Theatre Professor here. Do not let your kids go to school for acting. Oh, he or she is perfect looking and incredibly talented? Great, they don't need a degree in acting. Go to school in New York, Chicago, or LA, and audition between classes in a real degree. Now if they want to study design and tech, go nuts. The amount of work out there is incredible, there is just so much content being consumed.

I kind of regret doing CS instead of music. Maybe if I had done something more art focused the competition wouldn't have been so bad and I'd probably still have a girlfriend, which is more important to me personally than money.

The competition in the arts is incredible. But with your CS degree you could still do music on the side? Whatever you do, you have to live outside of work and put work into your relationships.

Are you talking about education or work? Because I feel the point he’s trying to make is that the educational aspect of acting is negligible. You can just do it.

LOL

Music is way more competitive than CS. You have to be a truly elite musician to make a good living in music, but you can be an average programmer and still make a good living in CS.

Drop the "follow your dreams" rhetoric and have a serious discussion with them about the costs of life and lifestyles.

If they want to live in a 6000 sq ft house in Malibu, then they shouldn't get a degree in 5th Century Aerobics.

Oh, come on. Visigothercize is the hottest thing right now: "burn! and loot! and turn! and burn!".

Seriously, this is good advice. A lot of young-uns have amazingly naive ideas about both how much money they will make but also how much money they get to keep. Like they will hear about making $70K and imagine that somehow that means that they could pay off, say, a $350K debt "in the order of 5 years" (obviously not thinking exactly 5). As opposed to the reality which is that they will be challenged to even service the interest on a $350K debt at that income level after their other expenses.

> Visigothercize is the hottest thing right now: "burn! and loot! and turn! and burn!".

I live in Santa Monica (just a little south of Malibu) and given the number of exercise/barre/yoga/soul cycle/equinox/pilates/crossfit places near me, I have to say: Visigothercize sounds like pure genius and I have no doubt it would IPO within a year or two.

"With ancient and time-tested techniques, we help you get in touch with your inner aggression and fear, channeling them into transformational life experiences."

> If they want to live in a 6000 sq ft house in Malibu, then they shouldn't get a degree in 5th Century Aerobics.

I mean if that's what they want, you might as well tell them to be born into another family because you'll never enough for that as a wage worker regardless of the degree.

Doctors and lawyers could afford a house in Malibu and they are wage workers.

The white collar professionals who can afford these types of areas are usually much more like entrepreneurs than individual practitioners of their craft.

And they have a relevant education.

If by afford you mean "take out a loan that will not be paid off until the property is underwater from global warming", sure.

There is no job that's kept pace with the growth of the economy, let alone the growth of the stock market.

At this point the smartest economic decision anyone can make is to invent cryosleep, build a modest nuclear reactor in their basement and wait for the year 3000 where compound interest would have made them the richest person in the world.

Not all doctors. Not all lawyers. Only the cream of the crop in those respective fields, and only after 20+ years in the field.

Of course, that assumes a normal mortgage, with no “payments go to interest only” or other malarkey.

But to be able to play at the top of the field you'll have to have attended something like Penn Law or Yale Medicine. SUNY Downstate won't cut it.

It's somewhat backwards in medicine. Many top grads stay in academics where the prestige is high but the pay is low. With the exception of elective plastics and dermatology, the highest earning physicians tend to be from middle of the road schools and work in rural areas after graduation (commonly from surgical sub-specialties).

It will, it’s just substantially harder. The ranks of partners at top law firms are much less prestigious than those of top law faculty. Academia cares more about prestige than basically any other sector of the economy. Even in medicine you have many, many tries at associating yourself with a high prestige institution throughout your career. If you studied at a toilet tier Caribbean medical school but ten years later you’re working at the Mayo Clinic no one will care about where you got your degree.

> Drop the "follow your dreams" rhetoric

The most important part of "follow your dreams" is to not let your imagination run away. You can get very close to what you want in life if you take a realistic perspective and understand basic finance.

Or even a modest 2000 sq ft house in the midwest for that matter

I've suggested to my kids that they study two separate areas. I think it makes you stand out in a very good way if, for example, you have a dual computer science / art history degree.

