If I don’t send my children to college, am I destroying their future? Or safeguarding a legacy?
CHARLIE (speaking to his father): But what if I don’t want to make shoes?
MR. PRICE: You’re a right funny kid, you are!
Saoirse is nestled beside me in the cramped theater. Bob and Ula are two seats down. Without telling the girls what the story is about (other than assuring them a quality performance in light of the fact that Cyndi Lauper wrote the music), we’ve brought them to see a traveling production of Kinky Boots. in Schenectady.
Saoirse is beside herself with excitement. Not only is she getting to see a Broadway show close to home; but her best friend Lani is due in from California the next day. Lani’s visit will be the highlight of her summer.
Their time together this year is short. They are both going to sleep -away camps. Lani has been enrolled in a computer programming camp in Berkley. Saoirse is going to a wilderness camp 30 minutes away from our farm, where every child is required to bring a knife with a four inch blade.
A little sad that Lani couldn’t join Saoirse at wilderness camp this year, I asked her mom if she was developing an interest in computer programming. “She has to go,” she explained to me quietly. As a result of having spent the bulk of her elementary school years here in Schoharie County before they moved out to Silicon Valley, Lani needs to learn computer programming to keep up with her peers.
Lani’s mom Kelly is one of my closest friends. She and her husband Dan and I all went to the same school here in Schoharie County. We were neighboring comrades in natural parenting when our children were younger. When Dan, a computer engineer, was offered a position with a high profile company in Silicone Valley, it broke my heart to see them go.
As we sit in the theater and watch the story of Kinky Boots unfold, Saoirse and Ula are mesmerized by the cross dressers as they strut and dance across the stage. But I’m wrapped up in the story of Charlie, the young man who inherited his family’s shoe factory. He is offered a lucrative job with his girlfriend in London, where they can become upwardly mobile. But upon the death of his father, he chooses to return home to the family factory, where he struggles to find a way to bring the family business out of the red and keep the employees on the payroll. At this moment in my life, as we work on our farm transition, Charlie’s struggles resonate deeply with me. To some characters in the story, Charlie’s family factory is a burden. In the eyes of Charlie’s father, the family business was a legacy.
A week after the show, Mom, Dad, Bob and I are sitting around the kitchen table with a farm business consultant, working out the logistics of merging our assets and making Sap Bush Hollow Farm an LLC. The subject of royalties from my books comes up. “I urge you to keep those separate,” the consultant counsels me. “I find that royalties are a nice way to fund college savings plans for kids.”
I laugh at him. “College savings plans? How about using those royalties to put food on the table for myself in my old age?”
He makes no reply. I feel like I’ve brought to light the unmentionable. Bob and I are not saving for our kids’ college education. In fact, while we share with them a love of learning, we are not even preparing them for the idea of going to college. Unlike Lani’s parents, we don’t really concern ourselves with whether or not Saoirse and Ula are keeping up, or whether they are “behind” or “ahead.” The very idea, to us, suggests competition with their peers. In our minds, competition for a limited number of jobs makes it a lot harder to build satisfying community. We don’t worry about competition. We worry instead about helping Saoirse and Ula to work to their potential, about helping them conceive ways they can earn the money they need while pursuing a lifestyle they enjoy.
This is not to say that we discourage college. But we are ambivalent about it. If they want to go and can find a way to pay for it, great. But we are leery that insisting that they go to college at all costs can set them up for financial problems later in life.
In our school district, where 40% of high school graduates don’t go to college, our views are not out of the norm. But Kelly and Dan, home from California, take us to task for this stance. And Kelly, in particular, is the last person with whom I can debate this subject. I simply can’t win.
We all grew up knowing lots of people who never went to college. Sanford and Ruth, my surrogate grandparents and farming neighbors up the road, dropped out of school at the ages of 12 and 16 respectively. By conventional figures, their income of a few thousand dollars per year made them poor. Yet Sanford was never without a book or a newspaper when he wasn’t working, the house was never in disrepair, Ruth carefully accounted for every penny, and there was always homegrown and home-cooked food on the table.
