Did Thomas Aquinas College Prepare My Children for Life After Graduation?

Parent’s Corner

By Laura Berquist (’75)

When people ask me if Thomas Aquinas College prepared my children for life after graduation, I say yes. I tell them about how my six children, all of whom graduated from the College, are grown up now. Four of them are married, three with children of their own. Four went on to graduate school. One now manages IT for a small business. (Amazing what philosophy prepares one for!) Two are well on their way to earning doctorates in philosophy, with future plans to teach at the collegiate level. Another is a nurse practitioner at Georgetown Hospital in Washington, D.C., and two worked their way up to administrative jobs in the business world.

Beyond describing my children’s accomplishments, I also describe how my children learned to think critically and well at the College. They learned how to determine, and focus on, what is most important to completing the task at hand. They learned how to learn, which is much more important than obtaining particular job skills, as such skills are very narrow in application. (I know business owners who say they always prefer a liberally educated applicant to someone trained in a particular field, because the training gets outdated quickly, but someone who knows how to learn will be able to develop the necessary skills when the time comes.)

For 17 years — from 1994 to 2010 — I had at least one child at the College, and during that time I got to know many other graduates as well. One, a medical doctor, told me that his education at TAC was most responsible for his success. Another alumnus thrived in his graduate architectural program, even though he had not taken the usual prerequisite classes, because he knew how to learn. An alumna said she had feared that she would struggle in her accelerated nursing program, but she was among the top five in her class. She cited the critical-thinking skills she learned at TAC as instrumental to her success. I know many, many more stories like these. The question of preparation is on the minds of those who ask me about the College, and I can say that all of my children have been professionally successful since graduation. I believe their education from the College is largely responsible for that. They certainly think so.

But when I answer that question from my heart — has TAC prepared my children for life after college? — this is what I say:

The education at TAC is the education for a man as a man. It fits his nature. It makes him more perfectly what God intends him to be. It forms his mind and heart so that he is able to know and love the highest things in the way that is possible in this life. It prepares him not only for a job; it prepares him to live his life here in such a way that he is ready for his ultimate goal: life with God. Thomas Aquinas College does this better than any college I know. 

What is most important to me is that all six of my children are committed to the Catholic Church and to their families. As a parent, I want them to be happy, in this life and, especially, in the life to come. I want an education that is ordered to both of these goals. If one is prepared for this life, but not the life to come, then he is missing what is most important. Bl. Cardinal Newman said, “If our hearts are by nature set on the world for its own sake, and the world is one day to pass away, what are they to be set on, what to delight in, then?”

I want my children to order their lives to eternal life, and Catholic liberal education as found at Thomas Aquinas College offers the formation that makes that possible.

Mrs. Berquist is the founding director of Mother of Divine Grace School, a distance-learning school serving about 4,000 students.