I totally agree with your husband. Experience will benefit your son/ daughter in his/her applications, increasing the likelyhood of being accepted in a top program. Moreover, and most importantly, he/she will take a much bigger benefit from the experience (more enriching!)

I am recruiting right now and seeing a lot of resumes from people who went straight to grad school. I am less likely to hire them than the folks of the same age with some experience. The latter comes with more experience and not expecting to be paid more just becuase of their degree.

I think it is very difficult for a 22yo with zero significant work experience to choose a graduate or professional school program based on any real knowledge. On the other hand, working for a few years provides a person with a lot of important information about his/her strengths, passions, and interests.

Anonymous wrote:I did it nights and my government job paid for it.

Most of my friends did this for law school too at the PTO.

I did it nights and my government job paid for it.

I saved myself 100K of law school debt by working a couple of years after undergrad and discovering it was not the career for me. I eventually found a different career path that did interest me and the company I work for paid 100% of my grad school tuition.