Last week I attended a reception for John Kluge Jr., the son of the late Columbia University alumnus John Kluge Sr.

John Kluge Sr. once donated $400 million to the university, the single largest donation for financial aid made to any American university - a donation of which I am a direct benefactor. My financial aid package comes from his endowment, so it is no exaggeration to say that I wouldn't be attending school here at Columbia without the extraordinary generosity of John Kluge Sr., which reduced the student debt I would have to take on for college to more affordable levels.

At the reception, John Kluge Jr. turned out to be a very nice man, and they played a video of his father formally donating the large sum back in 2008. In this video, Columbia University President Lee Bollinger called his gift "both a testament to his personal history and values and a challenge to all of us to do our best to live up to our nation's ideals."

Hearing Bollinger's words, I couldn't help but wonder if, by receiving John Kluge Sr.'s aid, I hadn't simply taken on a different type of debt.

The call to take our education and use it to help the less fortunate is not new to me. One of the most common recurring conversations among my friends includes the anxiety around our seemingly conflicting goals of achieving success and helping others. Lots of ambitious students come here with dreams of starting or joining a nonprofit, or else a business with a

I've personally seen how students' pursuits of success completely changes their priorities. In the same way that students come here looking to start a nonprofit, many students come with strong interests in learning about less "marketable" skills. However, the culture of success- chasing and fear of bad job markets often pigeonhole these students into drastically different college educations.

It's not uncommon to see English majors succumb to the seemingly job-friendly economics or for linguistic majors to go premed, or for film majors to excessively over-exert themselves acquiring a second (and more quantitative) major. And who's to say these are bad choices? After all, the fact is that there are probably more job options available to the film major with quantitative skills than the one without them.

Nevertheless, I can't shake the feeling that there is something fundamentally disturbing about the necessary insinuation that students who graduate with anything other than STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) degrees have nothing to offer society - or even the job market.

Seeing how the pursuit of success takes students away from their initial goals of helping others or studying what they love, I can't help but be skeptical of these students' working definition of "success."

This raises the question: What is success? Where is the "you are now successful" finish line, and how do you know when you've crossed it? Is it determined by how much money you make? Call me naive, but I really don't buy that. While the goal is always to make at least a comfortable living, I don't think you can call a man successful simply because he can afford his weight in gold.

Original post:
The Freshman: Chasing monetary prosperity isn't `success'