From the desk

As I rolled out of bed, only an hour after my alarm initially went off, I thought about how fast this week had gone, how fast every week had gone. Seems like just yesterday that I was walking across the stage to receive my high school diploma.

Now here I am, editor in chief of the Liberty Champion — and graduating in May.

In case your math skills are like mine, that means graduation is less than 10 weeks away.

For faculty and staff this means another year is all too quickly going to begin — new faces and legacies waiting to be introduced. For Lynchburg residents, this means three months of traffic-free living. However, for graduating seniors, like myself, this means much more.

In 10 weeks, I will no longer be viewed by society as a “high school graduate,” but rather as the much more acclaimed “college graduate” — right?

Well, not according to Rick Santorum.

“President Obama has said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” Santorum said in his speech Feb. 25. “There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day, and put their skills to the test, that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor that is trying to indoctrinate them. I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image. I want to create jobs so people can remake their children into their image, not his.”

With politicians fighting over everything under the sun, it only makes sense that they drag our education into the matter.

Fox News ran a special March 3 on the necessity of a college degree, a debate that was spurred on by the comments of Santorum.

Kai Falkenberg, a Fox News contributor and editorial counsel, said that college is no more than a waste for most students, claiming that students are putting more money into their degrees than they will ever get out.

Rick Ungar, a Fox News contributor and Forbes contributor, brought the debate back into perspective.

“Not everybody should go to college, but we don’t have to overdramatize this in the way Rick Santorum did,” Ungar said during the interview. “If college is something that you want, we should be a country where it should become available. This over-the-top response is foolish.”

As an almost-college graduate, what Santorum said offends me.

We are not in school, receiving an education, to become like Obama. In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing that on any of my syllabi.

There are dozens of colleges, like Liberty University, that have classes that are not taught by “liberal” professors.

When did receiving a college education become a bad thing?

I completely agree with Ungar. If going to college is something you really want to do, go for it. Everyone should have an equal opportunity at receiving a college education — one of the areas that I think President Obama stressed accurately.

To say that college education is unnecessary or a waste is ridiculous. Have you tried to find a job in our economy?

Oh, and didn’t Santorum not only receive his undergraduate degree from Penn State, but also his MBA from the University of Pittsburgh?

What a snob.