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    College is Not Mandatory: A Parent’s Guide to Navigating the Options Available to Our Kids After High School
    College is Not Mandatory: A Parent’s Guide to Navigating the Options Available to Our Kids After High School
    College is Not Mandatory: A Parent’s Guide to Navigating the Options Available to Our Kids After High School
    Ebook154 pages1 hour

    College is Not Mandatory: A Parent’s Guide to Navigating the Options Available to Our Kids After High School

    By Stephanie R. Haynes

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Discover Tools for Talking to Your Teen About Their Future (No Yelling Required!)

     

    I know parents like you want to help your team feel confident about their plans after high school but you're not sure how to help your teen determine a direction that reflects their values, passions, and interests.

     

    Your teen dodges your questions about their future plans. You then resort to lectures and arguments, which fuels your student's anxiety over making a decision and then you're both fed up and exhausted by the entire process. 

     

    You and your team shouldn't fight over what happens after high school graduation. As a parent, you shouldn't struggle to guide your student through the available options. Your student shouldn't feel overwhelming pressure to make the perfect decision. 

     

    This should be an exciting time of exploring possibilities for the future. That's exactly why I wrote College is Not Mandatory, A Parent's Guide to Navigating the Options Available to Our Kids After High School. 

     

    This book will give you 3 things: 

    • Gain an understanding of how our culture came to put such an emphasis on sending every student to college dash even if it's not the best fit. 
    • Parent-focused insight into the benefits and drawbacks of the five major pathways available to high school students after graduation: community colleges, trade schools and apprentice programs, the military, gap seasons, and four-year colleges (including collegiate athletics).
    • Healthy strategies and specific open-ended questions to use in conversations with your teen about their future.

     

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRelevant Pages Press
    Release dateMay 3, 2021
    ISBN9781947303126
    College is Not Mandatory: A Parent’s Guide to Navigating the Options Available to Our Kids After High School

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      Book preview

      College is Not Mandatory - Stephanie R. Haynes

      This guide is dedicated to all the parents out there who want the best for their high school students and are willing to help them explore all their options.

      Your efforts now are enabling the next generation to soar.

      Acknowledgements

      This book would not be possible without the influence, advice, and experience of so many others.

      Thank you, first, to my husband and children who tolerated my constant discussions and questioning while I worked through the creation of this book. Your willingness to always support me fills my heart and gives me the confidence to reach for higher stars.

      This book would not have come to life without the discussions, research, and dreaming with my friend and partner in parenting Jennifer Tubbiolo. Thank you for always pushing me out of my comfort zone.

      To all who allowed me to interview them in order to build my knowledge about each of the options available to students after high school, thank you. Your efforts at producing multiple pathways to success for today's high school students is exemplary.

      To those parents and students who completed the surveys I sent out for the case studies, thank you for your honesty. The readers of this book are blessed by your willingness to share your stories.

      Introduction

      The idea for this book was born from the hundreds of conversations I’ve had with parents and students about developing a successful career pathway after high school. As an educator and professional Education Coach and Consultant, I’ve had many opportunities to hear and observe, first-hand, the struggles of parents and teens as they navigate the options available to them after high school. So many teenagers are overwhelmed by the magnitude of the decisions in front of them that they often shut down completely or, worse, simply follow what all their friends are doing. So many parents have stories of doing what they thought they were supposed to do in their own post-high school years only to wake up in the future with regret over their choices. These regrets now influence whether they feel capable of helping their teenagers make their own decisions.

      Why We Need This Book

      High school counselors are fantastic at their jobs but are often overworked by the number of students on their caseloads. Individual Graduation Plan meetings [1] are often 20-30 minutes or less with little real reflection time or guidance to help students decide what to do after high school. Student’s approach to choosing their academic coursework has become focused on developing their competitiveness for collegiate acceptance or simply graduating high school rather than exploring potential career pathways. There are plenty of businesses focused on helping students plan and pay for college, but little amplification is given to choices aside from the 4-year college, though many opportunities exist.