While I was sitting down to farm feasts with Ruth and Sanford, Kelly was growing up a few miles away in a trailer park where “doing well” meant that a family could afford the skirting around their single wide. The desperate crimes often committed by the poor were the daily norm in her world.
For me, with professional parents, college was a birthright. Mom and Dad paid for me to live at home and go to the local school for two years, then for two years at a state school. My graduate degrees were paid for through assistantships. For Kelly, college was a hard-won dream, her only hope to escape poverty. If it weren’t for our high school teachers spending their own money to buy her supplies, having the New York Times delivered to her trailer steps, or pushing her to apply for scholarships, she’d likely still be living in the same county and the same conditions. And despite our proximity, we probably never would have met, because our parallel worlds would never intersect. The poverty I knew was more akin to simplicity. It was rich in resources. Kelly’s poverty was genuine crushing hardship.
And now, each of us has beautiful, intelligent children. I shudder at the idea that one week of Lani’s precious summer should be wasted inside walls staring at computer screens. Kelly shudders that I would not insist that my children go away to college someday to broaden their minds.
We have a history of sticking our noses into each other’s business. We have a history of disagreeing. This is partly why I love her so dearly. Our friendship never wants for excitement. And I am forever wiser for each debate that ensues between us.
And on the college issue, we find no resolution. Part of me wants to agree with her. I want to accede that I will begin preparing Saoirse and Ula for the idea that they must go to college. But if the predictive calculations are correct, one year of in-state public tuition for Saoirse will be nearly twice what our annual income was last year. Maybe Saoirse and Ula will take courses online. Maybe they could get scholarships. Maybe they could be accepted into one of the schools that allows students to work in exchange for their eduction. But maybe it won’t happen. Competition for those resources is fierce.
And here is where I come back to Charlie’s story in Kinky Boots. I am not unlike Charlie. I have stepped into a legacy. And while I do not have money to secure Saoirse’s and Ula’s college tuition, I do have a family business that I can offer them. Kelly is right. College can offer breadth in one’s education. But a family business, united across the generations, embedded in community and rich in clear streams, blue skies and fertile soils, offers depth. In a small family business, we become keenly aware how every single action affects the soils beneath us, the water around us, and the people beside us. Such learning experiences may not be expansive, yet they are no less profound.
But there is more than depth of learning. Bob’s and my ambivalence about college is tied to an instinct for cultural preservation. Kelly and I grew up knowing the same villages, the same roads, the same school teachers, but vastly different cultures. Hers was one she longed to escape. Mine is one that I long to preserve. And if we insist on college education at any cost, then Saoirse and Ula could incur debts so extreme that our way of life may simply be impossible for them. I watched this happen as I grew up through the farm crisis. Schoharie county parents were so eager to send their children off to a better future, they mortgaged or sold the family farms to pay for college and, in my view, gutted our community heritage and created a brain drain.
The grim truth is that, as it stands right now, we are raising two children who will be equipped to thrive in a place that is losing population every year. Dan joins Kelly in her arguments, explaining to me that this country’s economy is no longer based on agrarianism, the historical foundation of Schoharie County’s economy. It is based on intellectual capital. I argue that even intellects need to eat. And I marvel how, in spite of this, the farmer is worth significantly less in our economy than the computer engineer. It is no small wonder our vocation is disappearing.
As parents who want to ensure our children thrive in the future, are we forcing Saoirse and Ula to become an endangered species with the threat of extinction? Or are we preserving our culture?
I have turned these ideas over and over in my head since Lani’s family has been home visiting. I cannot reconcile them. But I do know this: As parents, we have to make choices. And we make those choices based on our experiences. And it is very possible that in just a few short years, either or both of our families will be proven completely wrong in our decisions. Nevertheless, for this summer, Lani will learn computer programming. Saoirse will learn to wield a knife. And they will continue to love each other as much as I continue to love Lani’s mother.
*Kelly, Dan and Lani are pseudonyms to ensure their privacy.
