What is the mark of a college education? Of course, there's the social aspect: meeting people, going to parties, learning how to work and live with others.

Then there's the responsibility aspect: finding a place to live, paying the bills on time, balancing and weighing time commitments.

But the main reason we ostensibly come to college is to study an academic field and earn a degree.

Ideally, this will help us develop an interest we are passionate about for our post-collegiate days, even if it is only monetary gains.

And we pay big bucks to do it. Tuition this year is the highest it has ever been, technology fees abound, and despite the "magical" seeds I bought on eBay, apartments still don't grow on trees. Is it worth it though? Take away the time spent at home reading and studying course material, which could be done without Penn State, and what you're left with are lectures, office hours and labs.

It might be a misnomer to call these the "intangibles" of the college education, but when you think about it, it's what we're really paying for.

But few of us actually utilize these resources, and I'll be the first to admit it. If I have a question, you know what I do? I don't either, but it probably won't be visiting a professor during office hours.

I'm usually pretty disinterested by my labs, and I'm no stranger to missing classes.

Worse yet, when I'm in class, I just passively sit there, not asking questions or answering ones posed by teachers.

The problem is that I am, by all accounts, a typical college student. The last point in particular is so prevalent that it bears more discussion.

Before freshman year, my view of college was more or less informed by Saved by the Bell: The College Years and that one episode of Fresh Prince where Will takes a philosophy class.

Accordingly, I envisioned professors to be dynamic and classes to be interesting and engaging. But by and large, it hasn't turned out that way.

Most professors just want to get through the material, and students are more than content to be reticent in class. I think the latter can be attributed to the "that guy" effect. No one wants to be the guy who the teacher tells to beg and roll over, or the one who causes class to run over with a good, but ill-timed question; we'd be afraid of what our classmates might think.

My solution could be to put a keg by the door, or perhaps install open bars in the back of every classroom.

Maybe then we'd finally loosen up, stop caring about what other students thought and start engaging our professors (of course as the number of drinks increase, the positive effect will be offset inebriation, but there's got to be some minimum there that the engineers can find).

Now, I'm no university provost, but I have a feeling that the administration would be reluctant to adopt this resolution.

Perhaps, then, the answer is to go electronic. If we're not asking questions we need to in class, and all the information in our notes can be found in the book, then why even make the 8 a.m. trek up to Chambers? Penn State is well on its way, with the ANGEL site and with many professors opting to put course materials the Web.

But lets take it a step further and archive everything online, including videos of lecture. You might say that this will only be feasible in a few years, or maybe when we're ready to send our children off to college, and right now an education from the online University of Phoenix just doesn't cut it.

I agree, and that's why I'm going to MIT. Not many people know that the arguable epicenter of higher education began offering its courses online, free of charge, and to
the world in 2002. Right now, I'm taking an introductory computer science class from the top com-puter science program in the country.

The text, syllabus, course notes, videos and assignments are all there. And although MIT maintains that these are not a substitute for the real thing, they are pretty close. So have the opportunities to watch the football team beat Nebraska, discover the secret recipe for monkey boys, and join the "I know Milton" fan club been worth the tens-of-thousands of dollars I've begrudgingly forked over to this university?

Now there is a real class discussion that you may actually want to participate in.