What Individual Parents Can Do: College Edition 2 of 2
How kids succeed at college - plus AI college counselors.
In my previous post, I confirmed that college done well remains a great investment. But most kids still don’t graduate. In this post I’ll explain why, how parents can help, and how AI tools now give more families access to aspects of college counseling previously reserved for the rich.
I want to emphasize my usual caveat for this post in particular: there’s plenty of good stuff parents can do, but in practice many kids cannot and will not access college without richer public support. I hope describing “what parents can do” clarifies why so many families struggle to capitalize on college.
Most kids still don’t graduate from college
For high school, we lay out a paved road to graduation in our public K12 education system and 90% of kids reach the finish line. For college, we turn that paved road into a rugged wilderness trek. As a result the share of people completing college has plateaued around 33% for people born since the 1950s.
This approach hurts lower-income families the most — not so much because they have less income per se but because they are typically less familiar with how college works.
So what exactly are all these families missing out on that prevents their kids from obtaining college degrees, and how can parents help? Let’s break things up into three categories: Preparation, Access, and Realization.
Preparation: getting kids ready for college
The biggest factor driving rich-poor college gaps is preparation as measured by things like high school grades and college entry exam scores. Richer kids on average have opportunities to develop greater cognitive, social, emotional, and physical skills starting early in childhood.
By the time kids reach high school these skill gaps are astonishing. For example, the share of our highest-income kids who score very highly on college entry exams is around 1 in 13. For our lowest-income kids, it’s 1 in 1,000.
Simply put, lack of opportunities to build pre-college skills during childhood is the main reason why so few kids benefit from all the advantages of a college degree.
What can parents do about this on their own? Unfortunately, way too many things to describe here. Preparing kids for college is all about the first 18 years of skill development and spans all the topics I wrote about in my book The Parent Trap and ongoing posts in this series — preschool, nutrition and health care, tutoring, choosing where to live, after-school and summer activities — all the ways we ask parents to orchestrate the 90% of time kids spend outside of the public K12 education system. There are big wins to be had, but they’re not easy.
Access: navigating the transition to college
Even accounting for preparation, our complex system causes many kids to fall through the cracks. That takes the form of well-prepared kids who should attend 4-year colleges attending 2-year colleges with fewer resources or no college at all. These missed opportunities account for about a third of the gap in 4-year college enrollment between lower- and higher-income kids.
Going to college involves paperwork, essays, recommendations, tests, transcripts, and deadlines. Every step involves strategy beyond the instructions. There are thousands of colleges, misleading marketing materials, and no obvious default way to compare options. The sticker price is meaningless, cheaper colleges are often better, and the real price only becomes clear after families complete the admissions process. Our federal financial aid application form asks for 10 pages of sensitive, complicated information that the government already collects in other places, and there are 1000s of oddball scholarships from Rotary Clubs, bird watching societies, and Pizza Hut.
For many families college is a new, unfamiliar thing. Some think “liberal arts” colleges are places where kids study socialist painting. Less than half of students are familiar with “Pell Grants.”
Now, there’s a strand of American culture that views our system as a way for kids to learn grit or resilience. Some parents convince themselves that if kids don’t work through all these obstacles themselves, they don’t want college bad enough, and by failing they’ll learn some lesson about personal responsibility that is even more valuable than attending college.
But that can’t be right. Even lower-income kids with great preparation go to college at lower rates than equally-prepared, higher-income peers. It seems unlikely these kids lack grit. What they lack is handholding and mentorship. High income families don’t rely on public high school guidance counselors serving 400 kids each. And they don’t rely on their own teenage kids to muster ideal levels of responsibility at this critical juncture. High-income parents supervise, double-check, encourage, and hire private help if necessary for every step of the process. They let their kids develop responsibility over time, not all at once at the brink of a precipice.
Some things parents can do at the “Access” stage:
View it as your responsibility to notice if your kid is struggling with college applications, and guide them or find someone else who can do so. Below we’ll see how AI can help.
Make sure kids study for and take the SAT or ACT, and then retake it to get the best score they can. Most lower-income kids don’t do this basic step, and many score higher than they expect and open doors to colleges they had not considered.
If you’re hoping to save money by transitioning from 2-year college to 4-year college, think hard about the low share of kids who pull this off. Remember your kid will typically be in larger classes, have a harder time enrolling in the classes they need to progress, get less support, and be surrounded by less-committed peers during those crucial first 2 years — and they’ll have to anticipate and manage a 2nd big transition between institutions. If this winds up delaying graduation the opportunity cost in foregone earnings can easily cancel out the savings.
Help kids access the financial aid that matters most: Federal aid (Pell Grants), state financial aid programs (e.g. CalGrants), aid embodied in lower tuition at in-state public colleges, and aid based on merit and need from colleges themselves. Don’t feel obligated to chase every obscure $1,000 scholarship you find on the web.
Don’t assume better colleges cost more. After accounting for financial aid and faster time to graduation, many great 4-year colleges cost less than 2-year colleges.
Avoid for-profit colleges in favor of public and non-profit private colleges. There is too much evidence that for-profit colleges overcharge and underdeliver.
Realization: making the most of college
A lot of kids who go to college don’t graduate, and therefore don’t reap the full rewards. And among kids who do graduate, some choose majors they later come to regret. Parents can help kids avoid these pitfalls.
The first thing to realize is that by preparing your kid for college, and then helping them capitalize on all that prep by attending a better-resourced 4-year college right up front, you are already doing a lot to help them graduate.
