Higher education is expensive. Whether it’s a two or four-year program, it represents a significant financial and time commitment; Embrace Your Freedom will help students and parents maximize the benefits of that experience. Embrace is very readable and filled with short vignettes illustrating the points made.

Glotzbach, who splits his time between the Tri-Lakes and Saratoga, recently retired after seventeen years as president of Skidmore College. Before that, he served as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and vice president for Academic Affairs at the University of Redlands. He also taught for fifteen years in the Department of Philosophy at Denison University and has a Ph.D. in philosophy from Yale.

While going to college is not for everyone, the economic and career opportunities for those who do are enormous. College graduates have lower unemployment rates, earn substantially more than people with a high school degree, and have a far wider range of career opportunities. There is no question that students who attend trade schools also benefit from that experience, and though this book is focused on those heading for college, those headed for trade school will also benefit.

“I think there is something powerful about the old model of education for the sake of education,” said Glotzbach. “You know, studying things that are intrinsically interesting, worthwhile, and so on, which is at the core of a liberal arts education. At the same time, the idea of a liberal education, in the Ciceronian notion, liber means free, the education for a free citizen. To my mind, that education is eminently practical because it teaches you how to be in the world as an ethical being and as a political view.”

“Today, if you look at our politics, we are suffering so much because of the inability of so many people to understand the difference between truth and falsity,” said Glotzbach. “How do you take an empirical proposition, a statement about the world, and determine if it is true or false? That’s liberal education; that’s citizenship. It’s also hard work. In this book, my point is that if you are a student, you need to cultivate your curiosity and ability to ask and answer questions.”

Glotzbach said that when our country was established, the founders didn’t view freedom as being able to do whatever one wanted but that we, as a community, were free to self-govern and make laws that benefited the whole. They were seeking freedom within constraints we, as a community, co-create with others. A central thesis of the book is to help students find the freedom to chart a future through the constraints of a school: the courses and activities they

select, the students and educators they partner with, and the constraints they set for themselves.

“Freedom, in the strongest sense, emerges from a social context because that context creates opportunities that the individual can realize,” said Glotzbach. “But to realize those opportunities, first of all, you have to have the support of this community.”

Glotzbach gave as an example a person whose goal is to be an astronaut, a goal only achievable with the help of many others who developed the rocket, the space suit, the launch pad, and the many other aspects of achieving orbit and returning safely to earth.

Our nation’s founders also wanted to create a form of government that could adapt to a changing future while remaining core to a shared set of beliefs and values. In a similar way, we need to be proactive about our education, including caring for ourselves as a whole person–mind, body, and spirit–and having the skills to adapt to a changing world.

“I see it as a wholistic approach, search for what Aristotle called your eudaimonia, your good life, flourishing, but again it is eminently practical because in the world of work today, the professional world with students changing careers up to nine times in their life, you have to keep learning,” said Glotzbach. “Students today may be working in a field ten years out that hadn’t been invented when they were in school. Now, with the field of AI becoming so pervasive, how will you survive and not be replaced by AI?

The benefit to society of college-educated people is enormous, perhaps best illustrated by the outcome of the GI Bill signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1944. The bill provided veterans with funds for a college or trade school education, which included unemployment insurance for a year and a cost-of-living stipend while enrolled in college or a trade school.

The immediate outcome of the GI Bill was that forty-nine percent of college classes in 1949 were veterans, and by 1956, nearly ten million veterans had benefited. This educated workforce transformed society and created the economic boom of the fifties.

“I’m trying to do two things in this book,” said Glotzbach. “I’m trying to give students a way of thinking about their life in a more intentional way, but also not trying to put pressure on them to do that. Education is a work in progress, life is a work in progress, but at times it’s good to sit down and say, Ok, what’s the most important thing in my life right now? That’s going to change over time. I think just the act of asking that question and writing something down on paper helps focus your attention. Over time, you can look at it and see if it’s changed, and how it affects my choices, next semester, next year as I think ahead.”

Critical is parents giving their children the space to fail and find a way to get back on their feet, learn from that experience, and try again. As many know, baseball legend Babe Ruth not only led the league in home runs but also in strikeouts. Another example is that it took Edison over 2,700 attempts before perfecting the light bulb. Glotzbach says that college provides students

with that safe space to fail and urges parents to be supportive but not interfere as students learn how to benefit from failure.

“Kids who are over-parented don’t know how to make decisions,” said Glotzbach. “They don’t know how to face adversity, pick themselves up when life knocks them down. The parent-student relationship is different for a student in high school than in eighth grade. The partnership must continue but know you must redo the contract. The college-bound student, in a certain way, becomes the senior partner. The student needs to take the lead and say this is what I need, and don’t text the student every hour, much less every day.”

“Being in college is such a precious opportunity; you can’t afford to waste it because it’s not going to come again,” said Glotzbach.