If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.

This is the 100th column of this series. During the two years during which this column has been published uninterruptedly on a weekly basis, a common question I received is why do I defend higher education? I remember when I decided to become a scientist. The day was October 5, 1957. I was a 6-year-old kid living in Venezuela. The big headline in the newspaper that day was that the Soviets had launched an artificial satellite named Sputnik. I was amazed. I asked my father all kinds of questions about it, but he could not tell me much more than what was in the newspaper. After all, that technological achievement had caught everyone by surprise