When Choosing a College, Choose to Thrive

This is the time of year when high school students must decide where they’ll go to college, and while there are many criteria for this important decision (large or small school; urban or rural; public or private) Wesleyan President Michael Roth says that it’s most important to choose the place where you’ll thrive, and develop the habits that will serve you after college and throughout your life.

In an op-ed circulated by the McClatchy Tribune News Service and published in papers around the country and overseas, Roth urges young people to choose the university where they will flourish.

“Discovering these possibilities for flourishing is the opposite of trying to figure out how to conform to the world as it is,” he writes.” That’s a losing proposition, not least because the world is changing so rapidly; tomorrow it won’t be how it is today. When you flourish, you find ways of shaping change, not just ways of coping with it. Those who get the most out of college are often anti-conformists aiming to find out who they are and what kind of work they will find most meaningful. They are not ready simply to accept someone else’s assignment. Those who get the most out of college expand the horizons in which they can lead a life of meaning and purpose.”