The United States has about 3,500 institutions of higher education that award degrees to millions of degree-seeking students. These numbers alone insure a multiplicity of individual and institutional meanings for the B.A. degree. However, one meaning of the B.A. degree is pervasive. For nearly everyone, it signifies the completion of a rite of passage. Like all end points to a rite of passage, the degree has its myths, rituals, and symbols.
Graduation is a grand, time-honored ritual.
On an elevated level, this particular rite of passage ends in moral, intellectual, social, and psychological growth. The B.A. degree represents the gaining of wisdom, consciousness, conscience, membership in new communities, and character. My last two sentences, of course, are the staple of graduation speeches. Indeed, versions of them have often dropped like paper petals from my rosebud lips. In her impressive 1995 Bates Convocation address, the historian Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz elaborates on this idea.