Oh my, did this touch a nerve! I live in an area of the country that believes that college is the only way to go. My family also strongly believes that college is incredibly important. I used to think that too. And then I had my children. My daughter is a free spirit who homeschooled until 16. She finished community college but hated the four year school. She doesn’t want to take on more debt and she has decided to join the Navy at 23. I worry for her, but she made this plan. And then there is my middle son. He has behavioral and learning issues. We could force him to do something he hates by making him attend college, but why? We are currently exploring career options that require no college degree, but need someone capable of risk assessment and enjoys being outside. The pressure here in NJ is immense. My son is 16 and people have been asking where he wants to go to college. I explain that he isn’t interested and you’d think I had just suggested that he wants to become a serial killer. No matter how many times I point out that only 25% of the working population has a college degree or that people with advanced degrees need food, fire fighters and plumbers, I still get uncomprehending stares. I want my children to be happy with their lives and their choices and if college is that choice, then good. I’m pretty sure my youngest will go to college, but at 11 he still has time to change his mind. Thank you for bringing up this topic because it is a difficult one. Especially when you live in an area where the expectation is that college is the norm.
Thanks, Sarah. Good to know we’re not alone. Here is another take that might interest you, from one of my favorite writers, Ben Hewitt.
I don’t think you “send” or “choose” to send your kids anywhere by the time they’re 18. It’s their life and choice. Maybe some kids would love to go, some are very clear on what they want to be (Neil Degrasse Tyson said in a talk show he knew he wanted to be an astrophysicist at 12 and his goal went thru college no matter what), some want nothing to do with it and want to be on their own, some want to work with their hands in the outdoors (I met my hubs in college, but he quit after the first year – later he went thru an apprentice type program and became a crane operator/heavy construction worker to be outside all day). I went to 4 yrs of college because the first summer out of high school I worked piece work in a garment factory and would have spent 4 years in hell rather than spend the rest of my life on a line – so 4 years of college was a cakewalk. My parents were factory workers so there was no money from home – I went to community college 2 years and transferred to a SUNY college for the last 2. I took out a small loan the last year, had Pell, and worked through college and summers. I never expected my parents to pay for anything. The experience never hurt me, I actually loved learning everything they put in front of me in college – and it helped me in my future job outlook (this was in the 60s/70s ! I’m retired now)
The very best thing a parent can do for their children is expose them to lots and lots of ideas, of “things” – (Tyson was so awed by a trip to a planetarium as a child he now runs one!) – Teach them to use their minds and imaginations, especially their imaginations – teach them to read and write, use words, draw, sing, play music, so their brains can fully develop. When you can see they lean / are pulled to something let them go. Give them the information, the tools to do what calls them. They will be the best – teacher/artist/lawyer/farmer/homemakers they can be if they choose it and love it themselves. They can invent their own businesses based on what they love. (I mean – aren’t you doing what you love and learning, still, everyday? Didn’t you love the country and outside, and growing things as a child? Isn’t what you do learning new things all the time, and having the sense to know what will work for you? Doesn’t it make you happy to wake up knowing you are where you want to be? That is the best you can hope for and give to your child – that same space to make their own informed choice)
Sometimes it takes a college or university to get them there – if you see they are called to what may need more early in life, then plan with them for their future as best you can afford. (It doesn’t hurt a homemaker or famer to know how to keep a budget, or read a mortgage statement, or learn about the area in which they will be making their home, either – if they can learn all that before 18 they don’t necessarily need college.)
The worse you can do is teach them to always run home if they have issues, or to view life through a backwards looking lens, never ask why, never try new things, never think for themselves but allow others to think for them.
