Abhijit Naskar

And of course these days I feel like there is a nation of us - displaced southerners and children of the working class. We listen to Steve Earle, Mary J. Blige, and k.d. lang. We devour paperback novels and tell evil mean stories, value stubbornness above patience and a sense of humor more than a college education. We claim our heritage with a full appreciation of how often it has been disdained.
And let me promise you, you do not want to make us angry. ~ Dorothy Allison

The aim of a college education is to teach you to know a good man when you see one. ~ William James

You didn't need a college degree to become one of the people who knew what was really going on. If you paid attention, you could pick things up on your own. ~ Jeannette Walls

The cost of college education today is so high that many young people are giving up their dream of going to college, while many others are graduating deeply in debt. ~ Bernie Sanders

The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think, ~ Walter Isaacson

Mr. Benjamin shrugged his shoulders. "We have to live today," he said. "If you had a son, Harkavy, you'd want him to have a college education. Who's going to wait for the Messiah? They tell a story about a little town in the old country. It was out of the way, in a valley, so the Jews were afraid the Messiah would come and miss them, and they built a high tower and hired one of the town beggars to sit in it all day long. A friend of his meets this beggar and says, 'How do you like your job, Baruch?' So he says, 'It doesn't pay much, but I think it's steady work. ~ Saul Bellow

And the final product of our training must be neither a psychologist nor a brick mason, but a man. And to make men, we must have ideals, broad, pure, and inspiring ends of living, not sordid money-getting ... The worker must work for the glory of his handiwork, not simply for pay; the thinker must think for truth, not fame. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I don't care how high my shrink increases my Lexapro dosage - I WANT TO BE A ROBOT THAT HELPS WOLVES HAVE SEX. Otherwise my parents threw away the money they spent on my college education. ~ Patton Oswalt

Do we see a college education, for example, as a ticket to privilege or as a training for service to the needy? What do we teach our teenagers in this matter? Do we urge them to enter college because it will better equip them to serve? Or do we try to bribe them with promises of future status and salary increases? No wonder they graduate more deeply concerned about their standard of living than about suffering humanity. As ~ Richard J. Foster

Community colleges are one of America's great social inventions a gateway to the future for first time students looking for an affordable college education, and for mid-career students looking to get ahead in the workplace. ~ Barbara Mikulski

No longer a mark of distinction or proof of achievement, a college education is these days a mere rite of passage, a capstone to adolescent party time. ~ William A. Henry III

People like me who grew up in a working-class town, who don't have a college education, you don't usually hear from us. ~ Michael Moore

If entrepreneurs were running schools, instead of bureaucrats, schools would be teaching a lot more of the skills and mindsets found in this book. Since they're not, this book is a necessary antidote to a traditional college education. ~ Scott Banister

The first dream I had was just to get a college education. I got through college in three years, taking extra classes in summer school. ~ Eli Broad

College education is the great Filipino dream. But in a world of rapid technological change, getting a job or keeping it depends as much on how well one reasons as how well one uses his hands. ~ Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo

Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of. ~ Criss Jami

Although the terms teaching and learning are typically paired, those of us who teach know that students don't always learn. When I complained about this early in my teaching career, a colleagues chided me: "Saying 'I thaught the students something, they just didn't learn it' is akin to saying 'I sold them the car, they just didn't but it'". ~ Elizabeth F. Barkley

By making college unaffordable and student loans unbearable, we risk deterring our best and brightest from pursuing higher education and securing a good-paying job. ~ Mark Pocan

I'd compare college tuition to paying for a personal trainer at an athletic club. We professors play the roles of trainers, giving people access to the equipment (books, labs, our expertise) and after that, it is our job to be demanding. ~ Randy Pausch

Daily reading is a sacred knowledge. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I didn't want any degrees if all the ill-read literates and radio announcers and pedagogical dummies I knew had them by the peck. ~ J.D. Salinger

Computer mistake in grade-giving resulted in academic failure of several brilliant students. After some years the mistake was discovered. Letter was sent to each student inviting him to resume his studies. Each replied he was getting along very well without education. ~ John Cage

Every man should have a college education in order to show him how little the thing is really worth. ~ Elbert Hubbard

There is more to knowing than just knowing. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

I see the beatitudes of books displayed on a bookshelf. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Being graded for memorizing male accomplishments with the deep message that we can learn what others do but never do it ourselves. ~ Gloria Steinem

We've reached a point in human history where higher education no longer works. As a result of technology, higher education in its traditional college setting no longer works. It will never be effective or progressive enough to keep up with the growing needs of employers who look to college institutions for their future employees.

