I cry way more at graduations than I do at weddings. Really, I get teary as soon as I hear the beginning strains of Pomp and Circumstance, and as soon as I see the broad smiles underneath the tasseled caps. Is there any other event that’s so universally happy and meaningful? There was so much pride in the audience at Friday’s graduation, and so many stories, and so much hard work and accomplishment. I saw cell phones, camcorders, and cameras all recording the event, and families craning to find their own graduate in a sea of black robes.
“You succeeded for one reason: the quality of your work,” Dr. Valeriana Moeller, the college president, told the crowd. She then added that there were almost 40,000 CSCC graduates in Columbus, in all lines of work: in construction, in health care, in education. “My one request,” she told the graduates, “is that you join them, working hard for this community. With great education comes great responsibility.”
Ohio’s Treasurer of State, Kevin Boyce, added to this theme of continued work and responsibility by crediting his own success to being prepared for opportunity, and by advising graduates to do the same. He also gave some stats that I found interesting: on average, a person with an associate’s degree earns 20% more than a high school graduate, and a person with a bachelor’s degree will earn a million dollars more in their lifetime. He addressed the changes in our economy, and the disappearance of many blue collar jobs, and the need for education for tomorrow’s jobs.
Boyce told the crowd that they have a responsibility toward their communities, too. He quoted Martin Luther King, Jr., saying that we are in an “inescapable network of mutuality,” a phrase I had not heard before, but that I liked very much. “We’re all in this together, basically.”
And when Paul Case, the valedictorian, rose to deliver his speech, he began by telling the crowd how he found himself back in a classroom after many years working in construction. On September 11, 2004, he was working at a construction site and he fell thirty feet, and he was confined to a wheelchair. He decided to go back to school, and now he’s graduating at the top of his class with a degree in Construction Management.
It’s not easy to go to college. All of us have other responsibilities, and some people have more demands on their time and energies than do others. And yet, even graduating into a recession, the lives of the men and women who graduated last Friday will be immeasurably better for the education, for the accomplishment, and for the examples they have set for their children. Sitting in the audience and hearing the names called as the graduates crossed the stage, I wasn’t the only one blinking back a tear or two.
