Rex Smith: What value do we see at graduation?

Hail, alma mater! And if you've never figured out that Latin phrase, now's the time to do it, since graduation season is upon us. "Alma mater" refers to your old school, you know, but it literally means "nourishing mother."

So, you new college graduates, and you older folks looking back: Do you feel nourished by your education? Was Mama College good to you?

How you answer probably depends on how you assess the value of education. As a dad who is proud to report that his kid is finishing a four-year degree — and who himself got a great education through borrowing and the sacrifice of middle-class parents — I have given this value question plenty of thought.

If your standard is a dollars-and-cents calculation, there's research on that point. Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce estimates that a person with a bachelor's degree makes on average $1 million more over a lifetime than someone with just a high school diploma. No college experience costs that much. And college graduates are much less likely to be jobless. So by the standard of income and employment, college is a worthwhile investment.

But are dollars the main measure of worth when it comes to learning? If you want to look beyond that view, you'll need to first assess what goal you've set for your life.

Most Americans don't awaken each morning with their very survival at stake. Since we don't have to spend our days finding the food, water and shelter we need to survive, we have the great luxury of deciding at some level how we're going to lead our lives, and what matters to us.

So your goal could be, say, to lead a joyful and fruitful life, and to leave your community better than you found it. Your goal might be lifelong growth, so that every day presents hope to become something more than you were yesterday. Or maybe your goal is spiritual enlightenment, or physical achievement.

Humans are drawn to learning, but they have different views of why it matters. Half of Americans these days take the more pragmatic view, according to the Pew Research Center; that is, they agree that the main purpose of college should be to teach specific skills and knowledge that can be used in the workplace. More than one-third, on the other hand, say the main purpose of higher education should be to help students grow and develop personally and intellectually. (About 13 percent say those objectives are equally important.)

Like almost everything in our country these days, there's a partisan divide on this issue. Democrats are more likely than Republicans to say personal and intellectual growth, not job training, should be the main goal of a college experience. And the more educational attainment a person has, the less likely they are to cite specific skills as the key value of college.

You won't be surprised that I'm in the camp of people who see education's great value as something broader than job training. So much of how we live is taught by what we learn.

Watching a political leader, for example, you may think back to that Shakespeare course, which as you were taking it may have struck you as four centuries past its sell-by date. But now your mind goes to King Lear, who loved to be lavished with praise, and so learned tragically, too late, that sycophants are less useful than a truth-telling spirit.

Or perhaps that same course brought you to an understanding of the value of mercy, which Shakespeare, in "The Merchant of Venice," noted "is an attribute to God himself," so that earthly power can be most like God's "when mercy seasons justice."

Maybe that introductory philosophy course gave you an understanding of logical fallacies, so that you notice people foolishly assuming their personal experience matches broad reality, or others falsely linking causality to events just because they coincide.

When we ingest such concepts at a young age, it affects how we view everything we confront thereafter.

Last week our daughter sent her mom and me a copy of her final research paper. It's astonishing in its depth, and loaded with concepts beyond my easy understanding. It's also unrelated to the work she has been hired to do — her first full-time job, which she will take up next month in a city she has never visited, 800 miles west of here.

Because of her experience over the past four years, she is ready for a challenge she can't quite imagine yet. In no small part, that's because at what she will soon call her alma mater, she found great personal growth, developed skills in human interaction and time management and learned to better understand the world she now faces as an adult.

We couldn't be more proud, or more grateful.