Six reasons NOT to send your daughter to college

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JustPink said:
0 enforcement for drugs/alcohol in dorms? Maybe they weren’t before, but they definitely are now. At least from what I’ve seen.

My brother and my significant other both got burned because of alcohol in dorms, and they went to different colleges. My brother was caught having a beer in a dorm once with his friends and almost got kicked out of school for it. He had to write an essay and do volunteer work and everything. My SO was at a dorm party where people were drinking, and even though he didn’t drink anything he still got in trouble when the RA walked in and had to face consequences because he was in there while others were drinking.
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I don’t doubt it has changed, but there was nothing done about drunkenness in the dorms when I was there. It was like living with some crazy parents who thought it better that their teens got smashed at home instead of going somewhere else to do it. To say that combining drunkenness and co-ed living invites violations of chastity is an understatement. Soap opera characters had less volatile personal lives.
 
AuditVocemMeam said:
I am a bit older than that now, but yes. Of course, I know where not to go and what not to do, so I have been able to have a good experience.
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(My apologies. I see the post where you referred to yourself as a 17 year old was written almost exactly a year ago. So, 18.)

That’s key right there… college and dorms are not horrible things and I wouldn’t even label them as “occasions of sin.” It’s all about who you surround yourself with and what you decide to get involved in. No different from everyday life. If you are weak enough in the faith that you’d fall during your college years, you probably would have eventually “fallen” regardless.
 
EasterJoy said:
I don’t doubt it has changed, but there was nothing done about drunkenness in the dorms when I was there. It was like living with some crazy parents who thought it better that their teens got smashed at home instead of going somewhere else to do it. To say that combining drunkenness and co-ed living invites violations of chastity is an understatement. Soap opera characters had less volatile personal lives.
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Thankfully things appear to be a lot more under control now in that department.
 
JustPink said:
It’s all about who you surround yourself with and what you decide to get involved in. No different from everyday life. If you are weak enough in the faith that you’d fall during your college years, you probably would have eventually “fallen” regardless.
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^^ 👍👍 nothing but the truth
 
While I think women should go to college if they want to, being well educated isn’t defined by or limited to going to college.
 
Cider said:
While I think women should go to college if they want to, being well educated isn’t defined by or limited to going to college.
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Try and get a job as a professional without a degree/grad school and see how far your alternate education goes. Yes, I understand the Bill Gates example, but he is not the norm!🤷
 
Cider said:
While I think women should go to college if they want to, being well educated isn’t defined by or limited to going to college.
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While this is technically true, having some sort of degree or certificate from a college is the only way to actually show that you’re educated. A person can drop out of high school and educate themselves by reading every encyclopedia in the world. But if she/he doesn’t have a piece of paper to confirm this education, it means absolutely nothing as far as society and the real world are concerned. That’s the problem with the author’s assertion about education and college.
 
kozlosap said:
Try and get a job as a professional without a degree/grad school and see how far your alternate education goes. Yes, I understand the Bill Gates example, but he is not the norm!🤷
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My point was in reference to a previous post that repeatedly equated college with being well educated not with being employable.
 
JustPink said:
While this is technically true, having some sort of degree or certificate from a college is the only way to actually show that you’re educated. A person can drop out of high school and educate themselves by reading every encyclopedia in the world. But if she/he doesn’t have a piece of paper to confirm this education, it means absolutely nothing as far as society and the real world are concerned. That’s the problem with the author’s assertion about education and college.
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Actually it’s not the only way to show education, and your example does not prove your point. It just shows that people are too lazy to properly engage with each other and instead overly rely on institutional certificates for “proof”. That doesn’t have any bearing on the various ways one can evaluate knowledge and education.
 
JustPink said:
Thankfully things appear to be a lot more under control now in that department.
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I think I had the bad fortune to live in a dorm that was particularly bad in that respect. There was a couple two doors down who were openly co-habituating on a women’s floor. She had a private room, he had paid for a shared room somewhere else in the building (allowing him to be in the building), but it was no secret that he lived next door.
 
JustPink said:
While this is technically true, having some sort of degree or certificate from a college is the only way to actually show that you’re educated. A person can drop out of high school and educate themselves by reading every encyclopedia in the world. But if she/he doesn’t have a piece of paper to confirm this education, it means absolutely nothing as far as society and the real world are concerned. That’s the problem with the author’s assertion about education and college.
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Actually, job experience and positive references can sometimes substitute for formal training, although it will not substitute for having passed a licensing exam, having the kind of evaluated internship that may only be accessible to students in formal programs, and so on. I do know people who went to work in their field and learned on the job instead of getting a certificate. It is true, however, that some consumers will look for businesses that employ people with widely-accepted certification, even when it is not legally required.

