College Transcript, Receipt for $100,000
This is a receipt, of sorts, for a purchase of $100,000.
$100,000 is about what 4 years at this college cost from 1986 to 1990. I managed (barely) to graduate in 4 years. This is the final transcript of my academic “achievement”, a record which revives some memories I had intentionally and even aggressively buried.
This transcript does not include the classes I failed: Scrabble, Bridge, and another course I think was called Heraldry.
These were courses taught by other students, and my failures were mostly due to me never showing up for them.
Other colleges had similar programs: Anyone from the student body who could prove themselves to be an authority on some subject or endeavor could teach a course on that matter. Oddball courses seemingly better suited for night school and continuing education programs rose up from this reasonably prestigious college’s experimental program: Papier Mâché, Bowling, Battleship, and Cheese Making are among classes I seem to remember.
The dynamic of these classes felt, at times, like a mutual curse. Students teaching students prompted skepticism right from the get-go, and in a way this sense of the teacher’s authority being preëmptively undercut made attendance at and participation in these classes more demanding than traditional classes lead by tenured professors with decades of experience at the lectern.
In many cases the subject matter of the classes did not seem particularly serious to begin with, raising not-so-subtle suggestions that your parents’ $100,000 was being partially wasted with filler courses which padded your final transcript with credits of dubious value.
You could call it a form of age bias. Some college students (such as myself) were still somewhat gawky and insecure. On account of that we might have felt more comfortable in a traditional student/mentor relationship, one where the mentor’s prestige came largely from their life experiences and not simply from recognized achievement in their chosen field.
I found this transcript in a file cabinet on October 19, 2007. It was the first time I had seen or even contemplated my college transcript in at least 15 years. As critical a document as this once seemed, this college transcript almost immediately became irrelevant. I have never had to present it to anybody, largely on account of my never-regretted decision to forgo the route of the “career academic”, entering graduate school and pursuing alphabet soups of advanced degrees.
I remember a high school counselor who laboriously explained to the class that “5 years from now, 10 years from now, no one is going to care if you got a C+ on that Algebra test, and no one will care if you got a D on a pop quiz in Biology.” At the time, under the thicket of adolescent self-absorption in those demanding days, I only barely believed her. But the counselor, of course, was right. I remember some high school classes for certain interactions and such, but without reference to report cards or transcripts it would be virtually impossible for me to remember individual grades or even my GPA.
Had I not happened to find this college transcript I would have no memory of my grades, and even less memory of most of the courses I took at this fine institution.
I still, however, have restless dreams in which I never finished college. In those dreams I wake up today, in 2011, feeling a dead weight on my life, a weight of having never earned a college degree and thus living in some kind of professional or reputational uncertainty.
These type of anxiety dreams are common enough, I think. My mother used to talk about lifelong-repeated dreams in which she was late to a final exam, or unable to find the classroom where a degree-resulting test had already begun.
My dreams of never finishing college, however, are traceable to actual events. I almost did fail to finish college in 4 years. And for someone like me (who, since youth, wanted to get through school but also wanted to get it over with very, very badly) this possibility was suffocating.
I don’t remember where I learned of it, but someone at this college told me about Retroactive Credit. Students on the cusp of failing to graduate in their desired span of years were allowed to use this magical trick just once in their academic careers. Weeks before graduation I was 2 credits short of the graduation requirement. The Registrar of the school was unsympathetic to my plight, and offered no consolation or advice.
Through some other channel (of which I have no memory) I learned of a then-obscure rule which allowed me to increase the amount of credits I earned for courses already taken. It turned out that in my Freshman year I had room for 2 more allowable credits for that year, so I increased the credits of a couple of courses (I don’t remember which ones) and I was free to graduate. O, yeah. This end-run felt like a loophole but the maneuver was perfectly legitimate. The increase in credits could have just as allowably been done 4 years earlier.
I remember the serious look on the Registrar’s face when I approached her about this. She could not lie and tell me that Retroactive Credit could not be done, but she seemed dismayed that I was able to “remind” her of this policy. She may have felt that her lack of forthrightness in informing me of my options, and by extension her competence as a school administrator who should work for the best interests of the institution’s $100,000 paying customers, had been called into question.
To put it another way, that was how I felt about this interaction.
At the time Retroactive Credit was an obscure policy among my peers. I did not know any other students who knew of it until they heard about it from me. It turned out many others were in my position of potentially not graduating in time, because after I told others of this trick it seemed like everyone did it, adding a credit here and a credit there to magically bump up their totals and get the hell out of school and on with life.
