Graduates soon will walk across the stage and have a cause for much reflection. There are many things to consider when graduating, such as where you will find your first serious job or just how many recycling plants your college career has kept open with empty beer cans and bourbon bottles.

What graduates should really reflect on is what they are going to do with their degree and the rest of their lives.

Many graduates get their degree to get better-paying careers and more money to live. Certainly, people need a certain amount of money to live in modern society. However, mere economic success or survival remains a poor reason for higher education. As famous author and philosopher William James once said, “The entire modern deification of survival per se, survival returning to itself, survival naked and abstract, with the denial of any substantive excellence in what survives, except the capacity for more survival still is surely the strangest intellectual stopping-place ever proposed by one man to another.”

He’s right. Without some greater quality to one’s life, mere survival is meaningless. A college degree can get a person a career, but what then? Years of mindless drudgery in a cubicle-divided universe offers no food for the soul. Neither does rocketing to the top of the corporate ladder if one burns many inoffensive people in the process.

James also said, “The great use of life is to spend it on something that will outlast it.” Graduates, what do you want people to remember about you a century from now? I doubt that you want to be best remembered as the salesperson who sold the most BMWs at the local dealership five years running. I don’t think you want your greatest accomplishment to be the next irritating Super Bowl commercial or your work in raising the price of a stock by a few points.

True accomplishment comes from helping people; from making this world a better place to live in. Social Security, recently in the news as President Bush pushes for its reform, was a major accomplishment of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the New Deal. Thanks to Roosevelt, generations of average Americans have enjoyed a comfortable retirement. Though I may have disagreed with some of his ideas, the late Pope John Paul II and his support of the Solidarity movement in Poland helped destroy the oppressive communist government there. These are accomplishments worthy of a life’s work.

No one is saying it will be easy. NIU College of Law graduates can find better money at a large law firm than at a free legal center that caters to the disadvantaged. College of Education graduates will find teaching at a rich suburban school much less taxing than working in an underfunded Chicago public school.

It is up to you, graduates. You can use your degree to survive, to make more money and collect ever more shiny and new, yet ultimately unfulfilling, consumer goods. Or you can use it to uplift, improve and inspire.

Columns reflect the opinion of the author and not necessarily that of the Northern Star staff.