There are even some fields where there is a prejudice against people who got their credentials without having sufficient experience in the field. There are many restaurants who would far rather hire a line cook with good references as a hard worker who always shows up than to hire someone who has trained as a chef at a cooking institute but lacks evidence of being up to the work load or being able to take orders from the actual chef.

And that is the thing: A person who doesn’t get their education from a formal school almost always needs to get it from hands-on experience supervised by someone who actually knows what they are doing. There are many things you can learn on the job better than you can learn them in a classroom, but there are few practical things (including, ironically, reading and writing well) that you can learn very well from a book on your own.

IOW, I would doubt very much that the person who advised learning things out of books in a library has ever learned very many practical skills that way. Textbooks are great supplements to an education, but it is a rare textbook author whose written directions will substitute for the guidance of a teacher.
 
Cider said:
Actually it’s not the only way to show education, and your example does not prove your point. It just shows that people are too lazy to properly engage with each other and instead overly rely on institutional certificates for “proof”. That doesn’t have any bearing on the various ways one can evaluate knowledge and education.
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Lol I’m sorry but the world doesn’t care how many books you say you’ve read. If you’re a high school drop out, you’ll generally have nothing to show for yourself education-wise as far as the world is concerned. I never said that it’s fair, just that it’s reality.
 
EasterJoy said:
I think I had the bad fortune to live in a dorm that was particularly bad in that respect. There was a couple two doors down who were openly co-habituating on a women’s floor. She had a private room, he had paid for a shared room somewhere else in the building (allowing him to be in the building), but it was no secret that he lived next door.
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Well, you are one good example of the fact that being put in an environment like that won’t necessarily break someone who is strong in their faith and makes good choices. 🙂
 
JustPink said:
Well, you are one good example of the fact that being put in an environment like that won’t necessarily break someone who is strong in their faith and makes good choices. 🙂
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Well, not in that case–that is, I would not say that any of my misdeeds were necessarily worse than what I might have done elsewhere–but I would never argue that environment doesn’t matter or downplay the importance of good friends, especially in the case of a young adult who has not cemented his sense of himself or her sense of herself.

A person only has a limited amount of resistance–one’s store of heroism can grow by exercising one’s will, but the supply is not endless in any case. If there is no limit on the near occasions of sin, people are going to sin more, and I am no exception to that rule. Sin, like the pull of a magnet, is also far easier to resist when the object of the pull stays farther away. What the fellow who thinks women ought not go to college doesn’t understand is that you do not have to put the magnet infinitely far from the iron filings in order to keep the attraction from exerting itself!!
 
EasterJoy said:
Well, not in that case–that is, I would not say that any of my misdeeds were necessarily worse than what I might have done elsewhere–but I would never argue that environment doesn’t matter or downplay the importance of good friends, especially in the case of a young adult who has not cemented his sense of himself or her sense of herself.

A person only has a limited amount of resistance–one’s store of heroism can grow by exercising one’s will, but the supply is not endless in any case. If there is no limit on the near occasions of sin, people are going to sin more, and I am no exception to that rule. Sin, like the pull of a magnet, is also far easier to resist when the object of the pull stays farther away. What the fellow who thinks women ought not go to college doesn’t understand is that you do not have to put the magnet infinitely far from the iron filings in order to keep the attraction from exerting itself!!
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I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I’d say probably 85% of the time I don’t really understand what you’re actually trying to say in your posts as far as where you stand.

The point I was trying to get across was that being in a difficult environment, such as college dorms, won’t necessarily break someone who is well grounded and has strong faith and a good head on their shoulders. Ultimately I am saying that I’m not against sending our kids to go off to college to live in a dorm.

From your response, I can’t tell if you agree with this or disagree with it. It sounds like you’re disagreeing, but your disagreement seems like it would contradict your response to the article, so I’m still at a loss.
 
