Clueless -- And Better For It

They're not particularly good looking or very well dressed, but they're my best buddies from high school and I guess I'm stuck with them. I got to see most of them again over Thanksgiving break, and not much had changed since we last got together over the summer. Or since we all left our graduation ceremony three and a half years ago, for that matter. Sure, some things had changed. We were all 21 for the first time, and we went to a bar together and laughed about the years when we had to trick, lie and steal just to get a six-pack. Oh, and Nikki had a new boyfriend. But other than that, the gang was pretty much the same. Even the conversations were basically the same. We joked about Barry's brushes with the law, made lewd comments about Tom's sisters, and laughed about Bennett's . . . well, we just laughed about Bennett. Again, the talk wasn't exactly the same. After all, Sara is getting married in a few weeks and Jed and his family moved to Seattle a couple years ago. But all in all, you could have walked into the little get-together we had at Jason's house Friday night, thinking it was 1987, and left without much evidence that it wasn't. Except if you brought up the question. The question was hanging out there since most of us first saw each other Wednesday night, but it wasn't asked. I don't know if it was out of a sense of tact, which I don't think I and most of my friends have, or politeness, which Lord knows none of us has, but no one brought it up. No one dared ask, "What are you doing next year?" Until Friday, that is. On Friday four of us went to an old high school hang out, a diner called, ironically enough, A Taste of Philadelphia (they have cheesesteaks and Tasty Cakes and all) and I think it was Jason who first asked it. "So what are you guys up to after graduation?" And there was silence. So I took the initiative. "I actually have no idea what I'm going to be doing." And then, one by one, the rest of them confessed. They had no idea either. Oh, Tom was going to law school eventually, but none of them had any clue where their life was heading after the band stopped playing Pomp and Circumstance. That night at Jason's, where close to two dozen of us had gathered, the question was posed again. And again, each of them gave the same answer -- they didn't know. It didn't matter if they went to Stanford or USC or little St. Lawrence College in upstate New York, none of them knew. And I found that odd. Coming from a school where it seems everyone has their professional lives planned out on the first day of their first freshman seminar, I had automatically assumed that everyone knew what they were doing when they left their ivory tower -- except for me. But it was now apparent that not only are there more people than just me who are clueless, but that tends to be the rule rather than the exception. And unlike the conventional wisdom in West Philadelphia, that is not something to be frowned on. Why is Penn so different? A lot of the blame falls on Wharton, a glorified trade school masquerading as an undergraduate educational institution. The entire school is geared toward churning out suits rather than critical thinking people. At the end of last year, one of my graduating Wharton friends spent several hours over a few beers lamenting the fact that he had never read Shakespeare and had never learned anything about European history. But clearly Wharton is not the only reason. Perhaps students and parents now feel that at a price tag of over $80,000, an undergraduate education must be a means to something better. Perhaps they feel that the most important thing that an Ivy League education has to offer them is a diploma that will open a few doors. Because I didn't see it that way, I had always felt kind of out of place. But now that I think about it, I feel kind of lucky. Both my parents and I saw education as an end in and of itself. My dad is constantly expounding on the value of being a "learned man," and my mom is always more interested in what happened in my New Deal seminar than the ding letter I got from some corporation. For a long while I thought my parents were odd. But now I think maybe it's just Penn that's odd. Peter Spiegel is a senior History major and managing editor of The Daily Pennsylvanian from Phoenix, Arizona. Laughter and Contempt has appeared alternate Wednesdays.

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