I killed my teenager’s fancy college dreams

If they want to live in a 6000 sq ft house in Malibu, then they shouldn't get a degree in 5th Century Aerobics.

The kids grow up thinking pursuing your passions and dreams is more important than accumulating money. And it feels so good and right until you find yourself broke and poor and your passion is gone, and you think life just sucks.

It takes no effort to throw down a spreadsheet. List their yearly earnings for the rest of their life. Throw in expenses like mortgages, vacations, food, then add in kids and family, medical emergencies, show them just how poor they will be if they go down the path of their shitty career. Many kids may be left wide eyed when they accept these numbers are true. There’s no extra money hidden away, no big windfall waiting to come out and propel them up the class ladder. This is it, this is their life. Good luck.

> A couple months ago, my 17-year-old daughter’s guidance counselor called her into his office to ask pretty much the only question that adults ask high school seniors: “What colleges are you applying to?” When Ella tossed off a handful of universities, he said, “Have you thought about going to art school?”

This is goddamn malpractice.

> Like most parents, who save on average $18,000 for their kids’ education, we’d failed to sock away anything close to the $75,000 annual sticker price it would take for Ella to go to, say, Pratt in New York City.

A friend of ours matriculated at a similar school, but dropped out and went into physical therapy instead. She and her husband managed to buy a house in their late 20s, have kids, etc.[1]

Your job as a parent is to socialize your children. And that means telling them how the world works. The society that they see around them exists because people with valuable skills work hard to produce things. That doesn’t just mean doctors or engineers—the world needs accountants and roofers and HVAC technicians. The common thread is that these are skills that people and companies need every day to make the world around us keep humming. People are compensated based on the value and rarity of their skills. And money is necessary for security and supporting yourself. Kids need to learn these lessons from the earliest age. You abdicate that duty if you don’t teach them that, and instead allow a bunch of government workers fill your kids’ heads with nonsense.

College, for most people, is a joke. Take a bunch of classes that don’t teach you anything useful, and then get a job that doesn’t require you to use anything you learned. It’s an elaborate shell game we have to play because we’ve bought into the nonsense peddled by teachers and guidance counselors. As parents, it’s your job to be smart and help your kids navigate this game. (We’re going through this with my wife’s younger brother right now.) Manage your courses to keep up your GPA, take prerequisites at community college for a fraction of the price, etc. The Kafkaesque administration of most colleges makes this hard enough. But teachers and administrators will fight you the whole way. They’ll talk about making sure kids get the “college experience” and telling kids to “pursue their bliss.” Its your job as a parent to do everything you can to fight back.

[1] I don’t want to come across to much like judging people’s lifestyle. I know some people who are happy with the bohemian art world lifestyle. That makes them happy. But when you see people complain about student debt and the plight of millennials, that’s what keeps coming up: they can’t afford to buy a house or have kids.

[2] That doesn’t mean I think doctors or aerospace engineers don’t need to go to college. But in 1960, less than 40% of the population graduated from high school and less than 10% had a bachelors degree. It’s incredible what a sophisticated economy we had with so little formal education.