The Five-Year Party (27 page)
Read The Five-Year Party Online
Authors: Craig Brandon
Looking back on this experience, I wish I had been more understanding and encouraged him to find his own way. I wish I had not tried to force him onto the college career path that he knew instinctively was not right for him. Pushing only made him more frustrated and damaged his self-esteem. My efforts to help were clearly counterproductive.
I am mentioning this because I think many parents make the same mistakes. Helping your child find the appropriate career path is one of the most important and most difficult tasks that parents face. I have spoken with many parents who were obsessed with getting their children into a four-year college, even when it was clear that their children were not intellectual and had no interest in further education. Our culture has constructed a hierarchy where four-year college students are at the top of the heap and students who attend community colleges or who take over family businesses or set out on their own are thought to be farther down in the pecking order.
College recruiters encourage this myth because it serves their own self-interest. They advocate sending every high school graduate to a four-year college because they think that’s what parents want. It’s important that parents realize that sending their children to college is not always the best option. There are other paths to satisfying careers that can lead to a fulfilling life without the decades-long burden of making loan payments for an expensive education that graduates never use. What parents should be looking for is the most
appropriate
option for their children and they, not guidance counselors or college admissions officers, are the ones best qualified to make that decision. There is no one-size-fits-all path to success. It’s a little more difficult than that and it’s important that parents understand what the other options are.
appropriate
option for their children and they, not guidance counselors or college admissions officers, are the ones best qualified to make that decision. There is no one-size-fits-all path to success. It’s a little more difficult than that and it’s important that parents understand what the other options are.
Perhaps the most important thing parents can do to avoid being fleeced by party schools is to take the time to make a reasonable and comprehensive evaluation of your child towards the beginning of eleventh grade. Don’t automatically assume that a four-year college education is the best choice, even if the guidance counselor recommends it and a college recruiter attempts to sell you an expensive degree. The truth is that guidance counselors recommend college for 90 percent of high school students.
Our culture has a damaging prejudice against kids who opt out of the four-year college path, thinking of them as failures at the age of eighteen. As a result, parents face tremendous pressure to get their kids into college, any college, and party schools use this pressure as part of their marketing strategy to sell them a shoddy product at an inflated price. “Can’t get your kid into a top college? Well, we want him at ours! And we cost less too. Step right up and sign here!”
Parents should take these advertising pitches with a grain of salt now that they have read the information in this book and know what really goes on behind the party school walls. A four-year residential college is only one of the paths to happiness and success and for many children it is exactly the wrong one. As we have seen in the previous chapters, sending the wrong kinds of children to college is dangerous and can lead to decades of financial misery.
The indisputable reality is that children have different talents, skills, interests, and abilities. Almost every child is good at something and among the important jobs of parents and teachers is to help children identify what they are good at and match it with the proper training to find a way to make a living using these gifts. Some students are good with their hands. Some can take a computer apart and put it back together. Some like to work outside. Some have social skills that make them good with people and some would rather read a book than go out and play. After seventeen years of observation, parents are the best possible real experts in evaluating their children’s talents and abilities. Don’t let guidance counselors, college recruiters, or party school administrators steer you in the wrong direction.
Some students should go to a four-college. If they like to read books, are curious about the world, like going to school, enjoy learning and acquiring knowledge, and have a specific career in mind that requires a degree, don’t let anything stand in your way. Send that kid to the best college you can afford and rest assured that whatever you pay is worth every penny. Good colleges want these kinds of students and will be generous when it comes to financial aid. Just be sure you aren’t wasting your money on a subprime party school that may look like a bargain but is really just an adolescent theme park.
At least half of American teenagers don’t fit into the ready-for-college category and that’s when parents have to make some hard decisions. Parents with highly inflated estimates of their children’s intellectual abilities keep party schools in business. Sending educationally disengaged eighteen-year-olds to a subprime party school is dangerous and often does them more harm than good. These kinds of students can face decades of underemployment and crippling debt. About 1,700 college students die every year from alcohol-related accidents.
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Remember that at party schools slackers make up the majority of students and they exert tremendous peer pressure on their fellow students to misbehave. Sure, these students will get a very expensive certificate, but they probably have not gained the knowledge and thinking skills that are supposed to go with it. As a parent, do you want to purchase an education for your children or do you just want a diploma? It’s no longer automatic that the two things are the same.
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Remember that at party schools slackers make up the majority of students and they exert tremendous peer pressure on their fellow students to misbehave. Sure, these students will get a very expensive certificate, but they probably have not gained the knowledge and thinking skills that are supposed to go with it. As a parent, do you want to purchase an education for your children or do you just want a diploma? It’s no longer automatic that the two things are the same.
When party school recruiters promise fascinating careers with high salaries for their graduates, parents need to remember that only the top 10 percent actually get there. For the vast majority of party school graduates, a college degree means being stuck in a low-paying job and saddled for years with tens of thousands of dollars of tuition loans. After reading this book, including the information in the appendix, you should have all the information you need to make a good choice as long as you are honest and open to the many options available. Remember that just because you can get your child accepted at a subprime college, it doesn’t mean that is the best choice.
