The Worst Advice Parents Can Give First-Year Students

Nearly 50 years ago, my parents dropped me off for my freshman year of college, beginning my life in the world of higher education. Over the decades, I’ve been an undergraduate, a graduate student, a professor, an administrator, and a parent of three college students.

I’ve seen students struggle and thrive. I’ve watched young men and women blossom into world-class scholars and take their education in directions I never could have anticipated. It all begins with that first drop-off, which is happening on campuses across the country over the next several days. And before the last goodbye, many parents will take their son or daughter aside for some parting advice.

Usually, it will be wrong.

When it comes to their children, parents are innately conservative. They want them to be successful and to lead fulfilled and happy lives. To many parents, that means counseling them to pursue what seem like paths to guaranteed success. But this sort of parental conservatism is a mistake that will lead students to get the least out of their expensive college experience.

First, parents often think in too short of a timeframe, focusing on the first job out of school and its starting salary. But students entering college today will likely work until they are about 70 years old, and probably live beyond 90—retiring around 2075 and perhaps living to see the next century.

[ Faith Hill: The new age of endless parenting ]

If you know what the best, most rewarding, and most fulfilling careers will be over that time span, you have extraordinary clairvoyant powers. Remember that scene in the 1967 film The Graduate ? At a cocktail party thrown by his parents, Benjamin, the recent college graduate of the title, is taken aside by a family friend who tells him that the future is “plastics.” And in 1967, that must have seemed like sensible advice, even if “microchips,” “computers,” or even “sneakers” would have been much wiser.

Similarly, for the past decade or more, well-intentioned parents have been pushing their children to learn how to code. As AI now threatens to make coding by humans nearly obsolete, that no longer looks like a surefire strategy for success.

Parents have to remember that their children will have long, long working lives. Pushing a student into one of today’s hot careers is unlikely to produce a lifetime of self-realization and happiness.

And when parents focus on narrow careerism instead of seeking to raise inquisitive and ethical children, they not only risk preparing kids for the jobs of yesterday; they also tend to create bored and unfulfilled careerists.

We all know and admire curious people who are always changing and growing. That sort of constant reinvention is as American as apple pie—or Benjamin Franklin.

Franklin began his working life as a printer’s apprentice and went on to be a journalist and best-selling author and scientist. He discovered the conservation of electricity and invented a lightning rod, cleaner-burning stoves, and bifocals. He created America’s first lending library, first hospital, and first home-insurance company. He started a volunteer fire-fighting company, and the university that employs me. And he served as a politician and diplomat, negotiating an end to the American Revolution.

Material success was not Franklin’s life goal. For instance, he refused to patent any of his inventions. He believed the world would benefit most if people had the unfettered opportunity to improve them, just as he had improved the inventions of others. He was, instead, driven by his endless curiosity, and his dedication to improving the world. If he succeeded on those terms, he believed, it would be fulfilling enough—and material success would follow.

When parents send their children off to college, they need to encourage them not to focus on narrow careers but to acquire the sort of all-purpose intellectual skills that allowed Franklin to thrive: the ability to ask deep questions and wrestle with big issues like human equality, the limits of individual freedom, and justice. Students need to learn how to reason critically; to distinguish bad, baseless ideas from deep and eternal insights; to justify their views; and to express those views lucidly enough for others to grasp. These skills have proved essential for thousands of years and will never become obsolete.

Most universities are no longer set up to impart such skills, having deemphasized their core curricula in favor of offering more and more specialized majors and courses. Grade inflation has made it harder for students to distinguish themselves through academic excellence, prompting them to set themselves apart through superficial participation in numerous extracurricular activities. Moreover, the high cost of tuition has created massive incentives for students, parents, and the larger society to adopt a narrow investment approach to higher education, looking for tangible returns denoted in postgraduate salaries.

[ Niall Ferguson and Jacob Howland: What the freshman class needs to read ]

Despite this, college students should take a wide range of courses and resist being pushed into majoring in business, economics, or computer science by default. Who knows what transformative insights and ideas they might gain from courses in art history, or the great American plays, or ancient political philosophy, or Russian novels? Serendipity is what makes college a truly educational experience, not just career training.

The college years are the best time to take intellectual and experiential risks. It is okay—even good—if some of the choices students make don’t work out. As one of the great psychiatrists at the National Institute of Mental Health once told me: “Growing up is about taking risks, having near misses, making mistakes, and learning from them. Children cannot mature unless they confront and work through serious challenges.”

Today’s college students will have plenty of time to settle into jobs. Before that, they should stretch themselves and discover their limits. As one educational researcher who has studied what makes people innovative argues, the keys are “asking naive questions, taking risks, and exploring the unknown, as well as admitting and learning from failures.” Thus, trying a new course or topic is excellent training for being innovative—another quality that will be in high demand forever.

So as you drop off your child this month, remember that they will have ample time to figure out their career. Before that, encourage them to take risks, and to stretch their brains and themselves. Only by doing that will they begin to discover what will give their life meaning and worth over the next 70 years.