<p>Do not give anyone the power to intimidate you when you ask a sincere question. That goes double for the students - why do you think we call them students? Ask whatever you want, ignore the silly stuff and take what you can from it.</p>
<p>“My daughter is a Senior in college, so she has her professors to talk to. But she does bounce things off me and I spend a lot of time being aware and smart about her choices. I am interested, and I have the time to do it.”
You could be my twin, if you substitute in Jr and Son! Thank God for the non snarky parents on CC!</p>
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<p>This did make me laugh! </p>
<p>Every now and then, we get a kid who wanders into the Parents Forum and accuses us of ruining our kids/the country by not abandoning them after middle school like a mother turtle after she lays her eggs in the sandy beach.</p>
<p>I ignore them…when they get kids of their own, then I’ll listen to what they have to say.</p>
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<p>Just for the record, I’m faculty, not a student. I’m also a parent (but not of a college age student). </p>
<p>The point was clear, and I just reiterated it in that thread: success in academia depends heavily on the development of interpersonal skills and an ability to communicate and network. Getting a work published is seemingly more political than passing a bill in Congress. If you want to guarantee that your son fails in his quest to be a professor, stunt his maturation process by being “too involved” in his life.</p>
<p>Bottom line: a 22 year old should be able to make his own decisions, be self-motivated, and not rely on “parent research”. You can justify it however you want (“he’s too busy”, “I know more about this than he does”, etc.) but it doesn’t change the situation.</p>
<p>mom2ofOH - I don’t think you’re crazy for wanting to research a career as a prof in fine arts. As parents we are (hopefully) a sounding board for our children and I, for one, want to be able to converse intelligently with my children when they turn to me for advice. That’s why I read CC. I have learned so much from the various threads. That being said, I briefly looked at your initial post and here is an answer to your question. </p>
<p>I have a Ph.D. in an area of the fine arts and here are some things you should know: Grad school is hard and can be expensive. BUT . . . your child should look for a grad school that will provide a tuition waiver and teaching assistantship to help offset the costs. During grad school I held down 2 Assistantships, a Fellowship, and a Scholarship, worked a part-time job, and was exhausted most of the time. However, I had a tuition waiver and managed to get paid to go to grad school. A year off between degrees is no big deal in the fine arts, especially if you son works in his field. He shouldn’t let too many years pass before completion of the Ph.D., however, because universities want young assistant professors who will establish a reputation by midlife which will draw in the best students. </p>
<p>Once the degrees are earned: Fine Arts profs are the lowest paid profs on campus. At a state university, starting salaries are in the low-to-mid 40’s with the occasional low 50’s for professionals coming into teaching after years in the business. Your child will have to be willing to go wherever there is an opening. It is very tough spending 5 to 7 years jumping through all the hoops needed to get tenure, but if tenure is achieved, your child will have a lifetime of job security. Universities are the patrons of the arts. A good gig if you can get it. </p>
<p>Hope this helps, and I think your son is lucky to having a loving, caring parent who is interested in his life.</p>
<p>G.P.Burdell: While overall I agree with everything you are arguing…If I am understanding the OP correctly, her son has untenured, junior faculty encouraging him to go into debt ($50K) for an MA in art history arguing this is an appropriate path to becoming a professor. I think her response is appropriate. Are you going to be hands off if your own kid ends up in a similar situation? Is there a point where you would get involved? Or would they never be in that situation because of what they absorb just from growing up in an academic household. I don’t know enough about art history to understand if this advice is reasonable but I do understand it deserves some serious discussion.</p>
<p>or how about this: if you knew a student was getting bad advice regarding grad school from a colleague, would you be hands off-- or intervene somehow? Would it be the student’s responsibility to understand the advice wasn’t on target?</p>
<p>Mom2-- Just wanted to let you know that it’s okay to stick around CC, even after you get your head handed back to you on a platter. (It’s happened to me several times, especially when I was new, and not wording things clearly.) </p>
<p>It’s really no one’s business why you are asking a question, nor should they care if you are a helicopter parent.</p>
<p>Some of the ‘advice’ you get will be terrific. Some will be hurtful, and some will be completely off the track. I have had several people forcefully tell me that they ‘had never heard of a high school program’ that I described, and proceeded to tell me what we should have instead! (like I can change the curriculum!)</p>
<p>Anyway, stick around, there are a lot of good people here with good advice. Interestingly enough, I absolutely treasure the support I have gotten here when I was going through some scary medical stuff. In my opinion, that is where the CC community really shines. In the support.</p>
<p>Oh, ColMomto2-- great answer!</p>
<p>I never give advice to my son. He’s much smarter than me.