      As a high school teacher, I have worked with thousands of students who had no idea how to figure out what to do with their lives after high school. As an Education Coach and Consultant, I have seen a significant rise in the number of teenage clients (high school through college age) who are searching for someone to help them figure their life out. All of these teenagers want to be successful and happy in life but have not had the time, the opportunity, or the training to explore their options, reflect on their values, identify their passions, and understand how to process all the options in front of them. They struggle with fear of missing out or messing up or not measuring up to the high expectations they’ve placed on themselves and so they become stuck.

      Parents are becoming increasingly aware there are multiple options for their teenagers after high school, but don’t know how to identify them or how to help their teen understand the benefits of each option available to them after high school. Additionally, after decades of societal pressures touting 4-year college degrees as the best predictor for future success, parents struggle with the FOMO mentality: will their teen miss out on something if they don’t go to a 4-year college right after high school?

      As I’ve worked with my students and teenage clients (and their parents) over the years I have come to develop a process:

      Help them identify their values and passion points.

      Guide them into a growth mindset about their future and the development of meaningful goals.

      Work with them to identify all their potential career pathways and the options available to them.

      Teach them how to research each option effectively and establish a post-high school pathway to personal success.

      What I have come to realize is there are many more teens who need this kind of process than I can help individually, and so the idea for this book came to life.

      How to Use This Book

      This book is not intended to promote any pathway as better than another. It is meant to provide the opportunity to explore the many options available to teenagers in a way that allows them to process and reflect on each option’s benefits and drawbacks for themselves. I hope that because of working through this book, parents will be able to guide their teenagers in meaningful discussions that help them reflect on the relevance of each option to their values and goals in life.

      Each chapter provides a general overview of each of five major options available to students after high school: Community Colleges, Trade Schools and Apprenticeship Programs, The Military, Gap Seasons, and 4-Year Colleges (including collegiate athletics). Each chapter has several case studies of student experience so teens might see themselves in that option, as well as parent interviews of what it was like from their perspective to help their teenager make the decision they did. Also included is a special Next Steps Guide that includes specific reflective questions and research options for parents to use in developing with their teen the best possible pathway to a meaningful future.

      A Note Parent to Parent

      As one parent to another , I know how tough it is to help your teen when they are struggling. We all want to have the answer, we all want to help them make their decision. Often, they rely on our direction, but this is an area we should only serve as a guide, not the director . For our teenagers to truly be successful in life they need to own their own decisions about their future. Our job at this point is to help them identify their options (including their financial responsibilities within each option), act as a sounding board as they work out their thoughts, and support them as they make the decision they see as best for themselves, whether or not we agree with their choice. This is tough to do, I know, but it is essential for their growth and development into adulthood. We all want our teenagers to develop into responsible adults; helping them identify this next stage of their lives and allowing them to claim the rewards and experience the consequences is a great way to do this.

      As parents, we may also need to do some work here. We need to identify what we’re willing to accept and what we are willing to provide and make those expectations clear to our teenagers. For example, if we are willing to pay for college, trade school, or a gap season, what requirements, expectations, and deadlines are on that financial gift? Will we tolerate a teen living at home indefinitely? How long will we allow a high school graduate to wander with no plan? What are the consequences of not making a choice or even putting in the time to research options?

      It is human nature to follow the path of least resistance. As parents we can help set up guardrails and guide our teenagers into a future that is successful for them, allowing them to make their own choices while setting up boundaries around our involvement. The result can be a plan teens are academically prepared for, emotionally prepared for, and financially prepared to step into after graduation.

      May your experience using this book be blessed and fruitful!

      Part One: The Background

      How the College for All Mentality is Hurting our Kids

      Getting a college degree has been hailed as the most valuable way for today’s high school graduates to be successful in life. That's just not true and that lie is hurting our kids.

      When I graduated high school in 1987 most of my classmates did not plan on attending a 4-year college. There was no pressure to go to college or pursue any other specific option for that matter. The mentality was to choose what worked best for us and our decision was based on what we wanted to do with our lives not what option was better. Our parents were hardly involved, though supportive. We all just seemed to choose the pathway that worked for us, without fear of not being good enough.

      When I

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