The Anti-College Chorus Grows Louder

In my book Thriving in the 21st Century, I argue that the pursuit of a college degree should no longer be the default position assigned to teens as soon as they graduate from high school. I’m happy to say that I’m hearing more people who share that opinion speaking out.

One of them is John Stossel, who recently interviewed college professor and economist Bryan Caplan about his recent book on the subject. I highly recommend both of these links to parents who are considering borrowing tens of thousands of dollars so their offspring can earn a college degree because they think it’s the only way they’ll ever get a job. I suspect this chorus will only grow louder as more time passes and tuition keeps rising.

Summer Vacation Projects–Finished!

It’s been three months since summer began. Where did the time go?

I spent some of it watching my son swim in his pool, gardening, planning our daughter’s upcoming wedding and buying a vintage Bernina and playing with it. I also finished a couple of projects, including this needlework pillow from a kit I bought in 1987 but didn’t start until I finished homeschooling two years ago:

I also made this quilt from fabric I bought from Connecting Threads:

Like the back? It’s a like-new, made-in-Italy sheet I bought at Goodwill for $3.99. What a find! The look and feel of it is just wonderful.

And now my summer’s gone, and it’s back to work. I’ll post here when I can, but I’m also going to share some posts from my older blogs (I began blogging in 2005) that may help newer homeschoolers. You’ll see them on Fridays…..Flashback Fridays.

For current homeschooling news, be sure to visit my other site, Thriving in the 21st Century.

Check out Thriving in the 21st Century….

to get the latest on preparing your kids for the “new normal.” Find out about:

  1. the surprising link between homeschooling and Tumblr
  2. yet another student loan-related tragedy
  3. and what happened to the high school student who refused to wear a tracking device/student ID

plus oodles of great links for all parents, right here.

Preparing Our Kids for a Challenging Future, Part 4: College is a Tool, Not a Goal

Over the past few weeks, we’ve seen that preparing our children for a challenging future means not replicating school in our homes. It also means giving our children the opportunity for free exploration, hands-on learning and discovering the upside to failure. These are important components for raising children to thrive in the rapidly changing 21st century.

But just as we no longer teach our children to use the slide rule or achieve perfect penmanship because they’re not necessary any more, there are some things we may not need to do to prepare our children to thrive in the 21st century. One of them is to push our children to earn a college degree.

Not attending college is a touchy subject for homeschooling parents. Back when homeschooling first hit the public consciousness, there were many naysayers who didn’t believe that parents could teach their children well enough for them to succeed in life. Here’s the gauntlet those critics of homeschooling held up: “How will homeschooled kids ever get into college?”

They got their answer when homeschooler Grant Colfax was accepted to Harvard; years later, when he and his homeschooled brothers had all successfully completed college, there was more proof. And when some suggested the boys were simply products of excellent genetics, their father pointedly noted that two of his boys were adopted.

Since then, college has become the holy grail for most homeschooling parents. A home-educated child with a college degree is proof to friends and family that this homeschooling thing works. So to suggest that most of their kids probably won’t need to earn a college degree may seem almost sacrilegious to some. But looking at college graduation as a badge of honor doesn’t necessarily help our children.

The push for college in society as a whole over the past 40 years has ignored the fact that many kids are not cut out for college. They may not be book learners, or they may have gifts that are better served by on-the-job training or tech school. Evidence shows that forcing all kids into college has resulted in a low graduation rate (only half of all college students graduate within six years) and a lot of dropouts hampered by large levels of student loan debt racked up during the time they were in college.

Even young people who excelled in college are finding that the high-priced degree they earned is not much help in the new economy. If they can find work, it may not be in their field of study; it may also pay less than they expected to earn. This can result in real hardship if they took on a lot of student loan debt, which can almost never be discharged through bankruptcy, leaving them with a burden of debt that could weigh them down much of their lives.

The fact is that most of the job growth over the coming decade as predicted by the U.S. government does not require a four-year degree, and college won’t be necessary for most workers (I’ve included those statistics in my book, Thriving in the 21st Century.)

This doesn’t mean that we should discourage all of our children from going to college. Those with the smarts and the desire to have careers that logically and/or legally require advanced education (physicians, scientists, etc.) should certainly be encouraged and helped to attend college. But the idea that every young person can and should go to college makes no sense in light of the changes in our economy. We parents need to be brave enough to buck the trend and look at each of our children as individuals, determine which (if any) will likely benefit from going to college, and then help the rest figure out the best way to proceed so that they’ll thrive in the 21st century.

(Thriving in the 21st Century: Preparing Our Children for the New Economic Reality is packed with ways to prepare your children for the future. Learn more HERE.)

Missed the first three parts of “Preparing Our Kids for a Challenging Future”? You’ll find them here: #1, #2 and #3.