I would say a big part of my not seeking that out from other adults was my own immaturity at that point. I decided on a college at the last minute and barely found a dorm room because of it… Not a good decision-making process for sure! I did have other adults who I could have consulted.
Incidentally, I went on a college tour that included many prestigious universities. Unfortunately, I did not think I could afford them and basically ignored it as a pipe dream. I knew scholarships existed but did not think it would be enough for these schools. UVA, Duke, MIT etc.
I did get scholarships for some great local universities. However, the scholarships were mid to high level and only covered maybe half of the annual tuition. So again, out of reach in my mind.
Just posting all of this to provide another perspective.
Again, I would say that many young people don’t have these competent, helpful adults available to them. I did but failed to take advantage of it. That was my mistake.
There’s an ever-growing perception that seeking advice means finding people to tell you what you want to hear. A lot of kids (and, sadly, a lot of adults) simply do not want to be told what they should do, they just want their own opinions validated. That’s what passes as quality advice these days.
There’s something to be said about learning from your mistakes. But that requires being held to the consequences of those mistakes, otherwise nothing is being learned.
If you’re a 17-18 year old kid who does’t know what you want do with your life you might not know the right people to get advice from. And if you do pick the people who are supposed to be good role models or mentors then those people may still give bad advice. You might not have access to people who can give useful advice either.
I was lucky as a teen, in that I figured out my career path early. But then I just mostly stumbled my way through it.
I’d also say that the main thing that decided which college I went to was affordability. Luckily for me that it was a good university that I ended up at.
That happens actually frequently. At my kids middle schools and high-school, they have career days where you basically ask people you know to shadow them in their work for a day to see what their work is about, with strong emphasis on finding people with jobs that sound interesting to the students. Our first daughter shadowed a CPA, a physiotherapist, an architect, and a programmer for adobe. Didn’t do much good since she’s not really going for any of these at all but it’s not a bad system. Assuming you are in an environment where you get enough variety in people you can shadow.
As far as picking a college, honestly our emphasis is more on value than on any particular profession or major first. Main advice: don’t pick a fluffy bunny major and evaluate the value proposition of intended degree and added value of institution you’re going to. Our first two kids were lucky enough to get tons of choices (ACT 34 and 36 respectively) so the choice was between full or near ride/tuition at pretty good institutions or substantially higher out of pocket cost at more prestigious ones. Either way, they’re getting a fixed amount of money from us. If they go over budget, they either work for it or get loans. If they go under budget, we give them the leftover money. Make them decide what the education they’ll be getting is worth to them essentially.
First one went middle of the road with Columbia who offered her a very good scholarship but was still barely in her budget. Second one could be going abroad since she wants to be immersed in her second mother language but a few other US schools that have decent exchange programs may yet win out. It’ll depend a bit on the respective costs but I think she’s aiming for getting merit scholarships and pocketing the difference. She basically picked schools by strength in her intended major (chemistry) first, size, location, ranking, and scholarship availability. COVID did not allow for much campus visiting as you may expect. So we relied on word of mouth and research. Not ideal but hey at least we saved on traveling costs and on listening to the sale pitches for each school.
Ok. I totally misread your first post and now it makes sense. When someone’s first kid goes to Columbia and they call it “middle of the road,” I can totally see why you might be surprised with the amount of trash schools with low graduation rates.
Her post naming public schools she was looking at listed the #1st, 3rd, 8th, 13th, 14th and 19th ranked public universities in the nation. I think she meant Columbia lol.
I meant Columbia in NYC. With her grades (4.6 GPA and 36 ACT), DD had lots of options. Ranging from full ride at most public schools to no scholarship at many Ivy league schools. Middle of the road was cost wise indeed, not ranking wise, sorry for the ambiguity.
But we received a LOT of solicitations for schools we had never heard of which we investigated. That’s where we were surprised by the requirements (ACT 15-18 range) and graduation rates (~30%) at some of them. To me, these should not be allowed to exist. Students with this low grades are clear indicators that a typical college learning environment is likely not going to be a good fit for them and they’d be better off saving the costs and following another path than forcing them to try to go to college.
Generally speaking, I’d say you are correct about a lot of these kids. But the street smart kids that go to these schools can (and often do) get degrees in the sort of majors that will help them get a job. For instance, will a young adult with an accounting degree from one of those schools do well as an auditor for Ernst and Young? Probably not. But they will probably make a better staff accountant at a medium size business than someone who has never gone to college. I’m sure the same sort of analogy is the case for several other majors at those schools as well. So I wouldn’t go so far as to say the schools shouldn’t exist. But those schools would do their students a much better service if they only offered majors in which the kids actually learn something that will make them employable.
Why not simply have a more need-based path for them though. Like in Germany where industry is basically sponsoring some kind of internship/apprenticeship system for about 50% of the kids, and 80% of these leading to a full time job afterwards.
I’ve seen this path being offered in very few situations across the country here where a company takes applications from high-school students directly where the student will be taught an actual job with almost guaranteed job at the end. But that’s a very small minority of the options for high-schoolers that may not be super book smart. Seems better to me than the costly shot in the dark with 30% success rate and failure meaning low income and high debt burden for years.
Seems like pie in the sky type wishful thinking. It’s one thing to revamp the college model to cut costs and make it more affordable (already proven to be extremely difficult). It’s a completely different thing to get private industry to completely upend their entry level hiring practices across multiple disciplines. How would you suppose we could go about doing something like that?
