I sort of see human survival worldwide as being a lot like how animals survive too worldwide

 In other words: "Those who can survive do and those who can't find a way to survive don't". I suppose this is sort of harsh but it is also true.

I was very aware of how difficult it was for people to survive in the 1950s and 1960s and this sort of made me afraid of adulthood after witnessing people literally dying from overwork and all sorts of illnesses they had when they didn't go to the doctor and died right and left.

As an adult I got more into healthcare and going to doctors even though my parents were against innoculations of any kind when I was a baby which caused me to get whooping cough and almost die. Then my son also got whooping cough so after that I made sure my two daughters got innoculations at least against whooping cough after this had happened twice (once to me as a 2 year old and once to my son as a 3 year old). Luckily we both survived this trauma in our lives.

But, as I was growing up it was pretty obvious to me that until people were about 30 years old and had somewhat settled down in their lives that people (especially children from zero to 30 were dying a lot. 

This was pretty frightening for me as a child. So, it made me want to try to avoid the pitfalls that many were making that led to their deaths.

Luckily, my parents sent me to a private school in Santa Fe, New Mexico for my senior year in high school and this catapulted me into a more collegiate way of looking at things. 

So, I would say going to college kept me alive in that it broadened my horizons from everything I studied and made me much wiser for my age.

However, College is sort of also like a hammer. You can build a house driving in nails with that hammer or you can hit yourself in the head with it and be dead. That's sort of how I see college.

Not everyone is wise enough to benefit from college to have a better life like I did.