Help Your Child Get the Most
from a College Education
One of our primary goals at Crown Financial Ministries is to equip parents to help their children make sound educational choices that will lead to good career decisions. With education costs soaring, these choices can have major financial implications. Consider the following facts.
• The average annual cost of college for room, board, tuition, and fees at a four-year university is $9,246 for public schools and $24,748 for private schools.
• The average college student changes his or her academic major 2.33 times.
• 50% of college students require six years or more to complete a degree.
• An extra year in college for a non-working student has an effective cost of $50,000 (income lost plus college expense).
Judging by these statistics, you can see that your children's educational choices and degree of motivation have large financial implications. In light of these costs, here are three questions you may want to consider:
- Have you accurately counted the cost of advanced education?
- Do you know your child's interests, their strengths and weaknesses, their skills and abilities, and their values, and are they being used as a basis for choosing further education?
- Are you sure college is the best direction for your children?
Answering these questions will help you be a good steward of their talents and your money. But the consequences of wrong choices go beyond money. For your children, this could mean being in a job they dread every day. If your children find a job they love, they'll have a privilege many Americans don't enjoy. In fact, the Career Direct assessment was created because Larry Burkett encountered so many people who were miserable in their jobs. Now, after providing assessments to more than 66,000 adults and 54,000 youth, we'd like to share some of what we've learned.
1. Most people don't know the process of making good career decisions. It's rare to find someone who made a career decision based on his/her personal pattern of how God made them. Most decisions were made by default (took what was available), or based on very short-sighted rewards. Given the model that the current adult generation followed, is it any wonder that many young people are stumbling down a path of career chaos?
2. Students with realistic goals are motivated. If you've read much about the state of education lately, you know that SAT scores have been declining for a number of years. These results indicate a decline in learning at the very time the world is being propelled into an age of information and technology.
One way of motivating young people is to get them involved in planning their vocational future. Dr. Cliff Schimmels, Christian educator and frequent guest on "Focus on the Family," points out in his book —Parents' Most-Asked Questions About Kids and Schools that "motivation is the ability of the learner to see the applied value of the lesson to be learned."
If you stop and think about it, we all know this to be true. Most of us find it easy to do some very "boring" tasks when we see them as stepping stones to reach our goals.
3. Knowing their unique potential can motivate your children. Jesus was a master at giving people a vision of who they could become. That same concept is the most powerful motivator you can use to encourage your children toward their education and future career.
But to be credible, occupational encouragement should be based on talents and interests. In other words, go with the grain of God's design for each individual, not against it. Choosing a career direction can be a challenge for young people. Your encouragement will be a key to their success or failure. Research by Crown Financial Ministries indicates that parents are a major source of advice regarding career direction.
How will you encourage them? What process will you use? Will the bottom line be based on how much they can earn in a certain field or the career you wished you could have entered? Or will the bottom line be based on the unique talents God has given to your child? If you don't know your child's talents, consider some type of assessment such as Crown's "Career Direct" package. The price of the Career Direct® Online assessment is $80.00. If you would like more information or need CD-ROM or paper versions, call Crown Financial Ministries at (800) 722-1976.
Learning how God has equipped him or her to work can help your child become a much more motivated student. It can save thousands of dollars of wasted investment in the wrong education, and ultimately, it will determine your child's witness in the workplace. 
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