The Opportunity of the Formal Student:

According to a Los Angeles Times report, an annual UCLA study of incoming freshmen all across the USA, less than 40% said it was important to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. In 1967, 86% said this was important.

Being "very well off financially" was at the highest level since 1991.

A side note of the study showed that a record 47% of students earned an "A" average, against 18% in 1968.

In all honesty, when I was a freshman at college, I couldn't have cared less about making a pile of money. For me, it really was about the experience (sometimes you just gotta go to the football game in Tallahassee or take the road trip to ski or to the beach and turn in the paper late, eh?) and figuring out who I was. The straight A's didn't come until I was deep into my major and by that time it was uphill trying to get that overall bad boy up around 3.0.

And the whole idea of nearly half of a university having an A average seems out of kilter, too. It's the same way at the local high schools, though...one of the high schools had over 10% of the senior class with a GPA higher than perfect (there were only 2 kids in my graduating class with perfects in the advanced classes) and over half the class had an "A."

So, open advice to this year's freshmen: No employer will really be all that stoked about your overall GPA...but the grad schools will likely care. So, take care of classroom business accordingly...but take the time to enjoy the life experiences and relationships a university experience affords.

If you're at a university, give some serious thought to the condition of the universe and your place within it. Some of this will come inside the classroom, but most will come outside those venues. And a lot of the outside thought processes are built on what ideas you're getting inside the classroom. In other words, get an education. Don't manipulate a system to get a good grade in ALL your classes...save that for your P.E. credit or a couple of electives when the rest of your schedule is demanding.

Don't worry about being well off financially. Most of those factors are outside your ability to control. Work on being happy with what you're going to be doing for the next 50 or so years of your life. This may or may not have bank account rewards...but there are unseen payments to being well off and loathing what you actually do.

I remaind convinced that most people grow more in the "university" age range than they do in the 18 years or so previous to that...so I'm hoping that is the case in the view expressed by the incoming freshmen class in our country.