HOW DO YOU MEASURE A COLLEGE DIPLOMA? YOU DON'T!

This is college-graduation time. Hundreds of campuses handing out diplomas and hopes to thousands of students. Columnist Erma Bombeck once quipped: "Graduation day is tough for adults. They go to the ceremony as parents...they come back home as contemporaries."

Over and above the classic debates over (1) whether every kid should attend college (2) whether every kid really needs college, we now have (3) whether every kid/parent can afford college. Lately some critics are comparing college loans to sub-prime mortgages -- shaky credits that finance wildly overinflated assets.

Please...this current reign of statisticians must stop. Or at least be challenged. Really now, not everything in life can or should be valued in terms of numbers and dollars. And yet every social fiber of our national being craves to put a price tag on each product, person and principle. [Perhaps by default, for a nation without a history of tribes, clans, or classes usually concludes money is the measure of all things].

Sticking with this American measure-of-all-things, the highly regarded Pew Research Center's legions of statisticians have recently slapped price tags on -- of all things not-supposed-to-be-priced -- our religious beliefs. Pause here with me and let us ask ourselves: Why in all the world would we want to do this...? Speaking for myself, I can find no really enduring purpose except to keep Pew researchers getting weekly pay checks. You of course are free to find your own purposes. In any case, here are the results:

* Reform Jews are the most affluent group, with 67% making more than $75,000/year

* Hindus are second, with 65%

* Conservative Jews are third, with 57%

* Pentecostals, Baptists and Jehovah's Witnesses were the least affluent with less than 20%

Again speaking for myself, my beliefs didn't even make the cut! Still, America is now left with yet another gobbledygook of numbers which for some shine like a thousand-points-of-light. Our college graduates are taking their diplomas into a land which continues to know more and more about less and less. Our visions and missions are weighted down with such a beautiful burden of statisticalized dots, we are too often too burdened to rapturously dream why-and-how to connect them.

History suggests that those graduates who will someday lead us to higher and nobler causes aren't the ones who got A's in math, statistics, physics or in MBA courses. Most often they are the ones who skipped those classes to lay out on the campus green and stare wondrously at the cloud formations...