Maybe Your Kid Shouldn’t Go to College
At least, not right away…
“So what’s after graduation?” I asked.
I was a youth pastor, and that was a question I had asked over and over to high school seniors for nearly a decade. I had no idea that this particular conversation would soon cause the end of that career for me.
“I’m going to college, I guess,” this kid said.
My next question snapped his head back. I’m not being glib — he literally jerked in his seat.
“Why?” I asked.
After he gathered himself, he regarded me with confusion.
“What do you mean, ‘why?’” he countered. “I have to go to college. I mean, what else am I supposed to do after high school?”
I was younger and dumber than I am now, so I didn’t even pause to consider the dangerous territory I was recklessly barging right into.
“Who says you have to go to college?” I asked. “Do you even want to do that?”
I knew his parents, so I already knew the answer to the first part of that question. I also knew the second part was irrelevant in that household.
He went on to college and, within three semesters, was back home and working at the local chicken plant. I wasn’t there to greet him either. After his parents caught wind of our conversation, it wasn’t very long before I received notification that my resignation was expected.
Here’s the thing colleges will never tell you: it isn’t for everyone. Ivy League schools reject almost everyone who applies every year, but even they are really only saying that their school isn’t for everyone.
College dropout rates are staggering. Colleges know this, too, and I can promise you they adjust their tuition rates to account for attrition. The students who stick it out incur massive debt while the institutions, many already flush with cash from endowments, continue to get richer and richer despite the high dropout rate.
If that many people quit each year, why did they decide to go in the first place? Here are a few reasons:
- As with the above example, familial expectation forced the decision. Humans spend around 18 years being shaped by parents/guardians/whomever, and upon graduation from high school, many are not equipped properly to make life-altering decisions for themselves. One of the common things high school kids told me was some variation of, “If I don’t go to college, my parents say I’m completely on my own.”
- Connected to the previous point, but different, are the kids who are desperate to get out of the house and explore the unsupervised space beyond their parents’ immediate reach. I’m a living example of this — I grew up in a strict, disciplinarian home and when high school ended, I threw caution to the wind and eloped with the first college that called.
- Societal pressure is a thing, too. Somewhere along the way, college became the new high school. My grandfather grew up in the Great Depression, a time in which many people never graduated high school. Getting that diploma was a hell of an accomplishment back then. My father grew up in the Baby Boomer generation, when getting a college degree was largely considered over-achieving. Society today tends to look down on anyone who doesn’t have at least a Bachelor’s degree.
- They don’t know what else to do. “College is just the next thing after high school,” one kid told me. He was under the impression that life is a set checklist, written in indelible ink, that one must follow right down the page if one wants to succeed. Anything less would be settling for mediocrity.
News flash: none of those reasons are good ones. Not a single one. If a young person knows in their heart that their calling is to be a doctor, lawyer, engineer, teacher, scientist, historian, or astronaut, then yeah. They need to go to college. Hopefully, sensing their calling resulted from deep soul searching and the hard work of developing those interests and aptitudes in the high school classroom.
College requires, at the very least, a work ethic. Discipline. And yeah, at least a modicum of intelligence. I’m not trying to be mean here, but not everyone has all of those things.
I lacked two of them myself when I landed on the front steps of my dorm in the fall of 1993. My GPA that semester was 0.4. I did not return in the Spring. I did go back the next school year, but dropped out again a year after that.
I eventually graduated from that school — 17 years and $49,000 in student loan debt later. I guess that eventually finishing proves I belonged there after all, but my story points out another truth that goes hand in hand with the idea that not everyone should go to school.
Simply put, even those of us who should go to school shouldn’t necessarily do it right away. At 18 years old, I fell firmly into the category of “gotta get away from my parents.” I got to school and immediately fell into the social life.
My parents said no almost every time I wanted to go somewhere or do something in high school but, when I hit college, the only person left to say no was me. And I just didn’t — except when it came to getting up in the morning to go to class. Or staying up late to study instead of watch movies in the quad and sit at Waffle House all night yukking it up with my buddies.
The moral of my story is, if I’d waited five years to go to college, I would’ve graduated eight years sooner.
College can be a wonderful experience for students who are mature enough to manage their work/life balance straight out of high school. It creates wonderful opportunities to succeed for those who show up with a plentiful supply of elbow grease and a firm idea of why they are there.
It can be brutal for decades to those who either went too soon or went when they shouldn’t have at all.
Call to action: when it comes time for you to talk to your kids about college (and please, please, please do it way before their last semester of high school), have honest and open conversations with them about it. Develop a plan together for how college unfolds, or what life looks like if they don’t go.
College is not the best gift we can give our kids. Our love, patience, guidance, and understanding are. Anything less than that can be a generational curse.