I do however give advice on CC. :D</p>
<p>I also NEVER give advice to my wife. 
;)</p>
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<p>After building the nest with money for the babes to spend as they see fit. And sending more money when the little darlings send word via seagull that they really, really need it.</p>
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<p>Are you implying that faculty sometimes gives bad advice? Security! Can we get this helicopter parent removed asap? </p>
<p>Making good decisions, in any area of ones life, involves developing mentors to seek out for wise counsel. Sometimes that includes ones parents. And there is not one thing wrong with that.</p>
<p>"success in academia depends heavily on the development of interpersonal skills and an ability to communicate and network. "
And that is obviously is very important, but how is a student supposed to know what are the appropriate questions to ask about how to apply for grad schools ? Is a 20 year old, who is starting to think about the possibility of going on to grads school just supposed to somehow pick this up this by osmosis if he is not at an institution noted for it’s great grad school placement? All some parents are trying to do is gather information, if it is available, to give to our kids in the event they want our input, particularly if we are going to be the ones paying for grad school. There is unfortunately no Wickipedia for “everything any applicant needs to know about the process of applying to grad school”. If there were we would not be posting questions we have on “your” grad school forum. Sorry if you don’t like it Burdell, but based on the sheer numbers of applicants from around the world applying for grad school openings at US universities, I’d say that things are probably a lot more competitive now than they were when you were in the process of applying, especially since there are many more students applying for a stagnant # of academic positions, all in the midst of a terrible economic climate.
Re this statement-
“Bottom line: a 22 year old should be able to make his own decisions, be self-motivated, and not rely on “parent research”. You can justify it however you want (“he’s too busy”, “I know more about this than he does”, etc.) but it doesn’t change the situation.”</p>
<p>Bottom line-We are not trying to do the leg work for our students. We just want to know for ourselves about the grad school process, because our kids may ask us for advise, and it also may have a big impact on our pocketbooks in the future.</p>
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<p>Yes. How do you solve problems? If you’re like most people, you analyze the situation, evaluate the options, seek advice from others regarding the options, evaluate the expected outcome of each option, then chose the option with the best expected outcome. How do you determine outcomes and seek advice? You visit websites, talk to experts, maybe visit some professional websites, check Salary.com, etc. </p>
<p>So that’s what some people here are doing - their children mention a problem, the parents go through this process (likely because they do not believe their children are capable), then the children get information from the parent and act. The problem: the children aren’t developing the skill set to solve problems. Even if they do some individual research and are they corrected or guided, they’re not developing critical thinking and problem solving skills.</p>
<p>This is similar to a boss-employee relationship. In that situation, the boss wants to make a decision so she gets the employee to research it, then acts on the research. The difference there is that to become the boss you have to be an employee first. The reason: by understanding how the research process works, the boss can fundamentally understand then critically analyze the research and perform an internal sensitivity analysis (“well, he found X because he assumed Y”) and adjust when necessary. </p>
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<p>So you assume that unless you help your student, he/she won’t get in to school? Is there an underlying assumption that every other student is receiving parental help, or that your student is inferior to the other students and needs that extra “boost”? </p>
<p>In the first case, you’re wrong. In the second: if your student can’t get in on his/her own merits, your student shouldn’t go to that school. It’s not a contest where 1000 people are qualified by 100 get in; applications are a mechanism to discover qualified applications. If you subvert the system by helping, and thus making the application not reflective of the applicant, that’s just a recipe for failure.</p>
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<p>Well paying for school is another can of worm, but it’s a little more substantial with regards to graduate school. I’ll just leave it at this: when I finished my BS, I wanted to go into a JD program. I knew nothing about a career in law, other than that lawyers are generally paid well, being a lawyer is prestigious, and that I liked going to college. After having to face the trade off of debt vs. reward, I decided that I didn’t like law enough to pursue it.</p>
<p>Several years later, I had to make the decision again for engineering graduate school. That time I analyzed my interest, compared it to the debt, and decided that I liked engineering enough to take on the debt. I’ve been very, very happy since (and I’m fairly certain that I would be miserable as a lawyer).</p>
<p>So, you see, debt can act as a barrier to entry that prevents students with moderate interest in a field from making a decision because of ancillary aspects of college.</p>
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<p>That is a HUGE jump.</p>