Such hard decisions…. I grew up in a lower middle class family with one parent that worked and one that stayed home and took care of house, kids, meals etc. My father quit school at age 16, during the depression to put food on the table for his parents and five siblings. college degree was not an expectation in my family. As a result he never made enough to feed, cloth and shelter us. I began working at age 12 to buy the basic things a girl wants and needs; clothes, shoes, haircuts, proms stuff, nylons, school lunches, etc. (I’m dating myself I know.) While I knew NOT to expect that my father would be fubding my college, because I knew he would not be, I was angry and disappointed that education was never important enough to them to expect it of us. My brother is a teacher and so am I. I CRAVED college I wanted my degree, my education. I wanted OUT of that small town where there were no jobs and that poor lower middle class life. I knew that a college degree was my ONLY choice of taking care of myself and getting ahead. I left home at age 17, went to junior college working fulltime and going to classes full time. I had just one $2,000 scholarship when I entered a four year university. I became a teacher. When my two sons were born college was what I wanted for them, from day one. I wanted them to be able to take care of themselves and have a careers/jobs. We began to save $250.00 a month for each of them when they were babies. Living on one incomes, we sacrificied greatly to do this. In a community where cable TV, vacations, two late model cars, spring break trips to Florida, eating out, occasional movies in a theatre etc. was the norm and the expectation…. we did none of that. We sacrificed everything to save for our children’s education…it was that important. We paid for classes, room and board and my sons worked from age 16 on and saved their summer income towards college. In college they worked part-time to buy their books. Even then books were $500.00 a semester. They came home summers lived at home and worked factory jobs to save up. They left college with small loans that they paid off once they got their jobs. I have no regrets. My friends who took trips every year instead of saving or who put their children’s loans on their mortgages are now in bankruptsy and or foreclosing on their homes worth less than the outstanding loans and because their own education is 40+ years old and jobs are nil in Michigan.
I live in a very rural, very poor area where there are no jobs. Many children here are home schooled and have no expectation for college, by themselves or by their parents. Without that education they have no hoping of finding jobs/careers and depend on cutting wood, snow plowing raising dogs or live off of others or the state. I don’t want to deprive others who are truly in need (veterans/the disabled etc.) but ultimately we taxpayers all pay for those who choose to live off DSS, food stamps and so on. I’m 65 my husband is 70 and some days after a 12 hours days working on our property/garden/lawn/chickens etc. I wonder when is it going to be my turn?
Your children have an option of working the farm and having a home you bought. Perhaps that is the legacy you have given them? But what if they choose not to stay? Then what? They will need an education to take care of themselves. I think your children are going to decide for themselves what they want to do. Stay on the farm or leave and go to college and city jobs. Where they are fortunate is that have several options to choose from. But ultimately it will be their choice, not yours. Young adults have a way of seeing things differently than parents and choosing for themselves. Both of my sons are educated, have good jobs and have worked hard to buy a home. They are supporting their families which is important. It was hard putting our own needs and our own retirement in last place but for us, it was the right decision. I have no regrets when I see my sons and granddaughters thriving.
HAS to learn programming? Please. I’m from Silicon Valley. No child HAS to learn to code to keep up. That’s a fallacy from someone who’s bought into the hype. Not everyone needs to be a bit pusher. There are several good articles out about how unhealthy SV culture is for children. Especially those in Palo Alto. Too many suicides by Caltrain.
Since you’re counting votes, Shannon, I’m with you – 100%, except for the angst over whether or not I’m right.
Speaking of touching a nerve, as the last commenter did, I could write my own essay about this. So here I go doing it.
We think it’s “natural” for people who never went to sit-down school to pooh-pooh it (sour grapes), and for people who did, to heartily endorse it (how can you diss the club you worked so hard and spent so much money to get into?).
Well, like you, I’ve got a degree, and like you, I can see “both” sides.
Turns out there are no sides. All is possible.
I don’t like the idea of children staring at walls and clocks and computer screens for months on end either, or of their being chastised and even humiliated for wanting to learn in their own ways and even have some fun. AND I also see the value of book larnin’.
But. We don’t have to sit in jail or become robots or Pavlov’s dogs. We can learn from Grandma and Grandpa, and we can learn from our friends, neighbours and peers – especially now, since those friends, neighbours and peers number in the millions on this here internet.
And we’re not computers ourselves. We are not capable of sitting in one place for hours having information shoved into our databanks. And it just plain doesn’t work to be told what to know. What to look into, yes.
We can and need to learn many things, in many ways, and not all at once. That’s what we have a lifetime for.
