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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote]It takes a lot of discipline to succeed in college. 12 months of taking it easy at a votunteer service job would not work for my kid ![/quote]
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Yup, heaven forbid they spend a year learning to live without running water, taking bucket showers and sleeping under a mosquito net, planting crops or fixing up a school, eating rice and beans for dinner,[/b] just "taking it easy" while their peers head off to college and join a fraternity and drink themselves into oblivion.  Not to mention that it will be a whole extra year before they can get to Wall Street and start earning a six-figure salary.  Glad I don't have a slacker who would waste a year that way.[/quote]

But when kids do that, they know they have a warm bed waiting for them back home.  They know they're parents will pay for a flight back home if something happens.  They know they are supported.

I actually think that in some ways it gives kids a false sense of what it really is like for people who live in those areas of the world where they have no running water, and it's not just a year of roughing it; it's their lives.

It's a bizarre form of poverty tourism.  There's also been a number of studies that have shown that some of those programs (where wealthy kids spend a year building things for free in poor areas of the world) actually make things worse because it would be far better to employ people living in those areas (who need employment) to do those jobs.

When I was in college, we had a couple of volunteer groups wherein kids would do those kinds of things over their summer breaks.  They saw it as a kind of vacation.  None of them ever came back (in my view) with a deeper understanding of poverty.   If anything, they came back with a kind of self-righteous view of themselves.  It was bizarre.
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+1 it's for rich kids. For MC kids the years go by fast. Their classmat s of  year 20xx are finished freshmen year and all that entails and are self confident sophomores. If they wait another semester they are even further behind. And in our case if the money runs out ...[/quote]

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