<p>These parents CARE. It’s not that they don’t think that their children aren’t capable of coming up with answers, it’s that they care about their children’s journeys, their children have mentioned their plans to their parents, and their parents are trying to find out about how those plans might pan out, often without EVER having the intention of letting their children know that they’ve even been doing research. I know I’d have rolled my eyes and yelled at my mom as a teen/young 20’s if I’d suspected she was trying to steer my life… but I didn’t mind her talking to others about my choices in life.</p>
<p>My husband is a professor. You can sure bet that I did research on how music composition professors get to where they’re going when we first started dating, and it sure as heck wasn’t because I didn’t expect that he was going to get there on his own. It’s because like it or not, I’m on this journey with him, and I’m curious. I’ll bet dollars to donuts that this is how it is with a lot of the parents here, and I think it’s presumptuous of you to assume that these parents’ motives are anything other than to gather information, and I think it’s very unhelpful to hijack their threads so that they don’t end up getting any information at all.</p>
<p>GPB, I see what you are saying (and often feel like parents are overinvolved in their kids’ lives, including me, at times), but you’re building a really extreme case, and I can see that no amount of discussion will change your mind. </p>
<p>I really responded just to say that I still ask my 80yo dad for advice because I recognize his wisdom in many areas and appreciate his contrarian point of view. I don’t feel socially crippled or inept or any of the other things you’ve mentioned as a consequence of occasional parental consultation.</p>
<p>“So, you see, debt can act as a barrier to entry that prevents students with moderate interest in a field from making a decision because of ancillary aspects of college.”</p>
<p>Even very talented, high achieving students with a passionate, all consuming, interest in a field (the OP’s son?) might not be well-advised to take on debt at the present time (I don’t know; that is the debate)… if the desired result is a professorship. Who can predict what is going to happen with the universities? Many professors will not be retiring. They won’t feel they can afford to. Current job searches are being cancelled nation wide. Does anyone imagine new positions will be created in the foreseeable future? Is this reality being communicated to undergrads? </p>
<p>G.P. Burrell: At what point would you advise your own undergraduate students, who will need to support themselves entirely out of future earnings, against taking on debt for grad school with the intention of ultimately becoming a professor? What percentage chance of a job would there have to be?</p>
<p>Just read the thread on the grad forum. Note to self - Do not post on the grad forum.</p>
<p>It’s simply amazing to me how people can make the leap from a simple information gathering question to assuming that the student asked his mother to go research (and decide) his entire career for him. I research things all the time just because I’m interested in them but that doesn’t mean I get to put any of that knowledge into play, or even that I’m finding things out to influence my kids one way or another. How sad it would be if my kids asked me my opinion about something that was going to greatly impact their future and I had no idea what they were talking about. I would at least like to have an intelligent conversation.</p>
<p>“Are you implying that faculty sometimes gives bad advice? Security! Can we get this helicopter parent removed asap?”</p>
<p>That is not to say that the OP’s son’s junior faculty advisors aren’t the next rising stars of the field and telling him exactly the right path to follow.</p>
<p>There is a stereotype that insecure new PhDs are occasionally rather undeservedly arrogant. It is perhaps remotely possible we sometimes run across those who fit this stereotype on these boards. jmho fwiw</p>
<p>To limit my remarks to art history as a field: I think that art historians have a significant influence on the culture, by determining which artists and which works are deemed “worthy” of analysis, and also which aspects of the works are important. </p>
<p>You might not agree, in terms of the cultural significance of art history. But I doubt that anyone who shares my belief wants decisions about art history to be made solely by people who have $50,000 of their own funds available to spend at age 22 . . . even if you broaden the group to include others who can take it for granted that they can freely spend $50,000 of their families’ money. </p>
<p>I believe that there is a significant socio-economic background slant among art historians at present, and I’d like to see greater diversity in the field. That requires involving people for whom $50,000 is a <em>lot</em> of money. And then I think the prospective art historian’s parents do have a legitimate interest in knowing more about the true career opportunities. This is especially true if the parents might be providing a safety net, in case Plan B needs to be implemented.</p>
<p>Academic employment prospects are hard to predict, because they can easily change while a student is in graduate school. This year, the outlook is quite bad. But who would have known that five or six years ago?</p>
<p>A bunch of my cousins got PhDs in fields where job prospects are slim. Some of them made it and others have found other things to do, such as being a college counselor at a private school. Just because you don’t succeed in getting a tenure track job, doesn’t mean you are doomed to a life of unemployment.</p>
<p>post #38
important, interesting point and I agree.</p>