I can appreciate the good intent the college system set out to achieve. For previous generations, the formula actually worked. Students enrolled into universities that were affordable, they gained marketable skills and they earned good jobs. Since there was a proven track record of success, parents instilled the value of college in their children thinking they would achieve the same success story they did, but unfortunately Wall Street was watching. Wall Street, the federal government and the college system ganged up and skyrocketed the cost of tuition to record highs. This was easy to do because not only did they have posters blanketing high schools showing kids what a loser they would be if they didn't go to college, they also had Mom and Dad at home telling them the same thing.

This system - spending 4+ years pursuing a college education when the world is changing at the speed of light - no longer works and it's not fixable. We now have the biggest employer's market in human history, where employers have their pick of the litter, and because of this employees will get paid less and less and benefits will continue to erode. ~ Michael Price

Is it too soon for me to put aside money for your kid's college education in order to thank him for helpin' me drag his mother's head outta her ass? ~ Kristen Ashley

The stress of it all. How the hell are we expected at the age of sixteen (and seventeen, in your case) to decide what we want to do for the rest of our lives? Right now all I want to do is get out of school, not start planning to get into another one. You're lucky you've always known what you want to do. ~ Cecelia Ahern

I think the most important issue for all of us is our economy and jobs and creating opportunities for young people to be able to get the education that you need to be able to afford to go to college. ~ Debbie Stabenow

And there's this place called college! I mean, they want you to care, dig it, care about this education trip, and they don't care enough themselves to make it as attractive as the crap game across the street! ~ Spider Robinson

I met with a group of a hundred or so fifth graders from a poor neighborhood at a school in Houston, Texas. Most of them were on a track that would never get them to college. So I decided then and there to make a contract with them. I would pay for their four-year college education if they kept a B average and stayed out of trouble. I made it clear that with focus, anyone could be above average, and I would provide mentoring support to them. I had a couple of key criteria: They had to stay out of jail. They couldn't get pregnant before graduating high school. Most importantly, they needed to contribute 20 hours of service per year to some organization in their community. Why did I add this? College is wonderful, but what was even more important to me was to teach them they had something to give, not just something to get in life. I had no idea how I was going to pay for it in the long run, but I was completely committed, and I signed a legally binding contract requiring me to deliver the funds. It's funny how motivating it can be when you have no choice but to move forward. I always say, if you want to take the island, you have to burn your boats! So I signed those contracts. Twenty-three of those kids worked with me from the fifth grade all the way to college. Several went on to graduate school, including law school! I call them my champions. Today they are social workers, business owners, and parents. Just a few years ago, we had a reunion, and I got to hear the magnificent ~ Tony Robbins

No one should be denied the opportunity to get an education and increase their earning potential based solely on their inability to pay for a college education. ~ Bobby Scott

In the wake of his breakdown, Oswaldo had become hyperattuned to the way he, and people like him, were perceived. For his first three years at Yale, he'd been frustrated by these perceptions, feeling that they were inescapable, allowing that caged feeling to overwhelm him. The perspective granted him by two weeks of near total isolation had led him to believe that he––and in a much bigger way, Rob––had only propagated the ignorance of their peers. Because they did get stoned all the time, they did get angry, they did dress like thugs, they did talk shit about a college education that might set them up for fulfilling lives, they did set themselves apart. For Oswaldo, the issue had ceased to be a philosophical and historical one, and instead had come to revolve around a simple goal: to graduate from Yale without making that task harder than it needed to be. After all, that was the point of college––not freedom, not alcohol, not relationships, but to obtain a degree. ~ Jeff Hobbs

Before you're ready to tell that story well, you might have to study and learn the equivalent of an entire specialized college education on the society in which your story takes place, because all sorts of things were happening that you need to understand before you can even begin to tell a story in that milieu. ~ James Alexander Thom

Having a college degree does not make you educated. Always learning new things is what makes you educated. ~ Dan Pearce

Offline classes form the nucleus of the college life. Online classes can only complement offline education, not replace it. ~ Shivanshu K. Srivastava

School exams are memory tests, in real-world no one is going to stop you from referring a book to solve a problem. ~ Amit Kalantri

Claude Hopkins.. maintained that nobody with a college education could write an advertisement addressed to the mass millions. That's absolute poppycock. ~ David Ogilvy

I mean that they (students) should not play life, or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? Methinks this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics. ~ Henry David Thoreau

What a slacker. Just because daddy paid for his college education, he thinks he can avoid dying for his country."
Willie "Drafted ~ Rich Allan

I began my education at a very early age; in fact, right after I left college. ~ Winston Churchill

While Obama might not push college education exclusively, like most Democrats he does oversell it and does shortchange the alternatives. And millions of young Americans pay the price. ~ Rick Perlstein

In no way did any of this discourage or deter Wilbur and Orville Wright, any more than the fact that they had had no college education, no formal technical training, no experience working with anyone other than themselves, no friends in high places, no financial backers, no government subsidies, and little money of their own. Or ~ David McCullough