I'm lucky though because my kids are dual US-Canada citizens. They can go to university in Canada and it's very inexpensive.

I asked a mechanical engineer in hiring if a double major on a resume made any difference to him. He said that if the major was not related to engineering, he really didn't care about it. They're paying you to be an engineer, nothing more. I studied Russian and in aerospace engineering in the US, employers absolutely did not care about it. I now resent the time/money spent on that coursework, and wish I had taken stats or CS, maybe dabbling in Russian on my own time.

When you hybridise like that it’s up to you to highlight the benefits. As you point out it’s much easier to do that with closely related fields. You need to have an idea of what the one field brings to the other. If you don’t know and can’t articulate that how is the hiring manager supposed to?

having more than one degree won't help someone get a job, but it will help that person succeed in their career

I'm not an expert, and every kid is different, but when I talked with my oldest (now in her first year of college) these were the things that seemed to help her pick a direction in life:

1) The Ideal Job Venn Diagram by David Hamil (https://breakingnorms.files.wordpress.com/2012/01/ideal-job-...) It's a Venn diagram of "things you're good" at, "things you like doing", and "things that pay well". The main purpose of this is to kick off the question of whether your true passion should really be a hobby instead of a job. Also, if you don't have a "Dream Job" in mind, then start by eliminating jobs that you would hate or be terrible at. Sometimes it's just easier to pick a job that doesn't suck.

2) College is an investment in your future, so you need to understand the full costs (tuition and lost income), as well as the potential returns. What professions are you interested in and what are the average starting salaries for them? At that salary how long would it take to pay off the full cost of going to college?

Another key thing I learned is to start having the conversations well before they are stressed out about picking a college and possible career. At that point it's too emotionally charged to have a rational conversation.

Tell them that they don't have to follow their dreams 100% of the time.

If you don't plan to have a big career besides art, learn something that you can bear with and that has enough demand so you don't have to work 50h a week to pay the rent.

I know many people who simply have a vocation and an avocation. They work 3-4 days a week in an office job to pay the bills and do different stuff with the rest of the week.

Actors, musicians, tattoo artists, DJs, event organizers, illustrators, fashion designers, instagram influencers, photographers and what not.

Sure, it's cooler to do 100% of what you love, but these things really only bring fun if you can really do what you love and not have to bend yourself to apply your loved skill to some dumb projects just to make money.

I know many photographers who have to do one marriage after another, just to pay the bills and they hate it. Illustrators who have to draw corporate crap all the time etc. This sucks the soul out of your passion.

Kids of that age are usually wise enough to understand probability, the relative importance of money, and where their family’s relative position is in the financial sense.

With a solid grip on those parameters, I’d say that most well-adjusted teenagers are reasonably equipped to make that decision on their own. If you feel like they’re still making the “wrong” decision, I’d personally apply anecdotes and statistics to add emphasis to the parameters you feel they’re undervaluing.

Reflecting on my own situation, having recently come through the higher education system miraculously in-tact, the biggest issues I’ve observed are:

(1) most teenagers don’t know the financial situation of their parents (very few did when I was in High School, anyway). Their parents could be bona fide millionaires, but they make choices ignorant of that fact. Or, their parents could be penniless, and they don’t apply to schools that give needs-based full rides, because they think they can’t afford it.

(2) most teenagers do not have an appreciation for how quality of life varies substantially with seemingly small variations (say, 60k vs 90k living in NYC) in salary. This makes the “worst case” of having a minimum wage job seem not too bad.

(3) most teenagers don’t understand the “life impact” and psychological burden of having a mortgage-sized loan at 22: how much of a new grad paycheck is “left” after taxes, rent, loans; how the size of the loan correlates to the amount you take out of your paycheck; how much the loan costs over it’s lifetime; and how much this all impacts your decision to buy a house, start a business, marry, etc. This obviously impacts you terribly when your college adventure is unsuccessful, but it is a burden you’ll bear regardless of your success.

I feel similar to the author of this article, that it’s the responsibility of the parent to not sugar coat those issues with aphorisms like “just follow your dreams” or “the issue of money always solves itself”. It might feel embarrassing to tell your children your situation in life, but it’s a big life decision and it ought to be an informed one.

