How the Rich are Secretly Handling College

[Anonymous]

If you are truly wealthy, you can afford an unconventional path. Nothing new about that. The rest of us take much bigger risks if we push such options.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:No. That is what I am telling you. The titans of creativity and critical thinking by any measure are all questioning their college education. Some never completed it, and while in college, attended precious few classes. That's just Kool-Aid talk spouted by the Admissions Office. They were creative and thought critically by the time they stepped foot in college, and it's largely by the enrichment their received outside of school classes.

They used to squawk the same way when classical education was under attack. Whatever happened to that??? Gone, gone, gone...

The titans of creativity and critical thinking? Hee hee.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:You assume going to college is all about passing along certain information. A liberal arts education emphasized skills like creativity and critical thinking, necessary in any field and walk of life.

You assume "creativity and critical thinking" can only be learned in college. Bzzzzzzzzzzzzt, wrong.

If anything, these days college hinders the development of creativity and critical thinking.

This is OP. I did not post the above, but the general consensus seems to be: college is for sexual experimentation, drinking, and to get a job. Unless you want to be professor, then by all means get into a top school.

Why do parents need to pay $$$ for kids to sleep around and drink, can't they do that, if they must, while immmersed in more productive ventures? And now, even the job thing is coming into question.

We certainly agree with this at our house. We are saving from babyhood, yet for what? Colleges seem intent upon destroying their own value, or at least what we consider valuable. Perhaps other families really do intend to buy 'the college experience.' The rich question it for one reason, but a family that contributes to a 529, month in and month out for 2 decades, will not like seeing that go up in pot smoke or sex experimentation, a 'studies' degree etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:No. That is what I am telling you. The titans of creativity and critical thinking by any measure are all questioning their college education. Some never completed it, and while in college, attended precious few classes. That's just Kool-Aid talk spouted by the Admissions Office. They were creative and thought critically by the time they stepped foot in college, and it's largely by the enrichment their received outside of school classes.

They used to squawk the same way when classical education was under attack. Whatever happened to that??? Gone, gone, gone...

The titans of creativity and critical thinking? Hee hee.

Right? There's a boom in Silicon Valley right now, and apparently people there think they're doing something special. It's all good 'til the bust hits. It was the same thing in the last boom/bust cycle. Egos inflated by money, and they both came crashing down.

[Anonymous]

NP here. This isn't the tightest response because I'm being interrupted left and right, lol, but it's interesting so I'm going to attempt getting out a response.

I started out very poor and worked my way into a HYP grad school education, and my DH also has advanced degrees.

College for pure liberal arts at this point baffles me, but I'm not sure what the alternative is. Seems like we take a bunch of our potentially most productive part of the society and waste them. We put them together to drink/sleep around, and get inculcated with the professors' views, which due to tenure are often way off-base because they are not subject to market forces.

Then they often go to jobs that have nothing to do with their education; that they could have done from high school. Sure, this is all fun for the individual but on a mass scale this seems like a tremendous waste of parental resources, and with respect to the young person's time --I wouldn't call it exactly wasted--but it's time that could be put to better use if our system was revamped somehow.

I see your point, OP. My (tween) kids are straight-A and athletic and we try to help them be well-rounded. However; my kids are not in your circle, so not sure what people like me would do for an alternative when it comes time for college.

For my DH and myself, the advanced degree helped us gain entree into our profession, and provided us with a circle of peers who were interested in some of the stuff we are interested in, and contacts. I'll have to look back on your post, but I think you said you and your circle had graduate degrees. I wonder how that plays into your connection with each other.

I was living in a very wealthy part of LA and in a circle maybe not quite like yours but with some similarities. One problem is the lack of work ethic. Some (elementary/middle school) parents in my circle believed a traditional school could not handle "their child's creativity" and that was the reason their kid was not doing well in school…but it really seemed to me to be that they and their kids were entitled and the kids not doing well due to lack of work ethic and parental failure to institute any sort of boundaries. There are lots of schools that feed into this view and will take those snowflakes for a high price.

[Anonymous]

If you are truly wealthy, you can afford an unconventional path. Nothing new about that. The rest of us take much bigger risks if we push such options.

This. It's been true for centuries.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Lol. New money. Bless your heart.

New money has always ruled this country after forcefully grabbing the reins from Old Money--which gracefully gave it up. Time and time again. Money came to me even though I did not chase it, I was chasing something else. I quit and hit financial rock bottom while I was working the start-up. I am grateful for how things turned out.