EDIT: The only industry I could see this ever working in here is primary school education. But I don’t think it’s necessary for that industry so it still won’t happen. Pretty much anyone who wants to become a teacher and is willing to get the degree and certification has their pick of multiple employers.
I think tax incentives for business to train high-school kid in specific in-need careers may be a way to promote that option. Make some of the costs to educate/train these high-school recruits tax deductible. That’d make it cheaper for companies to do so and they’d have a high chance to get someone immediately productive and who knows their company vs. a college graduate that may know a lot more of things the company doesn’t need him for but not so much about the company specific needs. And the tax deduction could be offset by not having to fund as many colleges with low graduation rates.
A decent upbringing and private high school does not mean your family has access to the right social circle. There are a lot of bad private schools out there. I was lucky, my parents went to college, but if they had not I don’t know where I would have ended up despite going to private school. My teachers were for the most part, idiots (and I’m even more aware of this as an adult). Our guidance counselor didn’t have a bachelors (coach’s wife) and had no advice about college/careers other than “here’s an application.” She even tried to take credit for a scholarship that I earned myself, until my dad went up there and went ballistic on her. I had plenty of friends whose parents didn’t go to college and they got no direction or help from the school. I’ll also add that, yes they did not have any other adults to have that conversation and probably would not have known where to find one.
I don’t think it’s that easy for a lot of kids to find someone to talk to. My wife grew up very poor. Her father was a manual laborer, her mother did not work, and neither finished high school. Do you really think her parents’ social circle included anyone to talk to about college and careers? Because she was valedictorian she got pumped up by teachers but their advice was pretty much “go to college!” Who was she supposed to go to for advice and did she even have the background to know what questions to ask?
One thing I remember about classmates whose parents were doctors, lawyers, or businesspeople is how comfortable they were talking with adults. They often spoke with them as equals. I would say that’s not something that kids coming out of low income/non-degreed/professional households have learned. I know my parents went the opposite direction and drilled into me that a kid’s opinion was worth nothing and adults ran the show, so I was incredibly timid when talking with adults. It can be a cultural roadblock too. It’s a lot more difficult and intimidating to a kid like that to talk to a complete stranger about career advice when they don’t have a family member to turn to. I would be willing to bet there are more kids who don’t have access to helpful adults in their life than ones who do.
Tax incentives are usually only usefule at encouraging businesses to do a little more of what they are already doing, or do a little less of something they aren’t that excited about in the first place. To completely revamp the way that private industry hires at the entry level, you’d have to downright outlaw things along with creating incentives.
“Tax incentives” is also an extremely generic answer. Businesses are already able to write off $5,250 per employee per year. Most of them aren’t giving that money to 18 year olds that promise to work for them in 4 years. They’re giving it to older skilled staff getting an online degree or employees with bachelors getting a graduate degree. What would you do to change that behavior?
For kids like that, you’re right, they may not have any successful adults to talk to.
I was mostly talking about the kids that come from middle class families with decently educated parents (some college or 4 yr state school degrees) that choose to get a degree in English (just an example, but you get what I am saying) with no plan on how they are going to use that degree to further their careers. If they had talked to any of the dozen or so successful adults around them (unlike your wife and your friends, they did have successful adults in their lives), they would have been told that a degree in english isn’t going to open many doors for them.
I would be willing to bet that the majority of young adults with degrees in majors that won’t help them get a job had plenty of access to helpful adults and either didn’t talk to them about what they should do, or didn’t listen. I think the kids you are talking about probably aren’t getting worthless bachlors degrees because they aren’t likely to get degrees at all.
18 year olds are also prewired for optimism. You can advise them all day long that a communications degree, on average, will doom them to a life of low-wage media jobs, but they won’t think it applies to them.
Don’t ask me how I know. I wish I could tell my 18-year-old self “everything you did in your tv/broadcasting career, you could have also done with an EE degree instead.”
I just wasn’t wired to hear it at the time.And yes, I went to a decent high school and have well-educated parents.
Of course, I had a scholarship to a state school and the out-of-pocket cost was negligible by today’s standards.
I dunno about that. I remember a “joke” from my freshman year (18-19) – business school is for those who can’t do engineering; communications is for those who can’t do business.
Could allow businesses to write-off more than the 5.25k and essentially cover all tuition for those kids. Set it up as a loan if the student decides to bail on them. Business agrees to make payments on that loan as long as the kid stays employed up to full balance payment after an agreed number of years. Basically provide an incentive for the kid to stay at that company in an actually working shortened private version of the PSLF program. Business could also underpay quite a bit the 18 yr old being trained down to a minimum stipend depending on how they split time between studies and work training. If they spent 2-3 years training a kid at minimum cost to them, and be assured that the kid would stick around, they may be better off than hiring a new grad who may or may not work out.
What you are proposing seems like it would only work for a business that gets the majority of its workforce straight out of school. I don’t know how many businesses like that there are, but the ones that I can think of off the top of my head are professional sports and the military. Professional sports competitors already get free college, so that’s a moot point, and the military does this exact thing already. The rest of private industry doesn’t seem like it could handle something like this without the risks being removed, which is why I believe we don’t already see it and won’t simply by increasing the tax deductibility threshold.
One ran his construction business out of his office in school.
The other had a PhD in education and her thesis was that parental divoce did not impact childrens academic performance.