Just say you won’t pay for it.

Show them the numbers, what it costs, what it pays, and say you aren’t rich enough to study a hobby. You need to study something you can support yourself with.

They can always go off on their own and do it. At that point, they are adults and you’re done your best.

> Just say you won’t pay for it.

And?

There are plenty of banks and government agencies more than willing to let a 17 year old sign up for a crushing student loan.

> Show them the numbers, what it costs, what it pays

Most 17 year olds are incapable of making a good decision even with this information.

And, given how many parents let their kids ruin the beginning of life with mountains of student loan, apparently, many parents are also clearly incapable of making a good decision with that information.

Does art school make a person a better artist? I would argue not really -- especially in a day in age where so much advanced art instruction is available for free. When a company or person wants to commission you, do they look at your degree or your portfolio?

The only real benefit of art college is more contacts to sell on your personality. $300,000 for that $75,000/yr college is a huge marketing budget for someone not proven to be a success. That money would be much better spent establishing an art studio and working on a portfolio. At least if they aren't very successful, some of the loss can be recovered.

The same idea goes for most art degrees in one form or another.

My girlfriend and I have had this discussion a lot, because she went to a top tier art school. I think you might be underrating three factors in your reasoning:

One is the value of very direct feedback and guidance from seasoned, respected professionals. The class sizes in top art programs are very small, and most classes have a frequent, intense “critique” portion where the professor and students tear apart each others’ work. It’s like 3 years of intense code review from other talented programmers, led by a staff engineer. It’s hard to put a sticker price on this, because you largely get out what you put in, but it’s immense and I’d argue unique to a top tier art school.

The second is that you’re living in a high pressure environment of professors and peers who always seem to be pushing you to be better in some dimension. It’s not conducive for everyone, but if you have a strong competitive drive, it can make you very productive.

Finally, the fundamentals in design and art are insanely important. My girlfriend took 4 semesters of typography, because the ROI there is legitimately defensible. Most people skip this stuff when they’re self teaching, and it shows to people who know better.

You’re right that portfolios are of paramount importance, but good companies will make you defend your portfolio pieces, and ask you what you’d do differently with different constraints or resources. An art school training will humble you to the idea that there is another way, and arm you with ideas for alternative solutions. It’s subtle, but it comes out in interviews and on the job. I’d argue it’s similar to software engineering in that way.

So yeah, I graduated from a top-tier art school which had very high tuition but I also had considerable grants and scholarships so I was able to pay off my student loans in a few years after graduating working a blue-collar job.

I experienced four years of group critiques, and really value that as an activity. Unfortunately very few people understand or can appreciate how directly that maps to software development.

My two cents, guidance counselors just need to shut the fuck up when it comes to talking with high-school students. There is so little knowledge about what different careers actually entail that I think it is impossible for high-school students to make informed decisions about what they want to focus on.

While I think getting a BFA was the right choice for me I also think that the school environment could have been much more beneficial and productive than it was (mostly due to students in other majors being disruptive due to their drinking and partying during the week.)

I really wish we had something comparable to group critiques in my computer science/engineering program. I wholeheartedly agree that it’s an underrated form of education: it allows everyone to benefit from everyone else’s talents and experiences, whereas the traditional lecture format is limited to the talent and the experience of the instructor.

I was really jealous of that aspect of my girlfriend’s education. Some companies and incubators (recurse center?) are really good at creating this kind of learning, but I don’t know of many traditional universities experimenting with this approach at either the BS or MS level; which IMO a shame.

Also, the skill of receiving and responding constructively to criticism is incredibly underrated, and is something that the good art schools seem to be unusually good at.

The way my girlfriend tells it, it was a tortuous time (for many of the reasons you describe), but it was also very formative and it accelerated her growth dramatically.

I think some of the more recent 'design thinking' schools are coming close. A key element in critiques is that everyone has pretty much the same role (they are creating something and getting feedback on it) so no one is trying to game the system for personal career advancement.

