The first time I played golf with Jackson, he and Ben were freshmen. 3 years later, the four of us did a father son trip to Ballyneal to kick off their last high school golf season where they are the co-captains. It was an incredible trip. 96 holes, hours spent putting, chatting, and laughing, and many wonderful memories made. From that first round together in August 2019, both their scoring averages have dropped by roughly 30 strokes. Work ethic and maturity are real. Tryouts are Monday/Tuesday and then the season begins. The elephant in the room, of course, is the question of college. Where can they make the team? Where can they play every week? Does it matter? And how best to manage the academic element of the choice?
We talked about it a lot and perhaps the most surprising discovery was that school location mattered more than school brand name. Specifically, they are looking at schools in states that were more open about COVID, don’t push woke agendas and don’t censor conversation. Yale would be a great example of a school that they would never, ever consider. Golf aside, Ralston College would be one that would top the list as anti-Yale.
Unfortunately, as the “progressive voice” has become so aggressive and loud in the last few years, 17 year olds who historically didn’t talk politics or care how their parents voted picked schools based on seriously important criteria like the football team and how hot students of the opposite sex were. Today, they have to look at the bias of the administrators and their press releases over social issues. What will the long term impact of this change be?
To me, it would seem that we will move backwards with respect to diversity of thought. If students are self selecting into schools that back their political ideals, how do we actually have conversations on topics that matter and learn to be more tolerant?
The University of Chicago addressed this in a letter to incoming first year students in 2016.
Our commitment to academic freedom means that we do not support so-called ‘trigger warnings,’ we do not cancel invited speakers because their topics might prove controversial, and we do not condone the creation of intellectual ‘safe spaces’ where individuals can retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own
Hopefully more institutions return to education with pragmatism and students evaluate which school to attend based on a very simple matrix: one with a team your skills are equipped to make, an education that prepares you to succeed in life, and a job that earns a living that covers the cost of student loans.
I mourn for the loss of 17 year old decisions based on party and dating metrics but I am proud to see my son making decisions that matter and won’t require future student loan forgiveness. We should all have these discussions with our kids, and when we do, esteemed professors at Yale may need to consider the benefits of a career at King Soopers. Brainwashing the youth is neither transferable nor marketable, especially when the youth see it coming.
Good stuff - having similar convos with my son who graduates in May. A wokeness rating for colleges would be great - is there one? If I were going off to college these days, I would certainly weigh how a school responded to COVID/masks/vaccine and their approach to DEI.
When my daughter went off to college in 2013, while I was concerned, it turns out I didn't give these aspects near enough thought, and I regret it.
I sent them a bright, well-adjusted young lady, and they transformed her into a rigidly opinionated pseudo-communist who is reflexively ignorant of many important realities of the world we live in. Now five years post-graduation, she's successfully launched a career (in a field having nothing to do with her degree), and while I'm proud of her trajectory, she is still significantly affected by that re-programming, from which I'm no longer optimistic she will ever fully recover.
I overestimated our ability as parents to have fully prepared her for the experience, because I underestimated the rot in our higher education system and would suggest that anyone who fears a similar outcome for their own family at least avoid the other mistake I made - she left college debt-free, because I paid cash for the entire experience.
In retrospect, it's possible, though not guaranteed, because the rot pervades the system upstream and downstream from education, that having debt on which I was not a co-signer to match up with her results might cause her to rethink the life-long value of those experiences and adjust her view of them.
The good news, weak though it is, is that when the University of Texas reaches out asking for endowment contributions, I'm comfortable using my wide-ranging vocabulary of softly articulated profanities to let them know my view of the damage they've already done to my daughter with my own money.
As I review the screed I've just typed, I'll also ask forgiveness from any readers for the rant. As might be plainly obvious, I remain furious about the dysfunctional system that turned her into something that is presently far less than she was raised to become.