We can go visit farmers and computer programmers. We can go to sit-down school for a week or a year. We can learn at the grocery checkout, and the market, and the post office, and the local theatre, and from our own experimentation and dreams. We can learn from the teacher in Thailand or Australia or Antarctica without ever leaving our homes, even if we don’t own a computer.
Practically from birth, we’re now counselled to learn how to focus and specialise and “settle down” and stay in one school and one “job”.
(Notice how we’re not supposed to settle down in a geographic area, though, and just deal with it like “everybody else” when we have to move hundreds or thousands of miles away from everything and everyone we know, in order to be able to get that one job.)
Awfully glad I was so stubborn and backward as to not be able to focus.
I know how to spell and plant peas, and a few other things, including programming computers. I also know I learned most of it outside the institutions, faster and for a lot less money than I and my family spent on the walls and clocks and stale air and bad posture and sleeplessness.
“Competition” and “success” are just words we use to make ourselves and others feel bad. (The beatings will continue until morale improves.) There’s room in the world for everybody, and for everything they want to do, and we’re only going to see more of that in years to come.
P.S. Ben Hewitt is one smart guy. Thanks for the link.
I would not waste a plug nickel on college, especially as it is now little more than an indoctrination camp for progressivism!
The young folks that I meet regularly do not seem to have the ambition or guts my contemporaries had in the sixties e.g. go to college and then live in their parents basement…are you kidding me, I would have lived under a bridge. Then the culture was questioning everything, today the culture (in college) is learning what not to question! There is no free thought thus what is the use of it all?
I know that you are bright thus your children are bright. Your parents are bright thus you and they have already inculcated the values that college traditionally hammered into those skulls of mush.
I dealt with many fresh college graduates when I was an engineer (pre-farming) and what I encountered mostly were educated children i.e. lacking entrepreneurship, confidence and especially skills any 18 year old exhibited in the early 1960’s. Many had thought all would be given to them for simply showing up!
Running a business, especially a home business, and demanding of the children responsibilities and obligations as I suspect you do will have brought them to a level even college graduates infrequently exhibit..
When my sons friends were given video games he received tools, when they were given snow mobiles he received cross country skis, etc. None of his friends can do any of the mechanical, electrical, etc. tasks but he can and they all went to college.
Farm kids especially on a small and diverse operation have opportunity to interact with many areas including and perhaps the most important raising, processing and cooking their own food and learning how to live well on less. Frugality is a learned skill that will benefit one for a lifetime. At the farmers market I encounter 30ish children that are incapable of even cooking their own dinner – they are all college graduates.
Now once all that is learned let them go to a trade school once they know what they want to do. Having experience and accomplishment in all the agricultural areas including sales and marketing goes a long way in focusing on the areas they choose to seek but would have taken several extra years and thousands of dollars in the education factory.
We have opportunity to interact with many home schooled farm kids, especially the ones that have lots of home responsibilities. I can state unequivocally that these are the most articulate and educated young folks I have ever encountered. They will always be successful! I hear that they are not socialized with their peers but to adults. I can find no benefit to be socialized with nitwits.
Ensure that the children have a love for books and learning and especially a curious mind. They will be fine.
I love what you wrote, but as for the peer nitwits don’t be too rough. Our daughter home-schooled all her life until 8th grade decide with us it was a good place to learn about others and what she needed before hitting adult years. We do not know if she will stay with it but for know she is going to 9th, she is the youngest and has learned what her older siblings told her was true and how to navigate it school. She became a councilwoman and learned to navigate and use all her resources, I have no doubt being with family and God with love was the key. She always falls back on that to draw her decisions on, she encouraged her classmates all to rethink and question with their parents testing and other forces that the school issues that were not required and/or offensive. Her grade was the largest not participating in all those state tests to sit them out, she caused the kids to start asking why. It even caused our administration to do their jobs and find other ways to deal with the state. She is a shy gal but she knows how to push forward and lean on the right people to make things go better or just plain right. She still has a lot to learn and she may return to home-school or go elsewhere, it is up to her we encourage thinking out side of the box in a good way to whatever God brings you. Thanks again for you comments it was good, just remember we have to live with nitwits and perhaps we can make them change.