Instead of saving for someone else's college education, I'm currently saving for a luxury retirement community replete with golf carts and handsome young male nurses who love butterscotch. ~ Jen Kirkman

That's the value of a college education ... I don't know anywhere in the world where you can make an investment and make that kind of return. ~ Gaston Caperton

The colleges and other institutions of learning are going too far, in my opinion. I think 50% of those attending educational institutions, having the professions in view, would be better off with a common school education that would enable them to earn a living, rather than sit around in offices and wait for clients.
W.A. Clark (MT Senator, 1901-1907) ~ Bill Dedman

If you do not share the universities' values, it could be a big mistake to send your children to college before they are intellectually and morally prepared for the indoctrination-rather-than-education they will receive there. Therefore, prepare them morally and intellectually and, if possible, do not send them to college right after high school. Let them work for a year, or perhaps travel (for example, given the antipathy to Israel on campuses, a trip to Israel would be both morally clarifying and maturing). The younger the student, the less life experience and maturity they have, the more they are likely to embrace the rejection of your values. ~ Dennis Prager

College education gives you the chance to earn money and live thereupon. But, umless it destroys certain illusions that are nourished by the common level of mankind, your lives will not be happy. ~ Sai Baba

A college education is one of the few purchases a person can make that cannot be repossessed or auctioned off ~ Ken Ilgunas

I've always felt as if writing a novel is like giving birth. After the process is over, I am emotionally exhausted. But then the work's not done. I have to then raise the book to adulthood, through marketing and giveaways and pandhandling for reviews (its college education). And even while I'm nurturing it into something that is well adjusted and lovable, I've got other "kids" that need equal attention. It truly is work. My hat is off to real parents everywhere, who raise human children and novel ones at the same time. You are amazing. ~ Ash Gray

As far as I was concerned, the Depression was an ill wind that blew some good. If it hadn't occurred, my parents would have given me my college education. As it was, I had to scrabble for it. ~ Sargent Shriver

Our youth deserve the opportunity to complete their high school and college education, free of early parenthood. Their future children deserve the opportunity to grow up in financially and emotionally stable homes. Our communities benefit from healthy, productive, well-prepared young people. ~ Jane Fonda

Not knowing how to get what you want is better than knowing how to get what you do not want. ~ Mokokoma Mokhonoana

My parents were very old school, as were my grandparents who went through the Great Depression and were a big influence on my life. So for them it was very important for me to have a college education and to pursue a normal job that would give me benefits and things like that.
So they were very, very much opposed to me being a musician. They were all pretty horrified. ~ Anne Boleyn

Training is everything. The peach was once a bitter almond; cauliflower is nothing but cabbage with a college education. ~ Mark Twain

The truth is this: The rich will rule even at a place like Oberlin, where their kind is technically forbidden. They will simply invert the power structure to suit their needs. They will come out on top no matter what. Stuyvesant was hard but hopeful; Oberlin, on the other hand, reminds me yet again how the world works. I guess that's why they call it an education. ~ Gary Shteyngart

With the fate of Roe v. Wade now hanging in the balance, I'm calling for a special 'pro-life tax.' If the fervent prayers of the religious right are answered and abortion is banned, let's take it a step further. All good Christians should legally be required to pony up; share the financial burden of raising an unwanted child. That's right: put your money where your Bible is. I'm not just talking about paying for food and shelter or even a college education. All those who advocate for driving a stake through the heart of a woman's right to choose must help bear the financial burden of that child's upbringing. They must be legally as well as morally bound to provide the child brought into this world at their insistence with decent clothes to wear; a toy to play with; a bicycle to ride -- even if they don't consider these things 'necessities.' Pro-lifers must be required to provide each child with all those things they would consider 'necessary' for their own children. Once the kid is out of the womb, don't wash your hands and declare 'Mission Accomplished!' It doesn't end there. If you insist that every pregnancy be carried to term, then you'd better be willing to pay the freight for the biological parents who can't afford to. And -- like the good Christians that you are -- should do so without complaint. ~ Quentin R. Bufogle

Well as programs like the GI Bill that made a college education available to millions, government ~ Barack Obama

So if a college education is indispensable, the challenge as I see it is how to make it more accessible. ~ Gordon Gee

In the world today, a young lady who does not have a college education just is not educated. ~ Walter Annenberg

The American Dream is not being dependent on the federal government for your health care, for your automobile, for your college education, for your student loan on and on and on. ~ Marsha Blackburn

..."extreme capitalism": the obsessive, uncritical penetration of the concept of the market into every aspect of American life, and the attempt to drive out every other institution, including law, art, culture, public education, Social Security, unions, community, you name it. It is the conflation of markets with populism, with democracy, with diversity, with liberty, and with choice---and so the denial of any form of choice that imposes limits on the market. More than that, it is the elimination of these separate concepts from our political discourse, so that we find ourselves looking to the stock market to fund retirement, college education, health care, and having forgotten that in other wealthy and developed societies these are rights, not the contingent outcomes of speculative games.

