Collegiate Life is Not for Everyone
Tuesday, September 19th, 2006By Mimi Rothschild
We homeschoolers are academics at heart. As a fervent proponent of education, my biggest dream has often been to see my kids receive their college degree. I see it almost as a seal of approval on my own ability to homeschool. It means that I succeeded in preparing them for the rigors of collegiate life. But has this preparation gone to waste?
More students go to college today than ever before. One could assume that this means that our country’s young people are better educated and that the U.S. is poised to lead the world. Unfortunately, this reasoning is not unlike the push for higher minimum wages. By increasing the amount of students attending college, the academic standards across the board must be lowered to accommodate less prepared students.
This frightens me. The K-12 public school system has been fumbling for decades. Many colleges, even private schools, have to follow suit in order to maintain funding. A good percentage of students attending universities are indifferent to learning. Rather than giving them the boot and losing their tuition money, some universities have opted to cater to the apathetic underperformers.
Parents are still willing to pay outrageous tuition dollars to keep kids in colleges that do little to prepare them for that ever-boding “real world.” Consider the following, from a recent article in the Christian Science Monitor:
“Last year’s National Assessment of Adult Literacy found, for example, that less than a third of college graduates are proficient in reading and the ability to do elementary mathematical calculations.”
As tough as it is, homeschooling parents have to buck this trend and realize that not every child was meant to enter college. I know a young man who recently graduated from a top college. All he wanted to be in high school was a foreman on a construction site. His parents forced him to go to college. Although he performed well, he sadly lacked the motivation to pursue a white collar job and is currently working at the same fast-food restaurant at which he was employed in high school. College students across the country, even ones that do want to pursue white collar jobs, are forced to work as cashiers, baristas, and other low-paying jobs. All this, and they remain mired in crushing debt for years.
Parents, remember that college is one of many ways to achieve financial stability and occupational fulfillment. Pushing your unwilling children to enter college will not necessarily give your child the edge he or she needs to compete in the job market. Rather, pray with them. Pray that God will show them the path that they are to take. Don’t push your child into a university if he or she has no clue what she wants to do. There’s nothing more confidence-breaking than spending four years and $60,000 on a worthless college degree. I’ll leave you with one more statistic from the same report:
“Take a look at the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s 10 fastest growing occupations between 2004 and 2014, and you’ll find that six of the 10 professions do not require a four-year degree, and four of these call for no academic degree at all.”
It’s something to think about, parents.