I do not hate Old Money. You must be neither. The dirty secret is that Old Money and New Money secretly are fascinated by the other. Always has. You should see the eyes they make at each other at charity balls.

Can you at least address my initial post?

Oh honey. Many of us here have been to countless charity balls, grew up going. Old Money is much less fascinated by the nouveau riche than you would think. If you only knew how we talk at the country club when you arent around...

Yes, I'm sure the Mark Zuckerbergs of the work are really concerned about what the geriatric population of the Chevy Chase country club is discussing over Lobster Newburg.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Option 1: OP is a multimillionaire tech entrepreneur who spends His free time posting "the education secrets of the smart wealthy" on DCUM.

Option 2: OP is a bored high school student who has seen a few episodes of Silicon Valley and read an online article about Peter Thiel's scholarship program

I vote Option 2.

Ding ding ding! +1000

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:NP here. This isn't the tightest response because I'm being interrupted left and right, lol, but it's interesting so I'm going to attempt getting out a response.

I started out very poor and worked my way into a HYP grad school education, and my DH also has advanced degrees.

College for pure liberal arts at this point baffles me, but I'm not sure what the alternative is. Seems like we take a bunch of our potentially most productive part of the society and waste them. We put them together to drink/sleep around, and get inculcated with the professors' views, which due to tenure are often way off-base because they are not subject to market forces.

Then they often go to jobs that have nothing to do with their education; that they could have done from high school. Sure, this is all fun for the individual but on a mass scale this seems like a tremendous waste of parental resources, and with respect to the young person's time --I wouldn't call it exactly wasted--but it's time that could be put to better use if our system was revamped somehow.

I see your point, OP. My (tween) kids are straight-A and athletic and we try to help them be well-rounded. However; my kids are not in your circle, so not sure what people like me would do for an alternative when it comes time for college.

For my DH and myself, the advanced degree helped us gain entree into our profession, and provided us with a circle of peers who were interested in some of the stuff we are interested in, and contacts. I'll have to look back on your post, but I think you said you and your circle had graduate degrees. I wonder how that plays into your connection with each other.

I was living in a very wealthy part of LA and in a circle maybe not quite like yours but with some similarities. One problem is the lack of work ethic. Some (elementary/middle school) parents in my circle believed a traditional school could not handle "their child's creativity" and that was the reason their kid was not doing well in school…but it really seemed to me to be that they and their kids were entitled and the kids not doing well due to lack of work ethic and parental failure to institute any sort of boundaries. There are lots of schools that feed into this view and will take those snowflakes for a high price.

I can't figure out what kind of colleges you people went to, but I went to a selective liberal arts college where people didn't spend most of their time drinking and partying and sleeping around--they spent it in class or studying, or in extracurriculars in their areas of interest. I wasn't inculcated with my professor's views (the hell?), but I did get a lot of feedback and instruction that allowed me to significantly advance my understanding of a wide range of topics (science, math, economics, literature, history, art, foreign language, and social science) and further develop my raw talents in critical thinking, debate, and writing to a sophisticated level. Of course, at a residential college, I also got to practice living independently and making good choices about how to spend my time and how to live my life in a relatively sheltered environment, so that when I graduated at 21 I was fully prepared to live on my own and begin a career.

I don't know a lot of 18-year-olds with the discipline to educate themselves across the range of areas that are important for understanding of the world. You may be able to code well or have an entrepreneurial idea and make a bunch of money, but if you don't know much about people, history, or culture then you are a lot less likely to make great contributions to the world. And I don't think most 18-year-olds have the perspective or skills to really run a fully functioning organization--I have a master's in finance, and you're not going to pick that stuff up on the fly. If your parents can afford for you to learn all this on your own, on the job, great, but I think that's a pretty small percentage of the population and I'm not particularly worried that my kids are going to be left behind. Someone has to actually run the companies that these geniuses are going to be starting.

[Anonymous]

We had this conversation about unconventional education several years back. We realized that our kids weren't going to get any financial aid and that many schools cost 60,000 per year. I said to my husband: for 720,000 dollars (we have three kids), we could probably hand-pick a number of really great individuals -- seven or eight -- and have them come to our house and live here for four years and teach our kids only full-time. It actually seemed like a much better use of our resources than writing big checks to a university which would probably squander most of it in overhead and not really benefit our kids in any appreciable way. THese seven individuals could travel with our students, take them places, show them things. The only thing we couldn't figure out was how they would ever get credit for this unusual education from an employer, and how we would handle lab sciences. But when you think about the outrageous sums of money being demanded for just a BA, it does cause you to begin to think about out of the box solutions.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

If you are truly wealthy, you can afford an unconventional path. Nothing new about that. The rest of us take much bigger risks if we push such options.