James K. Galbraith, Lloyd M. Bentsen Jr. Chair in Government/Business Relations and Professor of Government, University of Texas. ~ James K. Galbraith

Growing up, I knew where the world ended. I could see it, at the horizon, where the sky touched the corn. My life was bounded and known. I *knew* the edges of the world. And then I went to college. ~ J. Michael Adams

Since most American students cannot simply pay their full tuition out of pocket, financing a college education often takes the form of loans, both private and from the government. ~ Charles B. Rangel

The whole people must take upon themselves the education of the whole people, and must be willing to bear the expense of it," [John] Adams wrote. "There should not be a district of one mile square, without a school in it, not founded by a charitable individual, but maintained at the public expense of the people themselves." Jefferson's fear was that without such a system of public education, the country would end up being ruled by a privileged elite that would recycle itself through a network of private institutions that entrenched their advantage. ~ Fareed Zakaria

I have a college education. I'm not destitute. I'm living like this by choice. ~ Alexander Supertramp Chris McCandless

It takes most men five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge. ~ Brooks Atkinson

Economists report that a college education adds many thousands of dollars to a man's lifetime income - which he then spends sending his son to college. ~ Bill Vaughan

Models are like baseball players. We make a lot of money quickly, but all of a sudden we're 30 years old, we don't have a college education, we're qualified for nothing, and we're used to a very nice lifestyle. The best thing is to marry a movie star. ~ Cindy Crawford

When it comes to college education, American families are paying more and getting less. ~ Patricia Schroeder

Get your education. The number of guys who are blessed to be in the league is so small compared to the number of high school players [who want to play in the league]. But one thing you can do is get your college education. If you are blessed enough to get a scholarship to play college basketball, make sure you get your college degree, too, then move on from there. ~ Tim Duncan

If you want to be a graduate student, you have to fall in love with reading. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Education changes lives and scholarships make it affordable. ~ Shay Spivey

The American Dream is one of success, home ownership, college education for one's children, and have a secure job to provide these and other goals. ~ Leonard Boswell

Every young man or woman should weigh the matter well before concluding that a college education is out of the question. ~ Orison Swett Marden

We find paradise in every library and bookshop. ~ Lailah Gifty Akita

I realized that I would have some very tough sledding, and I was very discouraged because I didn't see much hope of getting into the field I wanted to get into with no college education. ~ Clyde Tombaugh

You can't change generational poverty by sitting on your ass. Let's get to work! ~ Damen Lopez

Compassion is a college education. It's a doctorate. ~ Krishna Das

The habit of looking at life as a social relation - an affair of society - did no good. It cultivated a weakness which needed no cultivation. If it had helped to make men of the world, or give the manners and instincts of any profession - such as temper, patience, courtesy, or a faculty of profiting by the social defects of opponents - it would have been education better worth having than mathematics or languages; but so far as it helped to make anything, it helped only to make the college standard permanent through life. ~ Henry Adams

Some liberals think that describing any role that education gaps play in creating income inequality is some sort of sellout - that, in essence, you're telling the middle class, 'Tough luck; you should have stayed in college.' ~ Timothy Noah

I'm a philosophy major. That means I can think deep thoughts about being unemployed. ~ Bruce Lee

The notion that college education is a cost-effective way to help poor, low-skill, unmarried mothers with high school diplomas or GEDs move up the economic ladder is just wrong. ~ Rick Santorum

In my parents' day and age, it used to be the person who fell short. Now it's the discipline. Reading the classics is too difficult, therefore it's the classics that are to blame. Today the student asserts his incapacity as a privilege. I can't learn it, so there is something wrong with it. And there is something especially wrong with the bad teacher who wants to teach it. There are no more criteria, Mr. Zuckerman, only opinions. ~ Philip Roth

If I had spent as much time in the weight room as I did designing football uniforms, I probably would have had a free college education. ~ John Malkovich

I got a wonderful college education. I went to Harvard. In those four years I accumulated a lot of knowledge but I also created a kind of habit of learning that has stayed with me my whole life. ~ John Lithgow

Women while in college ought to have the broadest possible education. This college education should be the same as men's, not only because there is but one best education, but because men's and women's effectiveness and happiness and the welfare of the generation to come after them will be vastly increased if their college education has given them the same intellectual training and the same scholarly and moral ideals. ~ M. Carey Thomas

What are the purposes of examinations anyhow? Are they to increase our educational attainment? Or are they instruments used to bring suffering and humiliation and deep hurt to a person who is trying so hard to succeed? ~ Virginia Mae Axline