freckles make me strong.

apsies:

• I’m driving a nice new car that I needed desperately. (Cash for Clunkers)
• I owe less to student loans because of a pell grant increase my last year of school.
• I’m on my mom’s health insurance until I’m 26. (I previously wasn’t allowed on her policy.)
• My reproductive rights, as a whole, are still safe.

• There are other things I’m probably forgetting but these four are HUGE.

  So Mitt Romney can say Barack Obama has failed America all he wants. However, I know for a fact that Barack Obama has done more for me and protected me more than any Republican president would have.

• I was able to maintain my health insurance after I got laid off because of federal COBRA subsidies that made it affordable

• When transitioning to my new health insurance I did not have to worry that any services would be denied due to pre-existing conditions

• The federal government is concerned that I am paid equally for equal work as proven by enforcements for equal pay for women (Lilly Ledbetter Bill)
• The old and run down subsidized housing in my neighborhood is being replaced with new, energy efficient subsidized apartments and homes in a mixed income community. This created hundreds of much needed construction jobs, better integrates the community and allows those in subsidized housing nicer accommodations so they can live with more dignity.

politicalprof: I didn’t write this, but I wish I had. It’s from a graduating senior at the University of North Carolina. Brilliant.

BY CHRISTOPHER SOPHER

CHAPEL HILL — A poster once hung in the guidance office of my high school, comparing the type of car I would supposedly own if I went to college and if I didn’t. If I didn’t go, I would get an ancient, threadbare sedan of the sort millions of freshly licensed 16-year-olds receive from their parents. If I did go, I got an oceanfront house with two pristinely restored muscle cars in the garage.

Since I first saw that poster, I’ve come quite a way - geographically, educationally, emotionally. As a native Virginian, I’ve come to love North Carolina and its deep, abiding commitment to the promise of education, higher education in particular. But as I prepare to graduate from the University of North Carolina this weekend, I’ve grown concerned about the future of that commitment amid the confusing, competing tides of economic and political change.

My high school’s poster reflects how we talk about college to students: an investment in your future; a period of monetary cost now for great economic return later; a door to a better life. Every incoming student arrives armed with the promising knowledge that college graduates make one or two million dollars more over their lifetimes than do high school graduates. All these things are true. But they also miss the point.

Education isn’t like remodeling a bathroom or buying index funds. It’s an investment, sure, but not a strictly economic one. It’s an investment in young people, with our many fascinations and flaws and futures.

Here and on campuses everywhere, most students and faculty understand and treasure this fact, frustratingly impervious as it is to the immediate needs of our economy or our politics. I wish desperately that our public discourse would understand and treasure it, too.

I’ve never had a professor begin class by announcing the global economic importance of studying “Measure for Measure” or the long-term public benefit of knowing organic chemistry. The university has educated me for me, with the distant and difficult-to-measure hope that I one day pay forward the favor in civic participation and economic productivity.

We can’t run universities as factories, calculating the cost of inputs and the market value of outputs. People aren’t widgets. Even if they were, the human capital market will change drastically between now and the peak of students’ future productivity.

The public debate about higher education seems often to forget that between high school graduation and eventual employment as a doctor, programmer or malnourished graduate student, life moves on for students. We meet people, encounter new ideas, explore paths we’d never considered. We learn to live with and around each other. While the system is busy trying to imprint us with preparation for the “future jobs” of the moment, we are busy being people.

This fact holds the potential for a deeper education that recognizes earning a degree is about more than preparing for a career. That potential is already being tapped at many of our universities, but there is more that can be done.

There exists a great deal of data on this subject, and a great many people smarter than I debating what it means in practice. But the data tell only part of the story. The students tell the rest.

When my peers and I don caps and gowns and graduate, the remarkable thing about it won’t be that we earned degrees, or learned applicable skills or assumed unbelievable amounts of per capita debt - though all these things are true. The remarkable thing about it will be that we got the incredible chance to learn in a place of unbridled possibility. That place is more than a training facility; it’s a place that teaches the inescapable truth that we are dependent on and connected to one another in countless ways.

From North Carolina’s commitment to higher education I’ve learned many things, from public policy analysis to journalism to the proper color of fire trucks. The most important thing, though, is that education helps us to be better - as citizens, as workers, as people. From that betterment comes the economic opportunity we love to advertise.

I’m not an economist or an educator or an expert on higher education. I am simply a student, and I don’t presume to speak for my peers except to say this: the opportunity to spend a few, far too short years in such a place is an immeasurably wonderful gift. And it is one this state should continue giving, in full and always.

For that gift, taxpaying citizens who have never met me and probably never will, I thank you. Regardless of what kind of car ends up in my garage.

Christopher Sopher is a graduating senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, from Annandale, Va. He majored in public policy and political science.