An amazing recent discovery is that once kids land at a college, the impact of their family’s social class on their future income compared to their peers at that college mostly disappears. For example, low-income kids at Georgia Tech wind up earning about as much as their high-income classmates. The more well-resourced the college you attend, the more family class disappears. So lower-income parents might gently nudge kids to attend the best college they can even if they’re anxious about feeling left out while the rich kids do spring break in Cancun.
But choosing a college is only a start. Choice of major also really matters. There are big differences across STEM, business, social science, and arts/humanities, even after accounting for differences in the kinds of kids who choose these fields.1 We’re talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in lifetime income. There are even large differences across specific fields of study within these broad categories. One study found that students who randomly wound up majoring in economics instead of sociology or psychology at UC Santa Cruz wound up earning $22,000 (46%) more per year.
Obviously income is just one aspect of this decision and kids who are passionate about, say, visual art should absolutely consider that major even if the earnings aren’t as good. But it’s surprising how little attention families pay to data on income variation across majors, especially because anyone can access this information for free in the US College Scorecard. We don’t need a fancy natural experiment to guess that economics majors at UC Santa Cruz would earn a lot more than their peers in psychology or sociology. The College Scorecard data tells the same story.
Once you’ve chosen a college and a major, your kid has to do the work. It turns out college is hard! It can be lonely and scary. Lots of people talk about lifelong literal nightmares of showing up for final exams unprepared (or naked). For this reason researchers find proactive, comprehensive support programs dramatically improve students’ odds of graduating. These programs reach out to kids early on before problems arise, rather than waiting for kids to request help. They offer financial support as well as advising, tutoring, and mentoring around academic and psychological aspects of college.
Knowing these programs work so well tells us something about the value of active parenting during college. One useful way parents can help is to pay for college or guide kids to maximize their financial aid. When rich parents cover tuition and comfortable room and board, they give their kids the freedom to focus on studying rather than surviving. Yes that means some rich kids wind up treating college like a 4-year vacation. But many rich kids use that freedom to persist through college and major in demanding fields. The risk that kids may take college for granted seems smaller than the risk that kids may fail to graduate because college was a such a slog.
The last thing I’ll mention is that summer breaks and extra-curricular activities remain important in college, and parents can play a big role supporting kids in making the most of this time. Kids who come home for summer to play video games will be at a disadvantage compared to kids who dig up internships to explore industries that interest them and soak up social skills they don’t learn at school. Parents can help kids explore internship networks that many schools offer to those who inquire about them.
Some ways parents can help at the Realization stage:
To the extent you can afford it and sense it might help your kid, consider topping up financial aid to support a comfortable, low-stress college experience.
Make sure your kid is aware of income differences across majors at their college using the US College Scorecard.
Encourage your kid to view summer as an important part of their college education, and to view their college’s internship network as an important part of what their college can offer.
Be your kid’s proactive, comprehensive support program. This might be obvious, but make sure your kid knows you’re still eager to help them and you’re not expecting them to handle everything on their own right away just because they’re officially adults.
Meet your personal college counselor
One great new thing families can do is use AI. College is exactly the kind of complex, multi-dimensional problem where AI systems such as ChatGPT or Claude can add a lot of value. However, there are some pitfalls.
As of now, AI systems pay too much attention to sticker prices rather than actual prices after financial aid. They ignore opportunity costs that can matter when comparing colleges with different time-to-graduation. And most importantly they can assume kids behave optimally rather than realistically. For example, they tend to think it’s a great idea to save money by attending 2-year colleges, neglecting the risks.
So here’s a fully worked example of a prompt you can modify to get started (note the details are made up).
You are a seasoned college guidance counselor. Please suggest some good options for my kid, including an explanation for each recommendation, likely annual out of pocket costs, likely time to graduation, and likelihood of graduation. Please give your overall top recommendation along with this menu of options.
Here is some background on our family:
Our family lives in Redwood City, CA and has $85,000 total household income. We are married. We have 1 other kid age 14.
The kid I’m asking about is a senior in high school, with GPA 3.2 and SAT 1280, an interest in health care and possibly nursing or health policy or administration (but still very uncertain).
Our kid wants to attend college locally to live with us, at least to begin with, but they're willing to travel up to an hour each way daily.
We want to prioritize graduating from a good college, but at an affordable cost.
Please consider opportunity costs based on the typical time a student will take to graduate.
Please consider average out of pocket costs for a family such as ours, not sticker prices.
Please do not assume our kid will behave optimally or follow the ideal recommended path – instead assume they will behave more like the average student at any college under consideration when thinking about the odds of persisting through graduation and time to graduation.
Here are excerpts from the response – it’s likely as good or better than the kinds of bespoke advice that rich families receive from private counselors.
And if you want more detail, go for it. Maybe you forgot to mention you prefer a school close to a certain type of church, or you want a nice on-campus swimming pool, you want a pre-med program, etc. Maybe you want to add average commute times and traffic variability as another column in that table. Maybe you want all of these things at 2am on New Year’s Eve. No problem.
So there you go: Preparation, Access, and Realization. This little guide is just scratching the surface of things parents can do to help kids with college, and it’s a LOT! And that’s why, though I hope this 2-part post has been useful, I also think massive policy changes in child skill development and college accessibility are a far more promising strategy than asking parents to find their way through the wilderness.
David Deming and Kadeem Noray have pointed out that liberal arts majors partly catch up to STEM majors in earnings over their careers. However, their paper does not dispute the major economic advantages of STEM majors, which remain substantial even later in the lifecycle. A lot of the “non-STEM” majors they highlight are also more on the applied and technical side such as business, management, and law. That said, their point is important: it would be bad to push everyone toward ever more narrow, applied fields with the highest initial salaries at the expense of broad liberal arts skills. We don’t want everyone to major in JavaScript.