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My mom never went to college, but for her own children, getting a great education was not an option.

My mother taught public school, went to Harvard and then got her master's there and taught fifth and sixth grade in a public school. My dad had a more working-class lifestyle. He didn't go to college. He was an auto mechanic and a bartender and a janitor at Harvard.

They were often the first students in their family to go to college and the very idea of higher education was still foreign to them. They had to make a conscious and often difficult decision to come to college.

Their educations ended with high school - my father going to work as a clerk and then salesman in a company dealing in printing and stationary, and my mother working as a secretary and then bookkeeper in a firm of wool merchants.

Universities used to prepare young adults for the real world. I dare say the graduates today go in without a clue and graduate without a clue. It's time to acknowledge the college degree is not worth what it was in the past. Times are changing, and so is the way we prepare our youth to survive in a competitive world.

I didn't finish college, which is really weird because they awarded me the Alumni of Distinction recently.

My parents told me that education was the path to success - and they showed me, taking me to Head Start while they were pursuing their own college degrees.

For me specifically, it was important to graduate. In my family, I was one of the first graduates. My mom did not have a college degree. My dad did not have a college degree.

I really missed going to college. I missed not having that education and that experience.

In the 1940s, about 20% of people in the U.S. had graduated from high school, but less than 5% continued their education to get bachelors' degrees or higher.