Six months after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1987,
Anil Jethmal received in the mail his student loan installment plan. Only twenty-two years old and with an entry
level financial advisor job with its associated entry level salary, reality
began to set in for Anil that he had to start paying back tens of thousands of
dollars in student loans.
Was it all worth it?
Of course, it was. Anil knew all
the statistics. For every dollar
invested on an education at Bowdoin, the lifetime financial returns are
considerably higher. True to form, Anil
was able to pay back every penny of his student loans with interest well before
the 10-year allotted schedule.
Anil Jethmal is well aware that his financial successes in
life, including his being featured in The Winner’s Circle II: How 10 Stockbrokers Became the Best in the Business,
can largely be attributed to his education.
However, he has since learned to appreciate his education in a much
broader sense.
In a time where racial tensions in society have reached a
boiling point, Anil recalls a conspicuous absence of racism during his entire 4 years at Bowdoin College. Anil was aware
that Bowdoin College is perennially ranked in the top 1% of all colleges in the
U.S and, therefore, only accepts the best, the brightest and hardest working
students. However, it wasn’t until he got there that he realized the wonderful
by-product of Bowdoin’s vetting process.
Anil Jethmal, in a conversation with famed author and civil rights activist, Maya Angelou, discussed the relative, if not total, lack of
racism at Bowdoin. Maya Angelou
theorized that it was due to an abundance of “intellectual curiosity” on campus.
She held firmly that those with an “intellectual curiosity”
don’t fear people who are different.
They want to know more about what and why others are different. Those with an “intellectual curiosity” have
healthy self-esteem—they don’t need to put down others to feel better about
themselves.
Through the years, Anil has found that his education has bettered him and broadened his own scope of interests in countless other ways.
His studies of history, for example, inspire Anil often to
choose vacations where he may explore new and exciting world cultures. He feels that those who exclusively spend
their vacations at the golf course or at the beach are bypassing some of the
best that life has to offer. Even with
something as simple as food, Anil Jethmal finds, those with eclectic interests (inspired
by intellectual curiosity) discover many wonderful ethnic cuisines that others may never know and enjoy.
His enjoyment of the fine arts and for the symphony can be
directly traced back to his incredibly engaging professors and the stunning facilities at Bowdoin. The list goes on and on.
While so many may analyze the monetary benefits of an elite
education in terms of financial returns, Anil feels that education has enriched
his life in so many other ways. And
that, as the saying goes, is priceless.
