Never confuse education with intelligence. You can have a Master’s degree and still be an idiot.
-anonymous
One memory of my college graduation stands out: our dean spoke at a pre-graduation luncheon. He described what he’d majored in, then his first job after graduating. He had one career for 5-7 years, then another which lasted about a decade, then another for 5-10 years more. On it went until he was now dean at a private Christian university, something he never would’ve expected when he graduated.
His point was, many people like him don’t graduate from college and stay in their degree-related field for 50 years until retirement. In fact, that’s rare now compared to past generations. What’s more likely is a winding trail, a seeing and seizing of opportunities along the way.
As we talk to our kids about their options, doesn’t it help to look at it this way? Often without meaning to, we stress kids out: “Hey teen, I know your prefrontal cortex, responsible for decision-making and planning, won’t be fully developed for about 10 more years, but would you please choose the career you’ll still want when you’re 45?”
My Story is Not Unique
My husband Chris and I married soon after college. We had $87,000 in debt between student loans and one credit card. These days, that’s nothing, but it was still an intimidating amount for newlyweds.
Five years into marriage we became parents and got more serious about becoming debt-free. This had a major impact on me as a new mom. After 5 years of making our regular payments, I couldn’t afford to stop working. Because the monthly bills for our debt equaled our house payment, it was like having two mortgages. This put pressure on me to continue working when I wanted freedom to care for my baby full-time.
When our second child was born almost 3 years later, I was barely able to stop working; not because we’d made significant progress on our loans, but because of raises Chris had gotten. This was a huge blessing, being with my kids full-time, and I wouldn’t change it for anything. I still felt the weight of the loan payments on my shoulders, though. I was constantly trying to think of ways to make a little money. This was before hustle culture was such a big phenomenon, and before side-gigs were so ubiquitous.
Finally, 16 years after graduating, we said goodbye to our student loans.
And the kicker – while some things we learned at college came in handy over the years, neither of us had jobs that lined up with our college degrees. My husband, with his undergrad and Master’s Degrees in Communications, drove a forklift at a trucking company, then became a manager/tutor at a Sylvan Learning Center, then on to a manufacturing company where he still works today. With my Bachelor’s Degree in English – Writing, I worked as a medical transcriptionist for 12 years, typing verbatim what doctors said about their patients’ scapulas and ureters.
Ahem.
This is not uncommon. A post on Fastweb.com says, “Underemployment is a term that refers to employees who have a job outside of the field in which they majored. This term implies that these graduates were not able to find work in their preferred field and thus had to settle for any job they could secure.” Almost 50% of graduates find themselves in this situation, which tells me that college is not the bridge to success that it used to be for many people.
Of course, these stats are from the last few years. We might say that by the time our kids graduate it’ll be different; not likely, but anything is possible. We also might think that our child’s chosen field might not be so impacted, or that they’ll be the other 50% that do get jobs in their chosen field. They absolutely might. This post isn’t meant to be discouraging, but it’s a very real possibility that our children will fall into the first category, and we need to help them understand this and really consider whether the debt they’re taking on is a worthwhile risk.
Because even when college grads do land jobs in their chosen field, they will still have a mountain of debt to pay off (possibly doubled by a spouse’s debt) and the big questions are – did they truly need a degree to get there, and is it likely they’ll still even be in that field when they make their final loan payment?
Given the likelihood of the winding trail my dean talked about, I believe it makes sense to reconsider a pricey college degree. So what can they do instead?
Gain Work Experience
Amish children go to school up through 8th grade. Then they sit around and play their Nintendo Switch.
What?
No, they work. They gain real-world experience in their communities. They hone their skills and continue to hone their work ethic. By the time they’re young adults, they’ve spent about 8 years sitting in a classroom, and another 8 putting what they’ve learned into practice before launching out on their own.
Why couldn’t we do something even remotely similar? What if we take our teens’ interests, their “maybe I could major in…” and find places where they can work or volunteer to gain that experience? They’ll find out quickly if they hate it or love it. If they love it, they’ll have their foot in the door and can earn the respect of their superiors and a line item on their resume. They might even find that their winding path has already begun, that the foot in the door is an opportunity to advance in that field not by bringing a shiny $200,000 dollar degree that says they’ve sat in a college classroom for 4 years, but by having already proven that they can do the work itself.
Research and Process
I highly recommend the book, “Master of One: Find and Focus on the Work You Were Created to Do” by Jordan Raynor. Surprisingly, this book isn’t specifically geared toward high schoolers – it’s for anyone trying to decide what to pursue wholeheartedly over the next 3-5 years.
Take the pressure off as much as possible: first of all, let it be a process. If your child is 17, it might feel like you need to rush, but purposeful conversations over the course of a few weeks or months are better than making a rash decision today. There is so much flexibility to life; an ebb and flow of desires, goals, and opportunities that’s normal and healthy. Ask questions like, what could you see yourself being interested in enough for the next 5-10 years? What has been a long-term interest already? What are their natural strengths? Maybe take a personality or skills test to help give perspective.
Walk them through some scenarios: I loved the “Choose Your Own Adventure” book series as a kid. At the end of a chapter, you’d be given options about what should happen next, then you’d go to that page to continue reading. If you didn’t like that option, you could go back and see what else could’ve happened in the story.
Choose a career they’re interested in to start with.
- What’s the job description? Are there any blog posts or Youtube videos that show what a day might be like in this job? If it’s a serious interest, make a call to a local place where they can shadow someone for a few days (you’d be surprised how different the concept of a job can be from the actual reality – ask any police officer who’s buried in paperwork).
- What would an average degree in that field cost you?
- With minimum payments, how long would it take you to pay off this debt?
- How much interest would have been paid over the life of the loan?
- Do you want to get married? Your spouse may not bring any debt into the equation, but it’s a good possibility.
- Do you want to have kids? Stay home with your kids?
At some points, especially crunching the numbers, it can seem discouraging, but we are not doing our kids any favors by having them walk blindly into these issues.
How about you? What other questions can we ask of ourselves and our kids as they’re deciding on their future? Let me know in the comments below.
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