Although hearsay, defined as: “information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate”, is not admissible in any court of law, every day, every year, families make complex educational choices, consequential for their children’s prosperity, based on the hearsay, passing as truth, circulated along The Parent Network, distorted with each retelling, which may have been a selective assertion in the first place.
Acting on such garbled information, while well-intentioned, families make strategic missteps in the compulsion to hedge their children’s chances in what’s considered to be The Game of College Admissions—in reality gambling with their kid’s genius, sowing the seeds for college malinvestment as well as regret and/or resentment manifesting in the not to distant future.
Yet, to stop reacting to the court of public opinion, parents must be courageous, confident that nurturing their child’s unique aptitude, not subscribing to the group think of the competitive, modern American academic meritocracy, that only 4.0 GPA’s and 40 hours a week of extracurricular activities costing tens of thousands of dollars per year will merit the vaunted college acceptance and a thus guarantee a lifetime of prosperity unconstrained by the complexity of labor economics.
Furthermore, parents and students must disabuse themselves of the delusion that the college admissions process is a game of winners and losers. Instead, realizing that through the college admissions process, a young human being at a critical time in their lives can (re)discover their ability thus define or reaffirm their life’s purpose. Then, students will spend the four years, utilizing the vast resources of a university, to actualize their vision.
If not, the New York Federal Reserve will continue reporting 41% underemployment rates, where new college graduates aged 22-27 work jobs which don’t require a college degree that costs between 100 and 200 hundred thousand, yes that’s thousands of dollars. When new adults start their careers underearning, studies show they rarely vaunt into higher earning brackets over their professional careers.
Moreover, when generationally Millennials don’t and won’t earn equal to their Boomer parents until later in their adulthood, starting from a lower earning potential doesn’t bode well for more teenagers to realize their objective of a “good-paying job” for attending college in the first place, further adding evidence that their college dollars were mal-invested and the opportunity costs accrued impossible to calculate, but not difficult to perceive.
For more information about how to both plan for and navigate the complex college admissions process in order to minimize the risk of educational malinvestment, contact Creative Marbles Consultancy
