The Key Shouldn’t Cost More than the Treasure it Unlocks

For each of more than 400 days, I wrote and published at least 1,000 words on a site that no longer exists. I still have most of the posts stashed away and reread one every now again. The following was written on November 18, 2018. A great deal in life has changed since then, but I stand by my words. Here’s most of the post (minus the stretch-out-the-word-count stuff).

I don’t know what I have to write about, and as I was driving home from youth ministry with Henry and Sam about an hour ago, I was trying to convince myself that taking a day off is perfectly acceptable. … At some level or another, in one aspect of life or another, we all need some sort of accountability. The problem is that our criteria for what counts as accountability tends to be too narrow. How many students are in college because they feel they need an institution to tell them what to do and to somehow punish them if they don’t come through?

This is a subject that’s been on my mind a lot lately. I have a daughter who is finding that her college experience is leaving her less than fulfilled. Just yesterday, I was talking with a young lady who, after a year and half of misery has finally decided to not go back to college next semester. She’ll work full time instead, pay off her small student loan, try to figure out possible goals and means of attaining them. Oh, and when she goes to work at that coffee shop, she’ll be making drinks alongside the college graduate who is trying to figure out how he’ll pay off his tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of student debt.

At 8:45, Dennis called Henry’s phone to see why he, Sam, and I weren’t home for dinner yet. Henry explained that we had been talking after youth ministry. One of our conversations consisted of me trying to encourage a young man, who runs a rather successful landscaping business, to consider alternatives to college. He begged off, rattling off reasons for going that sounded like all of the reasons you’d find printed on a college brochure, which—you know—is just marketing material designed to generate income—for the institution, not the graduate of the institution.

It’s funny, but when we talk about college, we talk about tuition, room and board, scholarships, and financial aid, but we never seem to talk about opportunity costs. What could you be doing with your money—and more importantly, with your time: something you can never get back—if you weren’t spending four years jumping through the hoops some administration somewhere has decided is exactly what you need for some sort of success in life (defined by who, exactly?)?

Maybe it’s the unwillingness to even consider alternatives that gets to me. Maybe it’s the neighbor who has told his young son that he has to go to college, because if he doesn’t, he’ll be a failure. Maybe it’s the parents who run themselves and their kids ragged with the school schedule, the homework, and those all-important extracurricular activities because that’s how you get into the good colleges and get the good scholarships and get the good jobs. What about the good life? The one filled with meaning and contentment? Why does that count for so little in so many people’s plans?

I remember telling somebody about the skateboard business my son Henry is building. The response was, of course, “What about college?” “He doesn’t want to go,” I replied. “He loves designing and building skateboards and wants to see if he can create a successful business of it.” The response? “Oh, well, maybe he can take some business courses.” Why?!?!?! Why sit in a classroom and listen to a teacher who likely doesn’t own a business and probably never has tell him how he should run a business? Don’t you think that he can probably learn more by actually trying it? And if he fails? He’ll likely have accumulated a boatload of lessons that he can apply to his next venture.

Fear. I know. I understand. It’s the fear. It’s hard to turn your back on what everyone else is doing and go your own way. It feels like everyone else is just waiting for you to fail so they can say “I told you so,” and the stakes seem so high. It seems to me, though, that a debt statement featuring a six-digit figure is what people should really be afraid of.

In Better Than College, Blake Boles writes:

Money is just money; time is life’s true commodity. If you’re going to college in pursuit of some mythical six-figure income, that’s a poor gamble to make with four precious years. On the other hand, pursuing an adventurous, self-directed education guarantees you a value-filled experience.

College is right for some people, but how many people is it wrong for?