Let’s get to the facts: I’m not paying for my education.
Several years ago, my grandparents started a trust fund to cover my college education and living expenses so that I would never have to worry about not being able to pay for school. At the start of every term, I call my parents and tell them how much money I think I’ll need to pay for rent, tuition and my uncontrollable hummus addiction and, within a few days, that much money magically appears in my bank account.
Sure, it sounds nice, but my life is not without hardship – for example, there wasn’t enough room in my apartment for the tanning bed I got on Amazon.com, so I still have to walk to the salon like everyone else.
So yes, I am, in one sense or another, spoiled. I’m going to come out of college with no debt to speak of and I’ve never had to live off of Top Ramen for weeks at a time until my next paycheck came in (although to be honest, I really couldn’t buy very much Ramen with the paychecks I get here at the Emerald). I don’t take any of this for granted, of course, and I am living proof that an abundance of money doesn’t make a person wise, cultured, or even tolerable. If you still think I’m coasting through life on the good graces of my family, though, consider this.
If I were in danger of failing a class or in some trouble with the administration, I might think calling my parents would be an option. However, if I were to do so, and ask them to badger a professor on my behalf, I can guarantee you they’d both take a few days off work and drive down to Eugene just to laugh in my face and tell me “no.” This is because, while my parents are willing to fund my escapades in higher education, they’ve always made it clear to me that said escapades are mine and mine alone, and I’ve got to deal with the choices I make.
A mother of a college freshman in California, on the other hand, recently traveled to Cal Poly on her own to register her son for classes, buy his textbooks and meet with his academic adviser. In Texas, one girl’s mother lobbied university housing officials to change her daughter’s roommate, chose her classes and maintained a constant e-mail dialogue with her professors. And all across the country, colleges have begun to create entire administrative departments devoted simply to dealing with mothers and fathers who are unable to let go of their offspring. They call them “helicopter parents” for their tendency to hover around their children and, if current trends continue, college campuses everywhere will soon turn into a veritable “Apocalypse Now” of concerned guardians.
It’s sometimes embarrassing being a member of the “Millennial” generation (people born between 1982 and 1995), because we seem to have gained a reputation for being whiny, immature, and self-serving – perhaps rightfully so. Parents who 20 years ago were hanging yellow “Baby On Board” signs in their Volvos to announce to the world they had successfully reproduced are now taking a greater interest in college than their children are. While some parents claim they’re merely protecting the money they invested in their children’s education, the National Survey of Student Engagement found last year that the higher the level of parental involvement, the lower the student’s grades turned out to be.
What these parents don’t understand is that their investment is only worthwhile if their child knows he or she has to fend for his or herself. The most important thing college offers is independence – for the first time, many students have the opportunity to decide for themselves between studying and beer, and while beer usually wins, sooner or later the student in question will pick beer one too many times and learn a valuable lesson, all on his own. If parents are constantly involved – meddling, visiting, parenting – then the whole independence aspect of college is lost, and it’s just a bunch of classes leading up to a cap and gown and a cheaply printed piece of paper.
This is why your counselors always told you it didn’t really matter what you majored in, so long as you just went to college. What the experience primarily teaches you is how to manage time and take care of yourself; the educational aspect of it comes second. For example, our own Phil Knight majored in journalism – funny, I know, that a journalism major could find some measure of success or happiness in life – and went on to start a business, rather than work for a newspaper. I’ll bet you when he was in college, his mother wasn’t calling him every 15 minutes to inquire after his experiments with making shoes in a waffle iron.
So take it from me, the one with the trust fund: It’s fine to have your parents in your life. But what’s most important is that you’re the one living that life, not them. Because at some point, you’ll enter the “real world,” and it’s a lot easier to live there if you’ve had a little practice in college.
Of course, Hewlett-Packard recently reported that an increasing number of parents have started calling the company to negotiate their children’s pay, so maybe you can just ride the gravy train until they die.
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