Ed. Note: This piece ran a few days ago on EducatedQwest, Stuart  Nachbar’s well constructed site and blog.


How To Pick a College For Your Kid

by GLH

Can there be a more stressful time than our high school student picking a college?  For us the answer is no and it may well be even for THEM.

I am a decade away from when that happened to me but the memories are still fresh, sort of like a nagging groin injury that won’t go away.

Since this blog  is called What Would Dad Say, with the kicker text Frequently Wrong, Never in Doubt, it allows me to be opinionated.  If you disagree with me, so be it.

Here is my counter intuitive advice.  I don’t care how smart your son or daughter is, how much responsibility they have shown and how they make such good decisions back home in Abilene, Kansas.

They are clueless about picking a college. This is when you earn your stripes as a parent.  No one knows your kid like you do.  The kid doesn’t know himself like you know him, either.  You have to decide for him.

Now, you cannot let him know this.  This is where you use every manipulative technique you have ever learned.  You cannot say PICK THIS ONE, but you can influence.

These 18-year-olds don’t know much about the real world.  Classic case: a dad I knew arranged for his daughter to visit a very nice school, one that anyone would be proud to attend.  After a long day at the school, where she was guest hosted by one of the campus leaders, shown everything she had ever thought of, attended a few classes, the whole deal.  On the way to the airport, the dad asked her how she thought the visit went and she said, “Hated it.”  Hated it, he asked…there was not a clue she had hated it.  “Why?” he asked.  “Did you notice how those girls we passed on the way to lunch, didn’t even say HELLO? she asked.

Now, maybe she was being insightful, and could pick up on a non friendly environment, but that is not the point, and you know I am right.  Kids this age react and say stupid things.  Picking the wrong college just because of a perceived slight happens more than you think.

You have to get out ahead on this project.  You know that the school means a lot.  It is too darned expensive to leave the decision up to an impressionable kid.

You have my permission to take charge of this process.  Don’t wimp out just because a group of non parental counselors tell you that you should.

Destroy this after you read it.