College has much to do with success

I am looking back to the time spent at Kenyon College, my alma mater, and what I got out of it. I remember the emphasis the faculty put on writing. I’ll not ever forget taking the English Attainment test three times, which consisted of a 400-word essay on a subject they gave you. I finally passed it.

I later learned that passing this test controlled whether you got a degree and graduated. Also, the teachers commonly inserted questions in tests in all the majors, not just English, in which we had to answer by writing out a few paragraphs of prose on a specific subject and we had to seriously write it in a skillful enough way to answer the question.

The faculty agreed that being able to express oneself skillfully in writing English was a skill that almost anyone would need to be successful in the everyday work world.

I understand Mitt Romney attended four colleges and earned two degrees from Harvard. He talks of having similar learning realizations to what I fell into and he has obviously done a lot with them. I envy that he has done much more with what he has learned than I, but there has been a real learning process that has occurred in either case and the colleges involved had a lot to do with the success of the process.

Chuck Barr

St. Charles