Higher Ed
I sent my daughter off to college last fall. She’s nearby, attending that big football university. You know the one. My son has a degree from there as well.
But she didn’t just pick it, pack up and go. We visited schools around the South and had many discussions about what she wanted to major in and where she was interested in spending four years before heading off to grad school. (Her chosen profession pretty much requires an advanced degree.) And now we’ve done the parents’ weekends and the other family-oriented activities that higher education hosts to create greater connections between students and their funders (I mean, fathers and mothers).
It’s nothing like my experience going to college. For one thing, I didn’t have a clear vision in mind when I started. I didn’t take the recruiting trips to other campuses, sit in on classes in this or that major, and I didn’t stay in the dorm for a weekend to get a feel for the full-service college experience. Nope. I enrolled at the University of New Orleans and went to class. But as I soon learned, college was not my path.
That’s not the case for the more than 15 million new students who entered college in the fall of 2020, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In 4-6 years, 4 million will have walked across the stage – physically or virtually – to receive a degree.
And how much is that college degree worth? Some financial experts believe it’s more than $20,000 a year in salary over and above what someone with only a high school education will make. Some calculate that it comes out to almost $2 million more over the course of your working life. And those with degrees tend to have better health and retirement benefits and are far less likely to be unemployed.
Would my life have been different if my parents, who were not well educated, had encouraged me or even supported me in working toward a college degree? Possibly. But as I say in “The Street,” my chapter in Jack in the Box about finding your way in the world, “College could not teach me the two things I was most passionate about: modeling and sales.”
Do I support those for whom college IS their path? Obviously, I do. My children are testimony to that.