As baseball's opening day neared this spring, I had a flashback to my father's once-annual fantasy baseball draft, circa 2005.

After a dozen or so rounds of hoagies, beer and amateur prognosticating, one of my dad's friends started talking to me about my college plans, of which I was undecided at the time.

"Don't worry," he said. "No one cares about undergrad, anyway."

Blunt, maybe. But in a room full of guys with law degrees moonlighting as baseball know-it-alls, I understood what he was saying. Four years, a political science degree and a couple minors later, the statement should make even more sense.

And in some ways, it does. Though cavalier tuition hikes at a land grant university like Penn State have seemed to suggest otherwise, four-year colleges have assumed the de facto role of "secondary education" for growing subsets of the American population. The Schreyer Honors College boasts that 80 percent of my classmates will seek further academic validation in the form of graduate or professional degrees within five years of leaving Penn State.

For the immediate future, however, I'm going see how many people care about an undergraduate education in the real world. Better yet, I'm initially plunging headlong into the mucky abyss of print journalism, an industry that would likely be wobbling at its knees even without a compounding recession.

If this means I end up working games at Kennywood and making out with Kristen Stewart while a Violent Femmes song plays in the background, I'm willing to put up with that for a summer or two. Because the lessons I'll take from undergraduate education -- the lessons I'll need and think will last -- are the reasons I'll test one of the worst job markets in history with a couple internships and four years at a state school.

Surprisingly, most of these lessons are Disney-level tropes that sound a lot like the clichés my middle school principal made us memorize and recite on command in a noble attempt to inspire inner-city youth through muscle memory.

I've learned that at some point the decisions you make become who you are. I've learned that some people are a lot smarter than I thought, while others aren't nearly as knowledgeable as I guessed. I've learned that most of the stuff you regret is the stuff you didn't do.

I've learned that social innovation will push this generation toward frontiers it never fathomed before getting distracted by videos of house cats doing things it never thought possible. I've learned that I'm not above a wistful look back at my college years punctuated by Dylan lyrics. I've learned that I like reporting. I've learned that I can be edited and made better.

Ideally, someone who didn't get suckered into taking Carl Pavano in the first round in 2005 still cares about what I learned in undergrad. In the meantime, I'm content to strike another match and go start anew. It's all over now, White and Blue.

Matthew Spolar is a senior majoring in political science and is a Daily Collegian in-depth reporter. His e- mail address is mss342@psu.edu.