Hi, my name's Joe Bernstein, and I'm a reporter on the Stiles Desk at the New York Times.

This week Sunday Reed is a story I wrote for our magazine, a 48 year old man named Benjamin Bolger.

And what makes Benjamin special is that he is America's preeminent perpetual student. That is, he's someone who collects college degrees.

Over the past 30 years, he's received over a dozen degrees.

They're from the world's most prestigious institutions.

Harvard, Stanford, and Yale, just to name a few.

I had the same reaction as many people when they hear about Benjamin for the first time.

Why?

What would possess someone to dedicate themselves to this kind of life. So last summer I decided to go to Boston and ask

Benjamin myself and talking to him is almost like talking to a walking freshman seminar.

We talked about union labor.

We talked about cryptocurrency.

We talked about the nature of bridges, international and Middle Eastern diplomacy, even Joan of Arc.

And I asked him, basically a hundred different ways,

why can't you stop going to college?

And his answer just kind of stunned me in its obviousness.

He told me, I love learning. Higher education as an institution at large is so contested today, both politically and

culturally. People take out enormous amounts of debt, and we know that a lot of these

degrees may not set you up for life in the way we've been told. And so when universities have this lofty rhetoric about learning how to think and how to be a complete person.

But then most of their graduates are just going to earn some ungodly starting salary at a consulting

firm anyways.

I think it's natural to ask, what is the point? Is the only reason to go to

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