Does Your Teen Have To Go To College?
If your teen is a senior, you’ve probably asked them what they want to do after high school. The “good” answer is, “Go to college.” And, this is a good answer. Parents associate a college education with more opportunity and economic stability and rightly so the current unemployment rate among college graduates is 3.1% in the U.S.. Compare that to the national unemployment rate, 6.7% or the unemployment rate among those with no high school diploma, 10.5%. But does everyone need to go to college?
No, we don’t need every teen to attend college, like we don’t need every teen to become a lawyer. Remember, college or university is an opportunity for higher learning. However, every job has a college-type of higher learning associated with it. If you consider any vocational job, cosmetologist, automechanic or medical assistant they all have the potential to learn more and be the best in that field. Your teen may have to piece together this higher learning by working harder to take courses or seminars on the weekend or after work, but people who are the best at what they do irrespective of what they do stand out.
When you think of Bobbie Brown or Kevin Aucoin, the make-up artists you don’t imagine their parents saying to them, “Make-up artist? You wanna be a make-up artist?” And even if their parents did, it wouldn’t have mattered they were so driven by their passion. No, what they were really, were visionaries. They took their passion for a field and created something so special that the world bent to them. Will every teen that doesn’t go to college become as successful as these people, who knows? But, this should not stop your teen from doing their best in whatever they chose to do.
You know, the waitress that is very thoughtful, the teacher that senses you are worried about your teen and leaves a cell phone to make sure she hears from you or the cab driver that notices the laptop in the back seat and rushes back to see if they can find you. These people make your day too!
Whether your teen chooses to attend college or not is not the issue, it is whether they are passionate about what it is they do. When your teen is passionate about their life and their career, they have the desire to be better, to be the best, to do a job well done. when they give this gift to the world, the world will listen, but it will never ask , “Do you have a college degree?
So push the passion, not the college per say. If the passion is there, your teen will find their place in the world and if college happens to be the way to do that, well, so be it.
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