This. It's been true for centuries.

+1 The very wealthy at college are having a different experience than the middle class.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:You assume going to college is all about passing along certain information. A liberal arts education emphasized skills like creativity and critical thinking, necessary in any field and walk of life.

NP here. This his point is important, yet unfortunately and in st the same time, liberal arts degrees are being pushed to the side more and more. I find this to be an unfortunate trend.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We had this conversation about unconventional education several years back. We realized that our kids weren't going to get any financial aid and that many schools cost 60,000 per year. I said to my husband: for 720,000 dollars (we have three kids), we could probably hand-pick a number of really great individuals -- seven or eight -- and have them come to our house and live here for four years and teach our kids only full-time. It actually seemed like a much better use of our resources than writing big checks to a university which would probably squander most of it in overhead and not really benefit our kids in any appreciable way. THese seven individuals could travel with our students, take them places, show them things. The only thing we couldn't figure out was how they would ever get credit for this unusual education from an employer, and how we would handle lab sciences. But when you think about the outrageous sums of money being demanded for just a BA, it does cause you to begin to think about out of the box solutions.

I'm not sure what kind of really great individuals you think will work for $25,000 per year, but I doubt your kids would get much out of this education.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:NP here. This isn't the tightest response because I'm being interrupted left and right, lol, but it's interesting so I'm going to attempt getting out a response.

I started out very poor and worked my way into a HYP grad school education, and my DH also has advanced degrees.

College for pure liberal arts at this point baffles me, but I'm not sure what the alternative is. Seems like we take a bunch of our potentially most productive part of the society and waste them. We put them together to drink/sleep around, and get inculcated with the professors' views, which due to tenure are often way off-base because they are not subject to market forces.

Then they often go to jobs that have nothing to do with their education; that they could have done from high school. Sure, this is all fun for the individual but on a mass scale this seems like a tremendous waste of parental resources, and with respect to the young person's time --I wouldn't call it exactly wasted--but it's time that could be put to better use if our system was revamped somehow.

I see your point, OP. My (tween) kids are straight-A and athletic and we try to help them be well-rounded. However; my kids are not in your circle, so not sure what people like me would do for an alternative when it comes time for college.

For my DH and myself, the advanced degree helped us gain entree into our profession, and provided us with a circle of peers who were interested in some of the stuff we are interested in, and contacts. I'll have to look back on your post, but I think you said you and your circle had graduate degrees. I wonder how that plays into your connection with each other.

I was living in a very wealthy part of LA and in a circle maybe not quite like yours but with some similarities. One problem is the lack of work ethic. Some (elementary/middle school) parents in my circle believed a traditional school could not handle "their child's creativity" and that was the reason their kid was not doing well in school…but it really seemed to me to be that they and their kids were entitled and the kids not doing well due to lack of work ethic and parental failure to institute any sort of boundaries. There are lots of schools that feed into this view and will take those snowflakes for a high price.

I can't figure out what kind of colleges you people went to, but I went to a selective liberal arts college where people didn't spend most of their time drinking and partying and sleeping around--they spent it in class or studying, or in extracurriculars in their areas of interest. I wasn't inculcated with my professor's views (the hell?), but I did get a lot of feedback and instruction that allowed me to significantly advance my understanding of a wide range of topics (science, math, economics, literature, history, art, foreign language, and social science) and further develop my raw talents in critical thinking, debate, and writing to a sophisticated level. Of course, at a residential college, I also got to practice living independently and making good choices about how to spend my time and how to live my life in a relatively sheltered environment, so that when I graduated at 21 I was fully prepared to live on my own and begin a career.

I don't know a lot of 18-year-olds with the discipline to educate themselves across the range of areas that are important for understanding of the world. You may be able to code well or have an entrepreneurial idea and make a bunch of money, but if you don't know much about people, history, or culture then you are a lot less likely to make great contributions to the world. And I don't think most 18-year-olds have the perspective or skills to really run a fully functioning organization--I have a master's in finance, and you're not going to pick that stuff up on the fly. If your parents can afford for you to learn all this on your own, on the job, great, but I think that's a pretty small percentage of the population and I'm not particularly worried that my kids are going to be left behind. Someone has to actually run the companies that these geniuses are going to be starting.

Well said.

[Anonymous]

Very interesting thread. OP, I'm curious as to what you think about middle or slightly lower middle class parents who encourage their children to take up a trade, join a labor union, etc.