Notre Dame (Mendoza) vs. IU (Kelley) vs. others

blossom
Mon, 13 Jan 2025 01:10:36 +0000

If by “flavor of the month” you are suggesting that last month he wanted to become an epidemiologist and track infectious disease outbreaks, and the month before he wanted to work in sustainability helping big companies reduce their carbon footprint, and most of last year he was interested in architecture- then I’d really let the entire conversation drop until all the admissions are in.

There is really no need for a 17 year old to pick their “grownup career track” right now, even though I get that from your perspective, there’s the “struggling artist” college decision vs. the “solid upper middle class” college decision vs. the “top 1% earner” college decision.

But in the real world… kids who think they’re going to become investment bankers when they’re in HS fall off that track long before interviewing starts. In the real world, kids get exposed to 100 careers they’d never even heard of once they get to college. And in the real world- kids get launched into a career that didn’t even exist when they were in HS.

If any of us could predict what the labor markets would look like five years from now, we wouldn’t bother with CC. We’d be on a yacht in Sardinia pricing Picasso lithographs and having our personal chefs flying off to Alaska for the daily salmon catch. Nobody can predict what the hot careers will be in 5 years, and nobody can predict what disruptive technology will destroy one legacy industry and create and entirely new one.

So I’d let this one sit for a bit. There are way too many variables right now.