It could be adapted to CS/E classes where students were creating something new and most Art professors could probably help run them. There is a definite discipline and culture to running good group critiques.

I sometimes wonder about rpg's notion of a MFA in programming. I think it'd be very valuable - there's a lot of crossover between art and programming, I think.

I think survivorship bias and the need to justify the education necessarily clouds judgement.

If there's one thing the internet has taught me, it's that finding legitimate critique about anything is easy and cheap -- just put it out there and ask. There are lots of online art communities that can do this job very well.

High-pressure environments may benefit some people, but people with that kind of drive are likely to push themselves anyway. Plus, an actual commissioned project is way more pressure than any professor could add (at least to me)

Since the principles of art and design don't really change, they can be provided cheaply and easily just as you can find free (and very good) resources on basically every fundamental of programming.

$300,000 paid over a staggering 20 years at 7% interest is $560,000 by the time you're done and you're on the hook for over $2300 every single month or around $28,000 in student loan payments every single year.

(note: these numbers are from salary.com which gives the highest income of all sites I looked at)

The average artist salary seems to be $45,000 to $55,000 per year. 90th percentile salary is only around $72,000. If you're an average artist, more than 50% of your GROSS salary goes toward your student loan and even if you are top-tier, you still wind up paying 39% of your gross toward your loans. Even as an art manager, at 88k at the 50th percentile and 125k at the 90th percentile (not something you're likely to be doing with zero experience), you're going to be in a very tough situation until your mid-40s and that's assuming you don't want to have a family.

In contrast, a low-level HVAC tech makes about as much out the gate without all the debt. A high-level tech makes 62k on average (76 at 90th percentile) while that manager position 72k on average (92k at 90th percentile). An apprenticeship is generally free, but even if you wanted to go to your local community college, you'd be 10-15k out the door at the upper-end. That would be less than $120/mo over 20 years and less than $300/mo over 5 years.

Even a 25th percentile artist will make as much without a degree at 47k per year will be making about as much as a 90th percentile 72k per year paying out 28k every year. Investing the extra 4k every year you save over paying for that degree with a mild 5% ROI gives almost 80k saved for retirement by your mid 40s when your student-loan person is just breaking even. If you've managed to learn the rest of those fundamentals sometime over that last 20 years, you're going to beat that college education by a much larger margin.

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/artist-sala...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/art-manager...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/alternate/hvac-instal...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/hvac-mechan...

https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/hvac-superv...

“Survivorship” bias plays a role, but I think it’s unjust to chalk it up to just that.

The statistics you’ve given are a convincing argument against “arts” in general, but “arts” is a huge range. If you’re graduating a top 5 arts school, you’re generally already in the top percentile, at which point the sample sizes are small and the variance is huge.

The average ROI is very damning, but your choice of school plays a bit role in determining how “average” you are. I’m not arguing in favor of the average art school, I’m defending the ROI of the schools given as examples in the article (Pratt).

That aside, responding to your specific points:

Like a sibling comment implied, it’s not easy to find quality criticism on demand. I stand by this. It’s hard to tell until you’ve been in such an environment, but it really is an order of magnitude’s difference from what you can get online from strangers.

Further, I sort of miscommunicated the value of the environment. It’s more that you’re seeing how other talented people come up with solutions that diverge from your own in fascinating ways. It’s high pressure because everybody is so good, that it demands you to learn and better yourself, not because of deadlines, etc. That was my bad. :P

Finally, while the fundamentals are relatively constant, it’s hard to find them presented in a way that demands 4 semesters of self driven study. I stand by that point.

But yeah, in conclusion I totally agree with the statistics that the average art degree isn’t worth it. The average art position doesn’t require a top 5 degree. The positions that do are remunerative to the extent that they are worth it, in our experience. Finally, not everyone pays the sticker price; in fact, few people (mostly the very wealthy) do.

What online art communities do you think give critique as well as professional art schools?

> Does art school make a person a better artist?

It certainly isn't automatic but a motivated student can get a lot out of the experience.

Art creates meaning within contexts. It's certainly possible to learn to reason about context working on your own, but formal schooling forces you to do so and ensures it happens.

