Do parents misunderstand what a liberal-arts education is?
I think a lot of them are buying the brand. They’re coming to highly selective schools because, they say, “I know that if my kid’s got that brand, that they’re going to be set for life.” If parents do not put all that pressure on their kids to say, “You have to have a job at graduation,” that can be really helpful to the students. The job search is often the first time that these successful students have been rejected [from] anything at all. But unemployment at graduation says nothing at all about your future prospects–I mean, zero. In the book, for example, “KC” started off with a really good job at NASA but left because of bad bosses and had a period of unemployment. Now she’s the CFO of the Andy Warhol foundation. But when she was in that kind of depressive mode, she didn’t know when she was going to get out of it. The idea that careers are just something you think about in your senior year is missing the boat because, frankly, you’re going to think about it until you’re fifty. You
