NYT article: On Education - A Late Start is not always a bad start

Parents Forum
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<p>Take heart - there is still room in the world for people who do not fit into a one-size fits all cookie-cutter mold. “A Late Start, but Not a Bad Start if the Student Is Finally Ready” is for all those wonderful, creative late bloomers out there.</p>

<p>"Ms. Nolan is now 28, a long-limbed, wheat-haired young woman with hopeful grayish blue eyes who retains something of the teenage rebel in the Yankee cap she slaps on backward. This onetime dropout is a senior at Smith College, bicycling around a campus gussied up in the gold and russet colors of a dazzling New England autumn, a place whose alumnae include Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan.</p>

<p>MS. NOLAN is a breathing, pulsing rebuff to parents who despair when their children meander off course and can’t seem to find themselves, those who don’t follow the classic trajectory of graduation by 22 and a high-paying job by 30. Such parents, she advises from her hard-earned experience, should realize that people follow starkly different arcs and timetables, so parents should “never give up on your kid.”</p>

<p>“Just because your child can’t focus on their future when you want them to doesn’t mean they can’t far surpass your expectations when they really do focus,” she said.</p>

<p>When Ms. Nolan was ready to focus, there were places willing to offer her a second chance. After she got her high school equivalency diploma, Westchester Community College, a 30-minute drive from home, let her show off her gifts as a student and her leadership talents as head of the student government.</p>

<p>Then Smith took her into its Ada Comstock Scholars Program, an admission avenue that seems to escape the notice of families who think of Seven Sisters or other selective schools as exclusively for the elite 18-to-22 set. The 31-year-old program, like similar ones at Mount Holyoke and Wellesley, has long recognized that people flower at different paces and that the vagaries of life can trip up even the most fastidious wish lists."</p>

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<p>This article would be more convincing if it interviewed the students after they graduated from college and described their career paths. But good luck to the late starters–I went into my undergraduate program at the usual time, but was seven years older than most of my professional school classmates (and had a classmate more than a decade older than I was there).</p>

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<p>Most college graduates did NOT take the traditional route through college; ie college right after highschool, graduate in 4 years. Most have some checkered pasts in terms of higher education, with drop outs, transfers, drastic changes in majors, all because of some failure to do well. The Ada Comstock program is a highly unusual one in that it is offered by a top school, and it pays the older student’s expenses. Most people have to pay for their mistakes which makes completion of college a long and arduous path. That is why most of us really want our kids to get their undergrad degree, and then go out make their mistakes. It is a heartbreaker for parents who have to watch their kids go through the gauntlet of their own mistakes, and some do not do well. Plenty in our generation who not only did not come close tho their potential, and many living hand to mouth, if that. Many miserable as well.</p>

4

<p>The median undergraduate student in the U.S. is 24.5 years old (meaning half are older than that), attends an urban or suburban school, holds down a part- or full-time job, and attends school at night and/or on weekends. The 18-year-olds are the outlyers.</p>