EasterJoy said:
OK, so let’s do look at this wrong-headed piece point-by-point:
  1. She will attract the wrong types of men. I share the common concern addressed to us, again mainly by angry women, that there are so many lazy men in our society… This seems to imply that young men who go to college are more lazy than men who don’t (!!!), or else that Catholic men who go to college will naturally seek out Catholic women who did not. Those are both false.
  2. *She will be in a near occasion of sin. Just think of the environment that college-age students live in. You have a heavy concentration of young people all living together without the supervision of parents at the most sexually charged state of life they will experience. * Hmmmm…and exactly what kind of woman will tomorrow’s male Catholic doctors and lawyers be marrying, then? Are they going to go back to their home parish and find a nice Catholic girl who’s been–doing what, exactly?–since graduating from high school, or are they going to marry one of those non-Catholic near occasions of sin they meet at school? Is it not hard enough for good Catholics to meet each other, we have to take all the Catholic women out of college, too? Oh, and the Catholic men who didn’t go to college? Guess what? They’re not getting paid a family wage, so most of their wives have to work outside the home!!
  3. She will not learn to be a wife and mother. Nothing that is taught in a college curriculum is geared toward domestic homemaking… If you did not teach both your sons and your daughters the basics of home economics before they left high school, you failed. If you think that the modern homemaker has no need of anything she learned in college, you’re much mistaken. The bigger danger is that she’ll go to college but fail to take the coursework that would help her and her husband competently manage a 21st household.
  4. The cost of a degree is becoming more difficult to recoup. Like anything that is subsidized by the government, the cost of a college degree is inflated.
    This is so wrong-headed, I don’t know where to start. Think of where this country would be without the GI bill. It is the public universities that make and affordable education available to those who aren’t independently wealthy already.
  5. You don’t have to prove anything to the world. Often the reason for a girl going to college is the pressure of the society around her, including her parents. There is no reason to make this point to girls only. There are many young people who would be happier in technical degrees. Still, even most of the men I know who go into logging and farming went to college for at least two years–and these were guys who earned their own way working in the woods!
  6. It could be a near occasion of sin for the parents. In our culture many parents feel an unnecessary obligation to pay for the children’s college tuition. They’re saying that wanting to send your children to college is a wrong-headed reason to use NFP. Why that means that only boys get sent to college is unclear. One also has to consider that a Catholic woman who marries a college-educated man is more likely to be able to support a large family while she stays home and still get them through college. Well, the chances that a woman is going to marry and stay married to a college-educated man when she has not been to college herself are not that high. The college-educated tend to marry the college-educated, and the non-college-educated tend to marry the non-college-educated. College-educated women also have a lower divorce rate. (The worst rate, not surprisingly, is in women who dropped out of either high school or college. Could be lots of confounding variables there…)
  7. She will regret it. The more we talk about this prudent option for girls, the more we have women who are willing to admit to the regret they possess for having bought into the lie of the dual-career family. Yes, because no one ever regrets that they could have gone to college, but didn’t. The lie buried in this one is that the college-educated are required to be in the workforce from graduation until retirement, which is sometimes true, but not always by any means. Besides, of all those dual-career mothers going to work every day, how many have their houses cleaned and their groceries rung up and their twice-a-week at the restaurant dishes cleared by other dual-career mothers who are working at lower pay and perhaps longer and less flexible hours away from home than they are, because those dual-career mothers* don’t *have a college education? A woman with a college education is also more likely to be able to substantially help her family while only working part-time.
College isn’t for everyone, but the people who wrote this piece don’t seem to have done the research a college-educated person is capable doing concerning whether any facts actually support their thesis.

It would be better to encourage Catholics, both male and female, to consider what family trade-offs they will make depending on what post-secondary course to take and what degree and what university they choose if they do choose college: that is, how will I pay off these loans, will I be able to maintain my credentialing while parenting our children, what are the career demands in this field for parents, and so on. That is where I hear regret from the college-educated: That is, that they only considered what they’d enjoy the most–I mean both what they learned and where they learned it–during their four years of college, and not what college and what degree would best help them reach their life goals after college.
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👍 What I was thinking and what you so eloquently described. This was one of the most ridiculous articles I’ve read over the past year.
 
Lost_Sheep said:
At church, of course. :rolleyes:
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haha! I met my husband at church… the Newman Center where we attended university together. 😛

Oh… and contrary to the article, I will NEVER regret taking advantage of learning at a university, immersing myself in every class I could before having to go out into the real world when I would not have the time to do it. Quite honestly, earning the piece of paper was secondary. I knew it would be helpful with getting a better-paying job, but my long-term goals were to become a professional musician, which I am doing now, as well as being a mother, which I am also doing.
 
JustPink said:
I don’t know if I’m the only one, but I’d say probably 85% of the time I don’t really understand what you’re actually trying to say in your posts as far as where you stand.

The point I was trying to get across was that being in a difficult environment, such as college dorms, won’t necessarily break someone who is well grounded and has strong faith and a good head on their shoulders. Ultimately I am saying that I’m not against sending our kids to go off to college to live in a dorm.

From your response, I can’t tell if you agree with this or disagree with it. It sounds like you’re disagreeing, but your disagreement seems like it would contradict your response to the article, so I’m still at a loss.
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Sigh…no, I will assure you that you are not the only one. I’m often hard to follow. I was just as hard to follow before I went to college, though, I can assure you. 😉

College campuses present certain moral hazards, and I don’t think that this can be denied. What I am saying is that it is not necessary to stay off of them entirely in order to avoid the hazards, and that the hazards are of the sort that can’t be avoided just by staying out of the dorms or off of college campuses. I just think it would be naïve to say, “oh, she’s a good kid, she’ll be OK”. Forewarned is forearmed. Catholics ought to be aware that they would be wise not to underestimate the force of peer pressure, even if you have no intention but to be anything but “a good kid”, and to plan accordingly.
 
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