ShareThisDEAR DR. FOURNIER: Our college-freshman daughter came home for the holidays, and while she attends where she's always wanted to go to, where her father and I attended, she is miserable. Before she returned for this semester, she said to us, "Don't worry. I'll stick it out." She convinced her best friend to go there, too. We are not wealthy people, even though we have a college fund for her education. Even worse, greedy leaders of corporations and Wall Street have depleted part of our personal savings that contribute to her allowance at college. To make matters worse, she doesn't even know what she wants to major in. She's 20 years old and believes these should be her decisions. Does it make sense for her to stick it out?
ASSESSEMENT: We live in a country that has thrived on past greatness for several decades and has even passed this now-extinguished torch on to your daughter's generation. This country's early-end baby-boomer leadership has foolishly thought and taught that hard work is all that is needed.
Sadly, the latter-end baby-boomer leaders have developed and passed on the mantra to our children that more is better, and they have attached the horrific idea that it's OK for our children to get more by any means necessary. This is evident from the current economic crisis.
My son said to me recently that he thought historians would one day write that the baby boomers were the worst generation of this country because of the avarice and greed the generation has espoused, regardless of the collateral damage it has caused to so many people.
Simply put, the values system in this country stinks. Just as rotten is the idea in your daughter's generation that they are, at 20 or even 21, old enough to know what is best and to make decisions with other people's money.
They are not.
WHAT TO DO: This is not the time for your child to be toughing it out at a college she doesn't like because of some notion of obligation to a friend, and more important, with no vision of the future to guide her in her studies and playing Russian roulette with your money.
When I counsel students for career pathing, they must start by learning about demographic visioning, which reveals how the world is changing and what it will look like in 2020, 2030 and beyond. I make sure they see how new technologies have already eradicated even high-paying careers. For example, a technology company recently terminated hundreds of people whose job it was to search the Internet for news content. A software program replaced them.
It is always frustrating to me that most of the children who come to me for career pathing have set their sights on jobs that won't even be around by the time they graduate.
Until a child wakes up to career pathing with demographic visioning, going to college is a useless act.
And if your daughter continues down this road, you might as well call her college fund her psychiatric fund, which she will need when she graduates with a useless degree and no one to hire her.
(Write Dr. Yvonne Fournier, Fournier Learning Strategies Inc., 5900 Poplar, Memphis, Tenn. 38119. E-mail her at drfournier(at)hfhw.net.)
HASSLE-FREE HOMEWORK
