In the end, arguing about affirmative action in selective colleges is like arguing about the size of a spigot while ignoring the pool and the pipeline that feed it. Slots at Duke and Princeton and Cal are finite.
College is the grinding machine of the Mathematical Establishment, a conveyor belt that takes individuals from one cookie cutter to another so that the product comes within tight control limits out of the assembly line.
It occurred to me in my junior year of high school. I got my first letter from a big college. I still have that letter to this day - a letter from Indiana.
When you're a kid, you might be picked on for your differences. When you're an adult, employers, colleges, friends - people look for differences when you're adult, and that's what makes you shine and stand out.
If I went back to college again, I'd concentrate on two areas learning to write and to speak before an audience. Nothing in life is more important than the ability to communicate effectively.
I believe everything learned in college is an answer to a question that someone has posed. Questions get posed differently and the answers that come back transport us to places we never knew existed.
I always knew when I graduated from high school, I'd go to college. I never thought about what I was walking away from... I just wanted to study literature and writing.
It's hard for me to believe that a shy, bespectacled college graduate like Brad Meltzer who's a novelist and a father is a really setting out to be weirdly misogynistic.
I grew up with white parents, and until after college, it was a lot of confusion, especially because I grew up in an all-white area. So I never looked around and saw anyone who looked like me.
That's when we was makin this video stuff. They went all over the place makin it. And they was wantin to know, at the college, how I got started playin and how do I do everything - you know, all that.
Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.
I come from classical theater training and when I went to college it was a bunch of kids that were hand-picked from around the world. I was around such brilliant young minds and incredible artists with incredible teachers.
When I went to college, I thought I was going to become a professional musician. I was a French horn player, so I went to Yale to study with a very unusual French horn player.
I think as far as I've been able to understand from my friends that I went to college with and things like that is that it almost seems like Russian Roulette when you're coming out of the closet to your parents.
When Americans think of college these days, the first word that often comes to mind is 'debt.' And from 'debt' it's just a short hop to other unpleasant words, like 'payola,' 'kickback,' and 'bribery.'
Some libs took offense at my David Broder quip earlier. In my own defense, I was taught in college it's OK to disrespect dead white males.
I had no idea where these kids at a small private college in the San Fernando Valley were coming from, why they were coming to hear me, or what they needed to know.
I always enjoyed writing. I did playlets in high school, I did radio shows in college. That's one of the reasons I went down to Second City, because you could do acting and writing.
I feel like I'm 18, with the maturity level of like a 14-year-old. I'm still the same goofball; I'm still in college, as far as I'm concerned.
All through college, I was searching for characters that would make me unique and set me apart from the typical ventriloquist with the typical dummy that was the little boy, cheeky hard figure like Charlie McCarthy.
I had done a lot of rock 'n' roll photography when I was in college. I was one of many photographers who worked for The Doors, Jefferson Airplane, and all of these rock 'n' roll bands.
