17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Parent's View of Higher Education, October 2, 2000
Success Without College explodes many of the myths about college that abound in upscale suburban neighborhoods where parents expect all their children to go to the Ivy League and thrive. It helps you determine if your child is ready for college, or for a different kind of experience as early as age 15. More importantly, by improving the perspectives of parents, this book will change and reduce unrealistic pressures on youngsters that can make the teenage years difficult. In the process, parents can take satisfaction in helping launch their children onto a more productive path.
Despite the fact that U.S. high schools seem to create poorly educated students, a higher percentage of people leave those high schools to attend college than in any other country in the world. College is expensive, and this is a great drain on families and students. Yet, most of those who go off to attend college will not graduate in 4 years. Many will never graduate, and will receive little of value to sustain them as people and economically. Frequent binge drinking seems to be the main experience that people get at college these days.
A great strength of this book is that it is based in part on personal experience. The author's own son went to college for two years and did poorly. He then went out to work, and began learning how he needed to proceed with his life in the process. For many young people, college right after high school is too soon. You have to be both academically and emotionally mature. More people are the former than the latter. The book has a wonderful quiz that you can use to assess the emotional maturity of your youngster. I thought the quiz was good because it picked up on issues that two of my children had (who actually did complete college in 4 years), which I should have paid more attention to at the time. Perhaps each of them would have gotten more out of college if they had worked or done volunteer work for a year or two first.
The book also addresses what to do with the child who is having trouble with high school. You will also find out about a variety of resources for dealing with emotional problems, learning disorders, and career planning. There are counselors who can help and programs that you can pursue. In many cases these cost money. In other cases (like the Army), they just take investigation.
Given that more young people will not graduate from college than will, you would think that there would be more books about succeeding for those who do not go to college than those who do. It's just the opposite. Whether or not you think your children will and should go to college right away, I recommend you read this book. You may get some good ideas that may change your mind, and make your child's life much better!
If you are like me, you have not done enough thinking about how to prepare your child for life, as well as education. This book is a superb resource to do just that.
My main quibble about the book is that it relies on a few counterexamples to explain how well those without college educations can do. I would have liked to have seen a more systematic discussion about how those who go without college can always outperform the clueless liberal arts major. That would have given the book the necessary legitimacy to make parents feel terrific about exploring the noncollege options.
After you have finished this book, I suggest that you discuss what you learned from it with another parent to help pass along the message. If your child is willing to read, you can have a much better discussion about what to do next if both of you read this book first.
After you have had those discussions and taken appropriate actions, I also suggest that you consider where else you may have misconceptions about being a parent. What should your children be doing to prepare to be effective volunteers? What should they be doing to prepare to become lifelong learners after they leave school? What values will serve them the best? How can they learn to be good spouses and parents? You may be able to make improvements in these areas as well, based on your own thinking and research. Good luck!
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25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Enter College with a Sober Mind, January 15, 2002
This review is from: Success Without College: Why Your Child May Not Have to Go to College Right Now--and May Not Have to Go At All (Paperback)
Linda Lee's Success Without College is a sobering refutation of the assumption that high school graduates should march straight to the university. Starting with her son's disastrous jaunt into an expensive college, Lee does some soul-searching and concludes that in too many cases college is wasted on people who are not poised to benifit from it. She cites many reasons for not going to college. Among them a lack of maturity, the low rate of college graduation, the culture of hedonism, slackers, and ant-intellectualism, the binge drinking at college campuses, the many students who go for lack of any other alternatives, the outrageous college costs, the "dumbing down" of too many colleges. Lee suggests that young high school graduates might be better served if they take time off and do "character-building" activities such as volunteer work on an Indian reservation, an orphanage, or some such place. Only after someone has matured and is hungry for college learning, Lee argues, should that person go to college. Finally, she points out that many successful people never went to college and that many high-paying jobs only require, at the most, a certificate or a two-year community college degree.
There is much to admire in Lee's critique of Americans' blind march to college. However, some of her arguments seem less than convincing. First, her idea that high school graduates should take time off may result in protracted drifting. These young people, more than ever, may need structure and guidance found in some college environments. Second, the "character-building" activities Lee discusses require a certain emotional maturity, the very thing these young people lack, which is why they're not ready for college in the first place. I'm not sure very many people have the tools to work at an orphanage or a reservation right out of high school. Third, only a small percentage of people have the brilliance to be computer wizards and entrepeneurs. Therefore, I'm not sure these glorious careers can be obtained by a significant portion of the population. Fourth, when Lee wrote this book the economy was booming. She cited Cisco hiring people with two-year certificates at 60 and 70K a year. Since the book's publishing, the stock market has become sluggish and Cisco is probably not hiring as robustly as it did when Lee was writing. Finally, I'm not sure Lee's experience with her son, who by all accounts was a spoiled rich baby, makes sufficient basis for generalizing about the virtues of going to college. Whatever refutations Lee makes about going to college, the fact remains that in this country there is a huge stigma attached to those who don't have a college degree and all too few of us can, like John Cheever or Bill Gates, transcend that stigma.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A New Perspective on an Important Issue, May 8, 2000
By A Customer
I am so glad this book came out. From the day I set forth in college, I knew I was not college material. Based on circumstances, I was led to feel inferior if I had not gotten a degree. We have treated college degrees as status symbols when for the most part, we have more to learn about life than how to study for a test in college. The stories the author has about famous people who did not go to college and succeeded anyway made me realize that we all have opportunities to change our destinies. Not having a formal college education would be another excuse for not pursuing a dream.
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