“College ruins your creativity.”

It’s amazing how one phrase can upend your whole line of thinking.

I was in high school, away from my east coast suburb to attend a week-long program on the entertainment industry in Los Angeles. On one sunny summer afternoon, I heard from speakers with established careers, but only one man made a lasting impression on me. He was an old-school movie producer; essentially retired. It felt like after decades of living, making movies and witnessing so much from people, he made his verdict about the usefulness of higher education.

Me? Well, I had not yet even taken a practice SAT yet.

The evening I returned home I told my mom all about the program at the kitchen table. The trip to the Universal Studios backlot, seeing early short films from the likes of Robert Zemeckis and George Lucas at USC, and oh — this commanding speaker, and his words of wisdom.

My mom’s response? “So go to college and stuff your ears with cotton.”

She had a valid point.

And this is coming from someone who very much enjoyed his time in college. I felt inspired by plenty of my classes, being exposed to topics I would never have sought out. I met so many people from all walks of life. It was heartening, and yet, I still found myself romanticizing the college experience of an older generation of at least a half century before. Before the 1960s, they were college men and women. In the ensuing years, college students became “college kids.”

They also had to contend with an America that became too obsessed with the college experience. How I yearned to not be part of an era where test prep companies pushed overpriced services, special editions of newsweeklies given far too much relevance, and of course, all the “why not?” accessories to buy in July and August. (You are forever in my heart, Bed Bath and Beyond.)

Now I can’t help but feel an irony: there is a new generation of college students envious of the campus experience I had. One where social media was only starting to encroach on communal activities; where the best phones could only take blurry images and texting a single sentence on a numeric keypad was cumbersome. The times were achangin’ in my undergraduate years, and now, they seem so quaint.

Perhaps though, the pendulum has now swung so far the other way, that the producer’s insight now seems reasonable – almost as though his decades of experience had given him a glimpse of what was coming. The expectation had become that students enter college fully formed; knowing where you are going before you even get there. Yet in a world of influencers, consequential artificial intelligence and even more entrepreneurship, there’s an additional irony that this all-encompassing digital world is letting young people experiment with their ideas, their interests and identities more than college ever could. The price of a college degree has gone up astronomically, but its immediate value has arguably gone down. Therein lies the reckoning: a diploma that launched their careers for one generation may not do the same for another.

How much of what happens at college is a mirror of the society at the time in which someone attends? Or now — doesn’t?

I’m grateful for what I had and what I learned; the friendships and mentorship I received hold tremendous value. But I can't help wondering whether, if I were entering college today, I would feel constrained by a system that may be increasingly antiquated. (At least when I was in college, you could be in a corner looking at people — not looking at the glow of your smartphone.)

Perhaps that's what my mother was getting at all those years ago. The producer had a point about the dangers of convention, but my mother understood that listening to someone else's perspective didn't mean surrendering your own.

Maybe the trick isn't to stuff your ears with cotton after all. It's to listen, question, and leave yourself enough room to discover the world and stay curious.

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