We woke at dawn Saturday, a concession to the law of nature that says losing some sleep is better than baking in the sun.

Saturday was a special day for a group of young people used to concessions.

They went to college on a campus without any sports teams. Without a real library. When they started there were no intramurals. Student government, sororities, fraternities and even the student newspaper were all in nascent stages.

Why, in the fall of 2003, would any college-age freshman have chosen to attend CSU Channel Islands? They were choosing a college path with only a few of the college rituals, just a fraction of the college experience.

But they came. They came from Camarillo and Oxnard and Simi Valley and all over Ventura County. And they came from Sacramento and from San Diego. And they came from all over the country.

Hundreds of them walked across the stage beginning at 9 a.m. Saturday (so as to avoid the sun) and received their degrees after four years. They are the inaugural class the first group to start as freshman and graduate.

I am not sure any of them realize just how important that is to the rest of us in Ventura County. We have had great but expensive private colleges nearby in California Lutheran University and Pepperdine. We have had great state schools for reasonable tuition but they were quite a commute. And we have a splendid community college system.

But a public four-year university in the county has been a dream for decades. Now that it is here, it is critical that we keep growing it.

Our third son, Ben, was in this class of 2007. His education at CSUCI was astonishing both in the classroom and outside of it. With a campus so fresh and raw, he had to learn to be careful about making a suggestion lest he be put in charge of it.

He and most of his friends are talking about graduate school. And well they should. This is the investment Ventura County must continue to make.

Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University, noted in a New York Times piece this week that this is the first generation of college students that is not significantly more educated than their parents. The parents gathered around these graduates are more likely than ever to be college graduates themselves.

What will separate this group of graduates are advanced degrees, and more technical training than we can even imagine in 2007.

"Technology is advancing faster than our ability to educate," Professor Cowen argued.

CSUCI has five master's level programs and is adding more each year. CLU and Pepperdine offer dozens more.

Most of you are familiar by now with the difference between what high school graduates and college graduates earn in a lifetime. But there is new data showing those with advanced degrees earn 10 percent to 14 percent more per year than those with a bachelor's degree.

As we gathered, the entire family and dozens of friends last night to toast Ben and his fellow graduates, I saw the evidence of this need for continuous learning. Our oldest son and his wife are in the fourth and final year of medical school. Our second son, a UCLA graduate, is in the midst of intensive training for his new job in sales for a company that devises and sells Voice Over Internet Protocol communications systems.

I don't know how many of you have had the pleasure of trying to help your children with homework recently. Our government's zeal for education reform has pushed advanced curriculum lower and earlier.

What my fifth-graders learn in fifth grade, I learned in ninth. Much of what my 11th-grader learns I learned as an adult.

Education today is a far more intense experience and, perhaps, that is how it must be in a world in which the amount of knowledge seems to double each year.

The tired clichés at graduation speeches note that graduation is an end, but also a beginning. In this 21st century world, it is only a beginning.

Tim Gallagher is publisher of the Star and can be reached at tgallagher@venturacountystar.com.