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From the time we are small, we’re told that if we are good students, our reward will be getting accepted to/attending college. Parents tell us that college is supposed to be the icing on our educational cakes, the chance to become more self-sufficient, and the introspective path to our true selves.
While skipping through the quad or huddling in collegiate study groups, we are also told that it's a good time to act on our passions and become armed with enough knowledge to plan our livelihoods. Some of us do – or did. But in retrospect, many of us still wonder how those years might have been spent doing something more productive – something that spoke more to who we wanted to become or at least gave us time to experiment with it.
Fact is, some talents are better developed by doing, experiencing and even failing rather than by studying. Some of the world’s most successful people neither attended or finished college. When it becomes evident your child loves learning but hates to be force-fed, doesn’t get the big picture of why the study of trigonometry or biology might be useful later in life, but is creative or talented in other ways (or not), there is only so much you can do or say as a parent to convince them college is the best path for them. For careers where a college degree and the intense study of certain subjects are the only ways to get a foot in the door in a particular field, of course, there is no other path. Most of us admire kids who know early on what they want to do in life, but how many of them do we actually come across? And what if they put in those college years – even if they knew what they wanted to study – and then find out the hard way that the job market is not ripe for their choice of careers? Or what if they simply lose interest in their major course of study? Either of those possibilities are gut-wrenchingly common.
Cameron Herold gives TED talks on how to encourage kids who have entrepreneurial tendencies toward a life of lucrative creativity – often the most underrated trait recognized by academic institutions. The author, speaker and coach defines an entrepreneur at any age to be “a person who organizes, operates, and assumes the risks for a business venture,” and describes one of his earliest talents as a child – public speaking. Trouble was, “No one ever thought of getting me a speaking coach,” he says. “Parents tend to hire tutors for what kids suck at – like French. I still suck at speaking French.”
We think of how children are routinely told to aspire to becoming attorneys, doctors, engineers, nurses, scientists, etc., But did you know that not a single MBA program in existence teaches anyone how to be an entrepreneur? It's not something most academics knows how to teach. “These programs teach them to go to work for corporations,” he says. The problem, he acknowledges, is that entrepreneurs are simply not students. They are people who figure things out on their own.
By mid-high school, our daughter couldn’t wrap her head around the idea of more of the same in college but with even more pressure attached. She just knew she wanted to escape. A 17-year old when her father and I broke up, she had taken college prep classes, but ended her high school experience being home-schooled because she absolutely hated attending classes no matter how we tried to explain the value of them. We had taken her to one of those events where college recruiters gather and to our delight, she saw one college that might fit the bill – a touchy-feely school where you could create your own college major and there were no grades given. But the out-of-state tuition was prohibitive. So she decided to take a year to establish residency in that state instead. She found a place to live and a job there, all of which lasted a few months. By then she had discovered life unrestricted. College became something she admired seeing other people strive for, but she knew she had no patience for it. She eventually warmed to the idea of art school, where she might study her beloved photography, but that turned out to be even more unaffordable and taking on years of student debt was not an option for her.
So what happened to this wayward child? Today she is a successful business owner, her success having emanated from an online business she started ten years ago at age 22 so that she could avoid working for other people. Between high school and the age at which most kids graduate from college, she rode a sometimes-dangerous roller coaster, flirting with life from a number of perspectives. Once her online business took off, however, she took the time to write about those grunge years in retrospect. Her book reassures others that no matter how badly you might screw up, if you find something that speaks to you and you work hard at it, the world can become your oyster – with or without college under your belt.
Through this ground-testing period of her life, I felt as if I must have been the world’s worst parent, even though I tried to be there for her when she needed me. While other parents boasted of their children’s academic pursuits, mine was gleefully diving dumpsters, putting herself through a vegan diet gone bad, going from job to job and railing against corporate America for the sheer principle of it. While her peers from high school came home for summer breaks, my daughter used an accident settlement to hitchhike through parts of Europe. At a certain point, however, she decided it was no great honor (nor much fun) to be penniless and decided to act on a business idea. The rest, as they say, is history.
In the New York Times Motherlode article, "When College Isn’t in the Cards,"
anonymous parents are asked about their experiences with offspring not interested in going to college. One describes how her grown child’s primary interests were creative, leaving college as an option, but not a dream. Her child sounded a lot like mine in that he never hesitated to learn heavy-duty academics, but did not relish the idea of college. “I don’t want to push him into a four-year college where he would be miserable and we would spend what amounts to a fortune from our meager budget,” said the parent.
Many of us who know our kids are capable, talented and even brilliant often feel inadequate when we realize they will not be pursuing higher education – as if there were life messages we did not repeat to them as they grew up. Is that why we don’t we hear stories from other parents whose kids found a meaningful life with decent work, without college? We can read about irreverent geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson and others who either dropped out of college or never attended and found their success, but it’s rare we hear from their parents.
And then there are the numbers. Before you tell your child he or she has no choice but college, consider the cold hard facts: Only 2 out of 5 students who enter a public four-year college manage to earn a degree within five years. For two-year colleges, the graduation rate is even more abysmal. While it’s taking many students more than five years to graduate, nearly 30% of all students who enter college don’t return for their sophomore year, even after years of good intentions, planning and saving.
To top all that off, there is the millennial mindset – you know, kids who grew up posting selfies on social media and were convinced there were no winners or losers because they got “participation trophies” for merely showing up. A recent Inc.com article cites 29 interesting facts about this generation, among them: nearly half of employed college graduates work in jobs that don’t even require a 4-year degree. But what speaks volumes is the fact that 64 percent of Millennials would rather make $40K a year in a job they love than $100K doing something boring. Pile their desire for a flexible work schedule on top of all that, and you have a recipe that would have been unheard of in their parents’ generation, where we did back flips over finding jobs with benefits and decorated our own cubicles for a bi-monthly paycheck.
In their book Quirky Kids, Drs. Perri Klass and Eileen Costello talk about how college is not for everyone. “Kids, for whom academics are either uninteresting or incredibly difficult and who have interests or talents leading them in some other direction should wave their friends and classmates off to college without a second thought. There are vocational training opportunities or entry-level jobs. If you’re lucky, you’ve started thinking about this before that last year of high school, and your child has had a chance to find out whether she really does love working in a garden supply store as much as she thought she would. It’s often true that in a more academically oriented family, the parents have difficulty with a child’s decision not to go to college or not to go right away.”
When our daughter lost interest in sports in high school, we suggested part time work and she dove into it headlong. She scrubbed shirt collars at a local dry cleaner, sold shoes, made Subway sandwiches and helped to open a huge book store, all before graduation. She thrilled to the idea of having her own money and in the process learned about life – real life – through every job she took, failed or got bored with, even if I did feel a bit sorry for her employers from time to time. She actually became good at getting jobs, even though keeping them would be an issue until she discovered the joys of creating her own livelihood.
The most important thing about college is that it’s an opportunity for your child to sort him or herself out according to their interests and preferences. It’s a time for new intellectual pursuits and identities, offering football fields of forgiveness and direction-changing options within the next four years of growth. But if your child lacks patience or is dead-set against the idea of going into debt (yours or hers) for something they see no value in, my advice would be to simply let go and not fight it. There will be no amount of pontificating you can do to convince a grown child that he or she belongs somewhere where they feel they don’t. And you might just be surprised where they end up anyway.
