This past week I confronted what has heretofore been my personal mantra of higher education. I confronted it, struggled with it, and then threw it in the trash can.

One of my BYU professors said it best: "A college education is the only place where Americans want to get ripped off." That is to say, everyone always searches for how to get the least educational value for their dollar. They take only as many credits as necessary to graduate, and they try to focus on easy classes at that. They base their class schedules on what time the classes meet, rather than what they'll potentially learn. They don't want to work, they don't want to learn, they don't want to get the full possible value out of their tuition dollar.

While at BYU, I was converted to opposing this philosophy, and I walked the walk to match my talk. Heck, I even had to audit one class my penultimate semester because if I had gotten credit for it, I would have lost my scholarship for my final semester. And I've tried to do the same thing here in law school. If tuition is a flat rate, I'm trying to milk my money for all it's worth. We need 52 credits to graduate, and at this point I only need one three-credit class this semester to meet that requirement.

So this semester, I was faced with a choice: Cyberlaw, Wills and Trusts, or some cross-registration class at the undergrad college, the Education School, the Government School, or the Business School?

I was shocked when I ran through the catalogs for the other Harvard schools and didn't find any classes that really struck my fancy (except Humor and Wit, an undergrad English Department class that meets at the same time as Local Government Law, which I didn't want to drop). That was shocking. I recall always being able to find more and more interesting-looking classes in the BYU catalog. Maybe that was because BYU is a much bigger school, and therefore can offer more classes.

So when it came down to deciding between the two law school classes, I ended up choosing None Of The Above. I considered it, and really truly felt that I would rather have more time to myself than to learn more stuff for the same tuition charge. Plus, I liked the fact that the schedule I concocted for myself gives me Thursdays and Fridays off. I was floored that this was my decision, but I understand it and I'm sticking to it.

Part of it is that I'm finally burned out with school. I've been doing this for like 20 years of my life or something, and I feel like it's time to move on. Part of it is that I know I need more out-of-class time to work on my third-year research paper that doesn't even have a direction yet, let alone something substantive like an outline. But mostly I just want my life to be easier this semester. I want to slack off a bit. I don't want to learn as much.

So I'm a traitor to my own philosophy. Well, the way I figure it, I've been so doggedly true to my philosophy that when you average in this semester with all the others, I still came out ahead on my tuition.