An Ateneo degree is worth less than you think. The best it can do is to get you to the door of your dream grad school or dream company. However, what keeps you there won’t be the diploma or the added title in your name. It will be something else.

I assure you, it won’t also be your grades. It won’t be those letters you are so proud of—or may not be so proud of—printed on a piece of paper we call the Transcript of Records. So stop worrying about them so much.

Blasphemy!

Is it?

When I was in Japan, I found that almost nobody there had ever heard about the great Ateneo de Manila University. They know about elite universities in their own country, but not necessarily the so-called prestigious universities in other countries, like the Philippines. However, I soon realized that if you, a foreigner, can demonstrate an ability to speak Nihongo, the Japanese Language, fluently and cleanly, they will come to the realization that, “Ah, this person is intelligent. This person is educated.” Because Japanese people believe that their mother tongue is so subtle, so intricate, and therefore so difficult to learn and then master, you must be really smart to be able to speak and write it so well.

It’s the same thing in Hong Kong. If you can speak fluent and correct Mandarin there, you’ll find that the people there will have a much higher regard of you. Why? It’s because the masses there speak Cantonese. For the most part, only the people who were privileged enough to have been able to go to school, and have taken the time to learn Mandarin, can actually speak it. So if you, a foreigner, can pronounce the words in the correct tone, can read and write Hanzi, the Chinese characters, and can understand and appreciate Chinese culture, so that you are able to essentially communicate, then you must indeed be educated.

So now we come to the word “educated.” A degree does not automatically equate to being educated. Neither do your precious grades automatically signify that you are educated. So what does being educated actually mean?

It means that you have applied what you’ve learned in school, or wherever, in your life. The way you carry yourself, the way you communicate, the way you interact with people, how you form human relationships, how you perceive yourself and the world around you, and the kind of decisions you make every single day: These speak loudly of the kind of education you have achieved, and are the things that differentiate one who is educated from one who isn’t.

I believe that there are two essential things college should teach you. And if you have these two things, no matter which school you went to, you’ll go far. These are love for learning, and the ability to learn how to learn.

There are people who naively and mistakenly believe that learning ends after graduation. The truth is, learning doesn’t stop even after graduation. The world is such a dynamic place that the only thing we know that is constant is change. Whether it involves little incremental improvements or moon shot advancements, by the time you graduate, a whole new set of skills will have emerged to improve on existing processes, or to completely replace what has become obsolete. The ability to quickly and effectively learn these new skills will enable you to become a driving force that can tackle big and pressing issues facing our society. Therefore, as you join the workforce, do not be surprised if you’ll be put into situations where you’ll be tasked to do things that you may not even know anything about. You have to figure out how to learn on the job, using technology to magnify your capabilities.

Yet even if you know something about such tasks, the dynamics of the new environment, the workplace, will challenge you to think on your feet. There, you’ll encounter people, who may or may not share with you the same upbringing, the same background, or even the same values. How will you interact with these people? Will you be kind and humble, or arrogant and condescending? Will you choose conformity or individuality? These are questions that you have to continually struggle with, and must learn how to answer through the choices you make and the actions you do every single day. It is a continuous process of learning and making mistakes which only those who have learned how to learn will be able to go through worthily.

Of course, the prerequisite is that you have to love learning. You have to enjoy the experience of discovering things, learning how things work the way they work, and questioning why things are the way they are, instead of blindly accepting them as infallible truths.

So yes, an Ateneo degree is worth less than you think. It is worth less, because more than the diploma, the title, or the letters on a piece of paper, what’s more important is how you’ve actually applied what you’ve learned in your everyday life.

[notification type=”note” title=”GUEST COLUMN SUBMISSION”]Michael B. Syson is a lecturer at the Japanese Studies Program and the Chinese Studies Program.[/notification]