Is College Right for Everyone?

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Of the students who don't go to college or drop out, there are some who don't have the skills to maintain the necessary grades to successfully complete their course work. However, we have seen that many students go to college because they think they are "supposed to", and when they don't have their own reasons for going, they don't have an anchor to hold them in place when the inevitable storms of daily student life hit.

It seems to us that your job as a parent is to help your children know what their strengths, talents, interests, and goals are--to help them find out what contribution is uniquely theirs to make. If, in the pursuit of their own interests, goals, and the development of their gifts they decide to go to college, they will have their own reasons for being there and will be among the two out of ten high school students who weather the academic storms and graduate from college.

Maybe your children, as many we have known, will want to take another route, such as developing their mechanical reasoning skills and pursuing auto mechanics. Or, perhaps you have a child who loves to invent and wants to become a chef. Some of our students have gone on to successful, fulfilling careers in cosmetology, body work, photography, and dance. Still others have started businesses of their own training horses, grooming dogs, teaching yoga, selling real estate, creating websites.

By believing in your children's unique gifts and encouraging them to pursue them, you make sure that whatever your children do after high school will have meaning to them, that they will be passionate about it and will stick with it when it gets difficult, and they will have a 99.9% chance of success. Isn't that a great deal better than having less than a 50% chance of succeeding in college?

copyright 2010 by Willis & Hodson, Reflective Educational Perspectives, LLC