Wow, you really nailed some key points! I was nodding my head repeatedly as I read your comment :). My kids are 8 and 6, and feel like my wife and I need to be thinking about it now so that we are better prepared for the inevitable choices we will have to make as a family. I don't think we have to obsess over it, or figure it all out any time soon, but just keep it a topic of conversation. She is a high school guidance counselor, so we see it from two angles. I think our focus right now is to seek out and stay open to alternatives. As much as I am lover of the liberal arts, I almost hope my kids will want to go into a science field because I have a feeling that's where we will see the bigger changes in education. College was originally more about liberal arts, and so I can see that side staying relatively the same into the future. But go to college to learn how to code? Um, no. (Not that that's what I mean when I say sciences).

I have heard many stories of people with less education doing fine in life. Its col that he now still has a desire to go back though. I think sometimes people take that positive life experience without higher education, and use it to argue that higher ed isn't important. You both seem to share my attitude -- definitely issues that need to be addressed, but still quite valuable, just maybe not for the reasons most people think.

I would be interested to hear your husbands response to some interview questions I was asking a little while back. I did some research by interviewing people in hiring positions, and based on the NACE survey that comes out alomst every year that says employers want new hires with better communication skills, I would ask the subjects if the agreed, and then to be more specific about what exactly they mean by communication skill (that is actually an absurdly abstract concept). This usually required getting them to share a real example. Every person I interviewed ended up describing scenarios where the central issue was empathy. One person said he hired a newly graduate network engineer from a very reputable college who threw tantrums in the office when people would show him how to do things like rent a car online. Long story short, I now include multiple approaches to learning about empathy in all of my classes.

I agree college is more about things like connections, along with what I wrote about simply being more sophisticated. This is especially true of schools like Penn State, where you can end being interviewed by an alum at just about any job anywhere in the country! They are like a virus :).

Your last comment is really my motivation for writing about this topic. I had been thinkign for a while about what I ought to be writing about based on my experience. The obvious answer is the subject I teach, and I have written about communication a bit, but in some ways I really don't want to spend more time with those topics. Then it hit me that a different angle would how I could offer my experience and insight to families, and that was a kind of big light bulb.

Well, thanks for the detailed and thought-full comment. I hope you will look out for future posts on the topic. With kids in the same age range it would be great to keep in touch as they grow and we get closer to graduation. Cheers!

Oh, are you still in BC? I lived in Seattle for 6 years, and spent quite a bit of time traveling around Vancouver, and through BC and Yukon to get to Alaska. My heart is partially still in that region.