Now retired @ 60 and looking back my college experience was more about socialization. My degree was less meaningful than the electronics courses I took. I was blessed to have a father who recognized a “I can do it daddy” girl. He encouraged me to try my had at everything with only a few pointers towards a shorter path to solution. After college I passed my FCC 1st class test. I could have done this without college. I worked at a radio station for a time then got a job with a company who built broadcast facilities around the world. The company I worked for built DirectTV in 1994. I like to say we designed and delivered a technology solution. We are not responsible for how it is used. Yet I still feel angry about the hundreds of channels of mindless diversion born of that venture.
I spent 15 years in Information Technology running multi million dollar business applications for fortune 500 companies. A perfect example of this world is demonstarted in a short video, The Expert https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg. Nuff said.
Where you live and who you associate with is what drives your psyche. I lived in the Silicon Valley for 23 years and “intellectual capital” is (for the most part) steril, single minded, lonely and generally used to acquire wealth. Yes there are some innovations but the sweatshop conditions are pervasive. And the young are the fodder for machine. Watch the documentary “Three Walls” http://aeon.co/video/society/three-walls-a-short-documentary-about-the-office-cubicle/ for a preview of a what a typical work environment is like. The SV mentality is very elitist. Look at what is happening in SF with the Techies displacing renters and the gentrification of the City.
I am not opposed to learning the foundations of any skill. Programming is a skill, an adjunt to broader skill sets. I know a highly paid programmer who taught himself several programming languages. Passed his GED early and got a job making over $50k at 19. He grew up in a very restrictive LDS family and was determined to escape. The culture we grow up in forms our resolve in life. He was driven by his own needs and fortunately succeeded. But his success is actually very, very rare. There are few with his level of competance. The mentality is if I work harder, longer hours I can compete. Thousands end up competing their lives away. The competition is on a global scale now.
Conversly my daughter is of the artistic slant but technically savy and another do it yourselfer. She uses digital tools to make her art. But she is not interested in what is under the hood beyond whether she has enough RAM to run the program. Oh and she dropped out of college and is now studying online. She has no debt. Her high school friends are struggling to find meaningful jobs and pay back loans and high rents in cities with little to no natural surroundings.
We live in a technologically based society. Our culture is influenced by those closest to us. After a while what would seem unnatural becomes status quo. We seem to give ourselves permission to be like those around us despite our better judgement. Move to SV and you start acting the part. It is hard to hold on to who you are.
Sitting at a terminal in a cubical 8-14 hours a day is unhealthy. I know, I did it and my body and mind and soul are still trying to recover. Thank god for my grandmother who taught me how to garden, cook and can. And my father who gave me permission to explore the world beyond the classroom. Despite this I followed the herd for many years. Now I grow food and make toys and musical instruments in my little wood shop. This is all self taught or learned from a mentor or the web.
BTW my mother went back to college when she was 40yrs old after raising 4 children. She finished with a MA and at 60 decided to get a PhD. My husband dropped out of high school but returned to Jr. College when he was 35 and completed a MA 10 years later.
With so much uncertainty in the world isn’t it better to be happy, know how to work collaboratively rather than competitively? Isn’t it better to respect and cherish the gifts of every single person who contributes to our well being? We need to change our minds to change our mess. We need to be teaching our children a love of learning and let them choose who to be.
I’ve enjoyed reading the thoughtful replies to your post, Shannon. But one point that is being (mostly) ignored is the future of our world. I’m a very positive person, but quite frankly I believe the coming decades won’t resemble the previous decades. If financial instability wasn’t enough of a threat, consider an unstable climate.
College debt can become a ball and chain when the graduate realizes there aren’t jobs out there (except a few professions). And if our society is scrambling for the necessities of life down the road, we will be bowing down to the farmers, not the computer programmers.
Thank you again Shannon for a heartfelt and thoughtful column and esp. for being open to the discussion and disagreements with your dear friend and former neighbor. I hope whatEVER happens that Shaoirse and her friend continue to love and enjoy each other’s company – and to learn from each other. ALSO i want to talk to the girls about the show and what they thought!