You Pay Tuition. So Do You Pick the School?
By JEFF OPDYKE, The Wall Street Journal</p>
<p>To this day, my dad still gives me a hard time about my dumbest plan ever: the one in which I, a high-school senior, would attend an obscure university to study astrophysics – a university where astrophysics wasn’t even a degree program.</p>
<p>I chose this school because a friend was moving to the city where the school was located. So I tried to make up a parent-friendly reason to attend the school. Astrophysics sounded plausible, even respectable.</p>
<p>My dad laughs about it today…just as he did back then. Only his laugh back then was followed by the warning that he wasn’t paying good money for me to attend a third-rate school to study a subject about which I had never shown the slightest interest, and which the school wasn’t known for.</p>
<p>My point isn’t that he was right to shoot down my plans (although he was). My point is that he stepped in with a threat to revoke funding for college if I chose what he saw as a futile path.</p>
<p>And that raises a question parents and their kids regularly confront: When Mom and Dad are footing the bill, what say do they have in where their kids go to college? Do they have final say? Or is it their role simply to provide counseling, but, in the end, still open their wallets no matter what?</p>
<p>Lots of parents take the position that they get to pick the college, threatening to close the checkbook if a kid insists on pursuing some throwaway degree from a university where party participation tops classroom attendance.</p>
<p>The case for parental authority seems pretty clear. What parent wants to shell out tens of thousands of dollars on a degree that offers little hope for a more-secure future? Sure, kids are allowed to make mistakes in college. They change classes, they change majors, they even change schools. But no parent wants to fund a degree they feel certain beforehand has little promise. It’s a waste of all that money you scrimped to save over all those years.</p>
<p>Besides, parents often do know best. It would be hard to find a parent who doesn’t have a tale about some clueless decision their 17-year-old child made. Certainly, my father knew there was no inner astrophysicist screaming for release inside of me.</p>
<p>And yet…</p>
<p>What if my father had been wrong? What if we parents are too quick to assume our life experiences are a better measure of our children’s potential success than what our kids know about themselves?</p>
<p>A few years ago, the son of a longtime friend was accepted at one of the top public universities in the nation. However, the teen didn’t want to go, opting instead to head to a less prestigious school closer to home. My friend initially considered threatening not to pay tuition for the lesser school, hoping that withholding funding might alter his son’s position.</p>
<p>Ultimately, my friend never made the threat – even though he was certain his son would one day agree that he had made a terrible choice. His son is just graduating, and now wishes he had gone to a different school.</p>
<p>Yet, while his son learned a lesson, so, too, did my friend. His son, he says, “recognized in himself that he wasn’t ready to be off on his own, away from home. He knew himself better than I did. I now believe that if he had gone away, he would not have done well, and probably wouldn’t have stayed. If I had imposed that school on him, I think things could have been worse than they are now.”</p>
<p>As my friend discovered, it’s easy as a parent to say that this school is better than that school, and this degree tops that degree. But such arguments, even if correct, take place in a vacuum. It ignores all the other factors swirling around in a kid’s head – involving maturity, emotion and desire. As a parent, you can rule those out and say, “If it’s my money you’re spending, then you’ll go here.”</p>
<p>But it doesn’t always mean you’ve done your child a favor.</p>
<p>Given that my dad lived through this with me, I sought his thoughts on what role parents should have. His comments: “Look, you don’t have to go to Harvard to be somebody. But it does come down to the fact that this is the parent’s money you’re spending. You just want to cringe when your child wants to study some useless program at some throwaway school.”</p>
<p>My father also recognizes that saying that to your kids isn’t the best approach. Think back to your own youth, when your parents mocked your wants. What did you do? Rebel? Feel belittled? You don’t want to make your child feel that way. You want to make your point. But you want to be smart about it.</p>
<p>So how do you do it? My friend Deanna, in Milwaukee, has spent the years brainwashing her kids with visits to – and chatter about – the University of Wisconsin, which Deanna and her husband attended. Though she’d willingly pay for her kids to go elsewhere, her efforts have paid off: Her oldest daughter wants to enroll there.</p>
<p>That only works over time, though, so it isn’t likely to sway older kids who have already begun shaping their own thinking. At that stage, says my friend Anne, in Minneapolis, your role is to “guide and encourage kids.”</p>
<p>Anne basically interviewed her son, questioning him about the kind of college environment he sought, what he might study and whether he wanted to stay closer to home or travel farther afield.</p>
<p>At that point, I believe, you should do homework on your own. You research whether the various schools mentioned are good for the degree your child is interested in. Maybe you’ll find out that the school of choice isn’t particularly strong in, say, astrophysics. Or that its low academic ranking would make it tough to get a job after graduation.</p>
<p>You hope to persuade your child to see the light. But here’s where I come down in the end: It’s your money, and you make the decision. I want to empower my son to make his own choices of school and classes and degree. But if he, after all my efforts, is dead-set one day on wanting to pursue a marginal degree from a marginal school, I will let him…but he will do so without as much funding from me.</p>
<p>I now understand my dad’s position from all those years ago: If you’re going to make this kind of mistake, you’re going to learn about the financial repercussions the hard way.