From my own experience hiring designers, those with formal schooling in art tend to make better creative leaders, like managers or creative directors.

I’m pretty sympathetic to the perspective that the solution is not dealing with it. “I want to go to art school” is at the same level as “I want a pony” or “I’m gonna marry a rich girl”; it’s not originally intended as a serious life plan, and you’ll only start to see it as one if the people around you encourage it.

Can't speak to marrying the rich girl, but the 'I want a pony' can be dealt within some situations. Start by finding them a local ranch they can work on and learn horse care lessons from. Work with them on how they will pay for it and what they will have to sacrifice to make the lesson fees (being realistic in the extent they are expected to pay for it compared to something like piano lessons). Generally two or three weeks of cleaning horse poo from hooves will be enough to squash any pony dreams while teaching them a lesson on dipping their toe in the water and trying something out before jumping in.

If they happen to really like it, you can increase their involvement proportional to how much they are willing to sacrifice to support it. This won't work for everyone, but it shows working towards a goal and maybe they get to the point where they are willing to sacrifice other enjoyments in life to be able to stable a pony at a local ranch.

Regardless if they bail or stick with it, valuable life lessons are to be learned. I did this with my niece for a year and she discovered that she really loved horses even to the point of enjoying cleaning them, but also was too afraid of them (after seeing another girl get injured by a spooked horse).

I don't see anything wrong with going to school for an education rather than training. Frankly, I wish there were more kids working on a liberal and fine arts education. It's one of the reasons I'm a big fan of the free-college-for-all plans being pushed by some politicians.

I don't either. Most of the life-long value I got from college was not in the concentrations I was required to choose from. The real value was in the broad exposure to many disciplines, endeavors and POVs. Especially important in that were the hundreds of talented people I got to talk with ... a valuable extracurricular available at many schools.

Many people find satisfaction in work unrelated to what they thought they wanted when they were 18-20. Maybe they discovered other options they weren't aware of. Maybe their prospective specialities disappeared over time, maybe their values changed as they matured. A whole person is about more than income or ability to match some arbitrary standard.

In short noone should assume they know what an 18-20 yo is going to wind up doing (even if all goes well in their life). Nor do they (let alone their unfocussed 'advisors') know what occupations will stick around. A huge investment and a 4-year degree seems unwise and un-called for at this point. Never mind what 'tradition' says. Unless you're looking to be an academic, two years at first seems more reasonable. Less debt, less pressure. Get started, go try yourself in the crucible.

Five years later, that vagueness has been clarified by life experiences. At that point, the wisdom of a big investment might make more sense. 25 can be a lot more focussed than 20.

I don't see anything wrong with it either. I think it's a great thing that American doctors and engineers still get a liberal arts education, and it'd be wonderful if nobody in the US ever felt like finances were stopping them from getting the education they want.

But that's different than having a plan for your life. Most kids can't afford to wait until after college to start planning.

this sounds like a really bad way to spend my tax dollars. by all means, use them to educate the next generation of teachers, social workers, and scientists, but don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years and still need government assistance at the end.

> don't make me foot the bill for some kid to study art history for four years

This is completely false. In fact, the complete opposite is true. Art history students subsidize the cost of education for STEM students.

At least in Canada, your tuition is the same whether you study a STEM field or art history. But STEM has greater costs association with teaching, i.e. lab equipment, lab technicians' salaries, shop spaces, computer labs, etc. Much of social sciences and humanities teaching is based on a JSTOR subscriptions and a computer projector in the basement of a crumbling concrete building built half a century ago in the far corner of campus. 90% of the money that Social Science and Humanities students pay goes to fund the STEM programs.

you're not wrong, but read the context of the thread. I am replying to a proposal for free college as a taxpayer.

You are already footing the bill for the art history student to go through over 12 years of education, what's 4 more?

honestly not quite sure how to respond to this. the obvious response to "what's 4 more?" is that it's a lot more money than zero more, and each of those last four years is going to be considerably more expensive than a year of grade school.