In my role as a teacher in a subprime college, I could tell on the first day of my classes which students should really be there and which were simply coasting along for the five-year cruise on the party barge. It should be even easier for parents to make this observation once they know what to look for. It’s important to take a look at motivation as well as intellectual level. What does your child want to do with her life and why? Spending tens of thousands of dollars on higher education for a child who is not interested in education is simply tossing money away. It’s like sending a vegetarian to an expensive steak house. Sure, you can just have the salad, but you’re clearly in the wrong place. Sending the wrong kind of child to college is much worse than choosing not to go in the first place.
If your child doesn’t read books, shows little interest in school, and often says he doesn’t want to go, if he complains about doing his homework, gets in trouble at school and into disputes with teachers, if he spends most of his time with video games, web surfing, and partying with his friends, you are going to have to make some difficult decisions. Forcing this kind of child to go to college is asking for trouble. If your child acts like this with his parents and teachers carefully watching over him, what’s going to happen in college with no one paying attention until he commits a crime or ends up in the hospital getting his stomach pumped? This happens every day at subprime colleges. Parents of these kinds of children assume that their children will grow up when they get to the campus, as if some kind of magical potion affects them over the summer when they turn eighteen. Believe me, it’s not going to happen. Many of these children simply run wild when no one is around to make sure they follow the rules. Often, the only role models are older slacker students, who will provide the illegal alcohol and drugs, assistance in finding the next party, and instructions on how to cheat, plagiarize, and lie their way through college.
“The truth is there are students who are simply allergic to school,” said Linda Lee, author of
Success Without College
. “They have to be monitored in high school to do their homework, they skip school, arrive late, leave early.” College professors told her that three-quarters of their freshmen had no business sitting in a college classroom because they were spoiled, immature, and lazy and had no interest in studying what was being taught. From my twelve years as I college teacher, I agree completely. Many of my students even admitted to me that the only reason they were in college was to participate in the party or because their parents made them go.
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Success Without College
. “They have to be monitored in high school to do their homework, they skip school, arrive late, leave early.” College professors told her that three-quarters of their freshmen had no business sitting in a college classroom because they were spoiled, immature, and lazy and had no interest in studying what was being taught. From my twelve years as I college teacher, I agree completely. Many of my students even admitted to me that the only reason they were in college was to participate in the party or because their parents made them go.
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If, during the crucial conversation with your child, she says she wants to go to college, you need to ask her why. If she says she wants to learn, that’s fine. If she says she wants to have a good time, you need to talk about other options. Neil Bull, director of Interim Programs in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told Lee that too many parents think they owe their child a college education, even if the child doesn’t want one.
“I had this kid from Exeter,” one of the top college prep schools in the country, Bull told Lee. “This was a wimpy, feckless child who got 1100 on his boards.” This student had told his father he only wanted to go to college to have a good time.
“The father would be masochistically insane to send that kid to college,” said Bull. “Most college freshmen are just falling-down binge drinkers.”
“Would any sane parent spend up to $30,000 a year on a kid who said, straight out, that he just wanted to have a good time?” asked Lee. The answer, as I can attest, is that this happens every day with disastrous and costly results. “College is a very expensive way for your child to find himself,” said Lee.
So what are the alternatives to sending your child to a four-year residential college? There are many options, but all of them suffer from a public relations perspective because they don’t get as much attention as the glorified bachelor’s degree route. It takes courage for a parent to “just say no” to party school recruiters and forge their own way.
Among the best and least publicized options are two-year community colleges, technical colleges, and trade schools, which are currently overflowing with students eager to get into them. Many of them now operate on twenty-four-hour schedules to accommodate all the students who want to attend. Unlike so-called liberal arts colleges, where students are left to make important career choices by themselves, these colleges are focused like a laser beam on specific careers and outcomes. When students choose a program, the college focuses on preparing the student for a specific career in such fields as nursing, computer repair, medical records technology, tax preparation, etc. Although these students also take classes in things like history and English, the classes are designed for the less intellectual, more practical individuals who make up a majority of their students. Best of all, however, are the close connections between the faculty and local businesses that will hire their graduates. Students who complete these programs have a direct connection to the employment market and usually have no problem finding jobs as soon as they take off their caps and gowns.
Two-year colleges also offer an important option. After graduation from a community college, students can pursue a bachelor’s degree and transfer their credits to many four-year college programs at a considerable savings. This is a perfect route for students who are too immature to be left on their own at age eighteen but grow up significantly in their early twenties and decide that a bachelor’s degree might be right for them after all.
Because most of these programs take only two years instead of four, they represent a huge savings when compared to a four-year school that is really a six-year school. Also, because they are often located close to home, students don’t have to pay room and board and remain under parental guidance, unlike the freshmen who run wild on party school campuses. These students also have a much lower debt level than their counterparts from four-year schools.
Many parents say they are reluctant to take the two-year route, citing studies that show that the average four-year college grad makes more money than a community college grad. This gap, however, has been closing rapidly as four-year colleges increase their tuitions at two or three times the inflation rate and many holders of bachelor’s degrees fail to obtain the white-collar jobs that are in short supply. Although the average plumber, electrician, or computer technician earns less than the average holder of a bachelor’s degree, many technicians make much more than the average. Plumbers can move up to owning their own companies and have the potential to make more than the average college grad.
What parents have to battle here is our culture’s bias against tech schools. We have been taught since we were babies that a four-year college is the goal and anything less than that is failure. Technicians, however, often find it much easier to get a job than college grads because their experience is needed everywhere and is easily transferable.
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