I don't mind having my tax dollars go towards helping young people establish stable careers so they can become self-sufficient. I also don't mind paying to educate them so the can go out and help the needier members of society. I just don't think stuff like art history is a good investment of public money. I have a lot of friends who got art history degrees, which is why I use this example. they had a great time in school, but they would be hard pressed to point to any tangible benefits from the degree. most of them ended up having to pursue certifications for unrelated fields.

As I mentioned in a prior post (and which, as you correctly noted, did not adequately recognize the context of the thread), the cost for educating social scientists and humanists is minimal (though certainly not negligible, especially if we aspire to providing a good education rather than a bottom-of-the-barrel and grossly underfunded degree, which is currently the norm). However, I'm wondering what you consider to be tangible benefits? And to who?

The benefits of a degree in social sciences or humanities are ways of thinking that can be applied in various fields of practice. Students in these programs literally learn how to think and argue effectively, especially about social issues and social systems. This goes way beyond the first year sociology class that computer science students are 'forced' to take as an elective. Techies without social science or humanities backgrounds are notoriously bad at thinking about social systems, and end up developing extremely problematic socially-embedded tools and technologies. If we consider many of the problematic tech of the past decade (intrusive surveillance tech, under-moderated social media, crispr genetic modification, etc), they were all designed without such considerations in mind, and have had detrimental effects on society. It's sad that we continue to not 'get it', that thinking properly about human experiences and systems, as informed by specialists who deal with this specifically, is crucial.

This is not only true about tech fields. When social science and humanities graduates enter post-grad programs that actually recognize the value of such prior education (i.e. medical schools that accept students with bachelor or arts, which is surprisingly rare) these students actually tend to perform better. Public policy designed by social scientists and humanists also works more effectively, but instead we have huge lobbies funded by the tech industry and management firms pushing for de-regulation or regulation designed by those technocrats themselves (i.e. sidewalk labs in toronto).

It’s certainly not something I want limited tax dollars to pay for, given that we still have childhood poverty and homelessness to work on.

Our economy generates enough wealth to take care of those people too.

Let's convince taxpayers to raise taxes to pay for those things first, then worry about subsidizing four years of binge drinking and sex for middle class kids.

Student debt is a main driver of poverty and homelessness. Solving the student-debt crisis will reduce the poverty and homelessness and reduce the burden placed on programs meant to deal with those issues. It may be cheaper in the short term to just pay into those services, but why should people suffer before getting relief, when suffering could be prevented altogether?

Also, your impression about what college students actually do is completely unrepresentative of the experiences of those who are grateful for the opportunity to have an education, i.e. the people who would most benefit from having the costs of their education subsidized, i.e. those who go in with few opportunities and come out with many more. The only people who party are those who could already afford to live their lives normally after they graduate, or the people getting degrees in high-return fields (i.e. business and engineering).

> Student debt is a main driver of poverty and homelessness.

Source? Especially for the homelessness part.

Definitely. As long as we can get some guarantees that a good fraction of people who study for free contribute back to society without being treated like slaves.

All carrot with zero stick is not good just like all stick and zero carrot is not good.

Why should we pay for college for an area that won’t return a positive ROI just so they can be a “better citizen of the world”?

How are you going to measure ROI?

Back 2011 the Freakonomics guys said this:

> According to the College Board, a year of tuition at a public college for an in-state student costs an average of $7,605, while a year at a private college costs an average of $27,293. Meaning that (assuming you graduate in four years) a college diploma from a public school costs about $30,000, and about $109,000 from a private school. That’s a lot of coin, but consider this: the difference in yearly income for a person with a college degree and a person with just a high school diploma is $19,550, according to the 2010 Census. So keeping things simple, on average, a public school college degree pays for itself in less than two years, and a private school diploma in less than six. Which is probably why, according to the Pew study, the vast majority of college graduates (86%) say that college was a good investment for them.

Now things are more expensive, but even if the payoff is 2x or 3x longer now, it's still an overall good investment.

Plus, who knows what the benefits would be if the US were producing millions of great global citizens each year. If those global citizens helped educate and raise the world's poorest people out of poverty, those countries would likely stabilize somewhat and maybe that would ease conflict and spending on war.

And even if all the things I just said were wrong, sometimes ROI isn't a great way to value things. For example, journalism, especially at a local level, is hard to fund yet the value isn't zero. Lots of people who don't pay for news still benefit from having eyes on the powerful.

In that case, what’s wrong with the people who benefit from the education paying themselves? In a capitalist society, Journalism degrees should cost less than a STEM degree.

That seems like a good reason to me, as long as the debt load isn't severe. Plus, in my experience, education enriches the everyday profoundly.

The debt load will be severe. The US doesn't have a balanced budget, has a growing deficit at all levels (federal, state, municipal), and politicians are promising "free college", when we have bigger issues (child poverty, homelessness, healthcare, DEBT)?

It is impossible to predict how your child's life is going to turn out. I know a bunch of people who are making great livings with degrees in supposedly "low earning potential" fields like art, English, etc. Some are web developers, some are medical professionals, some are social media experts, some are entrepreneurs, etc. Who knows what the future of the economy will hold.

IMO it is better for parents to stick to logistics and standards, like "this is how much we can spend on college" and "this is how hard I expect you to work."

We are in this now. First year in college, still undecided what to do, but interested in something design/art/writing.

Our suggestions to choose something that might be profitable was a huge stress factor that pushed her towards depression and we decided to back off.

She had always surprised us in a good way, and she has proven to be very good a connecting with people, organizing, making things work.

I think she’ll be fine eventually.

We are not generationally wealthy, but tech has made us rich enough afford the college tuition without too much pain.

Not everyone can or wants to be an engineer.

Design offers an easy path to a profitable career. A specialization in UX design would easily earn your child a lucrative position in any tech company.

Even writing - something I pursued - offers a path to a stable career if you move towards copywriting and content. A few years in an agency as a copywriter and all sorts of options open up, some highly lucrative ones (creative director/strategist).

> Serious question: how does a parent deal with their high school kids wanting to pursue college in a field with a low probability of high lifetime earnings (art, theatre etc.) ?

Have them meet people in the profession, talk to them about the expense of college, and more generally help them strategize about what they'll need to do to maintain a middle class lifestyle as an artist. A middle-aged artist will be happy to share experiences and talk about money.

The other thing is to help them think about backup plans. There are plenty of jobs in art or theatre, business and technical, that don't necessary involve performing or creating art. In my experience with a theatre program in a large university, they're quite realistic about helping their students prepare for employment.

One of the great things about those fields is that they don't really require a degree. So one option is let them do it, just without the huge upfront sunk cost.

If it's art, they could live at home, work as a barista, take art classes, and paint as much as they want.

If it's acting they could move to L.A. or new york, wait tables and take lessons while auditioning.

After a few years they'll find a little traction and decide to pursue it a few more or they'll figure accounting isn't so bad. Better to figure that out at 21 than 28.

In my country people try to convince them but mostly they end up saying "well, if that's what they really want... they can always change degrees or do another one later". Several of my friends did that and ended up fine.

Of course, from the replies, I notice that in America the price of degrees makes the perspective very different because the decision may not be easily reversible...

Show them the website of the American Visionary Art Museum. It’s a museum for art made by people who never went to art school. It’s filled with stories of people who had rich lives as artists alongside other careers.

You don’t need art school to be an artist. http://www.avam.org/

The museum might be cool but that website is badly designed enough to testify against this idea of being a self-taught artist.

The museum is actually run by a mime (who did have formal training)!

incidentally, a folk artist is simply an artist that does not have a formal art education

My son went to college for Physics. I stressed to him that getting a high paying career in Physics with all the competition out there will be like landing a major role in a movie, he'll need to be the best of the best, and still be ready for rejection, possibly putting him into a situation where he'll take any job to stay afloat.

It took him 4 months in college before discovering an Engineering field he was more interested in than Physics. It wasn't my fear-speak that did it, he just discovered how interesting it was on his own and now wants to pursue it.

My sigh of relief could be heard throughout the galaxy.

We are also at a state school and paying all of his college expenses out of pocket except for books and a small stipend of financial aid. So, being in a career that would yield a high paying job after he left school was very important to us.

how about putting together a realistic budget for after they graduate? go tour some apartments and ask them to pick one they could see themselves living in. build a budget around the rent for that place, estimated utilities, going out with friends, etc. also add the monthly loan payment for the art school they want to go to. then compare that against typical monthly take-home pay for someone in their desired field and start cutting things until they can break even. $30-40k annual income can sound like a lot to a high school student until you start breaking it down month by month and force them to confront how expensive things are and the lifestyle sacrifices they will have to make.

In that case it's critical to go to an excellent school where networking is easy. If the probability of a job is low, go where that job is. NYC schools or USC/UCLA, I don't think the job opportunities are as plentiful in Chicago as you get competition from talent from both coasts and everyone with a pipe dream in the mid west. Otherwise it will be that shit underpaid job that you can't crawl out of, because you aren't going to get that 1 of maybe only 2 cushy theater company jobs in Houston, or a job as an illustrator in the entire mid west.

Just have them work the numbers out. Specifically create monthly budget after they graduate. Salary expectations, rent/mortgage, student debt, taxes, transportation, food, etc.

Ask them to double major?

Or pick up a trade instead of a second degree. I think it might be easier to structure time for your artistic passions with a trade day job than a white-collar day job but I might be biased by on-call duty.

Actually, this is excellent advice. Many of the people I know who went through art programs and hung out in the art scene later applied their aesthetics to things like the construction trade (fashioning complex plaster jobs, painting) or started some kind of small time manufacturing.

Good suggestion. Being from India where double majors aren't a thing, it didn't strike me.

Thanks.

I would suggest them getting two degrees. One would need to be in something they can tolerate doing for a living that has a good chance of earning enough money (though the actual definition of enough differs between people) and the other in what they love to do.

This does mean sacrificing a lot of the fun during college, but in exchange you get both an education in what you love and a career that can support what you love even if what you love isn't financially viable.

Take as many gap years being an artist as you want. The degree won't help much in pure arts anyway

maybe the 529 will grow in that time anyway

The average rate of return in 529s is about 3%.

You tell them to pursue it at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc, not at Pratt or Columbia, which are known money pits.

You can do anything with a liberal arts major from Harvard.

Tell the parent that their child is as unlikely to become Lee Iacocca as they are to become Robert Redford.

Just say no.

You crush their college dreams, which is what the whole article is about.

I told them flat out: if they went that way (non-STEM) they would have to do it w/o my support.

Though, in reality I would have continued to support them if they switched majors after giving STEM a chance for 2-years.

This happens to parents that don’t discuss the importance of having money in life. Also happens when kids get little to no financial education.

The kids grow up thinking pursuing your passions and dreams is more important than accumulating money. And it feels so good and right until you find yourself broke and poor and your passion is gone, and you think life just sucks.

It takes no effort to throw down a spreadsheet. List their yearly earnings for the rest of their life. Throw in expenses like mortgages, vacations, food, then add in kids and family, medical emergencies, show them just how poor they will be if they go down the path of their shitty career. Many kids may be left wide eyed when they accept these numbers are true. There’s no extra money hidden away, no big windfall waiting to come out and propel them up the class ladder. This is it, this is their life. Good luck.

Your first paragraph is absolutist, judgemental, and, frankly, very naive.

Our household has very open finances. We have dinner table talks about dollar cost averaging, compounded growth, and investing in broad mutual funds.

Kids have a bank account with debit card at 14, and a personal Vanguard account at 18, as well as a Roth IRA in which we match their taxable earnings.

And the kids know that making money is hard: they tutor, they create their own Kickstarter campaigns, they work as a cashier for extras.

They know how to make a budget and what things cost.

But no amount of your discussion or financial education is going change the mind of a very determined, strong headed youngster who “doesn’t want to live in the bubble of Silicon Valley anyway” and wants to pursue a non-technical creative course of live.

Alot of your points, show an upper middle class lifestyle. Your kids probably live in a bubble with other similar kids.

You need to expose them to people who have made bad decisions. Seeing how people live can be very illustrative.

Well then I just hope that youngster is also prepared to find some creative ways to make money.

I hope so too.

Just don’t assume that avoiding the parental flaws that you think you’ve identified to be the root is a silver bullet.