Good news: The higher-ed-parenting industrial complex has imploded

As a mom of teenagers and a feminist I am so here for it. But the macroeconomic fallout will be harsh.

These days my favorite reading are news coverage documenting the implosion of the house of cards that is higher education.

My kids are aged 15 and 17 — 10th and 12th graders — and I cannot tell you how welcome and necessary this cultural lightning bolt is, especially for upper-middle-class, white, educated parents like me who are especially guilty of perpetuating and benefiting from this crisis. I find this enormously, orgasmically freeing — like popping a pimple of pent-up insanity that is now proving, finally, to have net negative outcomes for kids, schools, communities, parents and the adults those children will become. Gender equality also stands to benefit.

So many of us have bought into the assumption that it is our right and duty to leverage everything in our power from before birth to ensure our children were on a path for maximum development of frontal lobes, elementary school resumes and sports/music/math skills with the singular end-goal of entrance into the best possible universities and their promise of high salaries.

Alas, we see now that is all one big, obeses, GLP-1 resistant lie.

College acceptance has gone sideways and rigor is a joke

Let’s start with college admission standards. Last week alone we learned that as much as 40% of the country’s most prestigious universities’ students enjoy extended exam time and flexible deadlines thanks claims of learning disabilities. Harvard and UC-Davis report a surge of students requiring remedial math and writing instruction, as ever-ballooning GPAs and grade inflation have so skewed university acceptance rates as to render these metrics all-but-meaningless.

One counselor at a highly competitive magnet school told me about parents who bypassed the legal process to attain an Independent Education Plan that allowed their child more test time. They simply created one. “She obviously has a learning disability since she got a B in the class,” the parents explained. The school didn’t push back, despite the illegality, to avoid conflict with demanding mom and dad and to later lay claim to yet another student accepted to a prestigious university.

Once enrolled, the quality of college is questionable. Today’s college students study fewer hours than ever (while college GPAs also climb), and when they do, students are almost certainly using AI — just as their professors also rely on LLMs to generate tests and grade papers while spending fewer and fewer hours teaching and more and more hours publishing papers that no one ever reads.

As any parent of a high school student will tell you, the pressure to participate in this racket is real.

Let’s start with school choice. Instead of taking for granted that the public institution down the block is good enough for our kid (who is statistically likely to be an average student), today’s parents mothers in most towns and cities devote countless hours ot visits, applications and discussion on finding, applying for and being accepted to the school that is the best fit for my child. Scaffolding it all are the logistical and financial resources required to facilitate the academic, mental health, social and extracurricular monitoring and programing designed for maximum acceptance rates starting in preschool, and, eventually college.

Well-connected parents have always hooked up their kids with impressive summer jobs, but today fancy extracurriculars are all-but-required for college admissions. Rec league sports have been replaced by expensive, time-sucking and community-destroying travel club sports and varsity teams monopolized by year-round players. Meanwhile, fewer kids than ever participate in athletics.

Similarly, fewer teens than ever have summer jobs — a once-right-of-passage that gave me more lessons and fun than any academic or extracurricular program (shout-out to fellow Midwestern corn detasselers and Pizza Hut servers!). Instead, June through August, teens spend at resume-padding camps and unpaid internships.

Last year I told my rising-senior daughter to figure out something meaningful to do with her summer. She reported back: “I did some research and all the programs basically require you pay a lot of money for me to show up.” She found herself a a hostess job at an Outback Steakhouse and a couple of internships, one of which turned into a paid ongoing position at an art gallery.

While the turbulent job market awaiting young people will require grit, self-determination and agency, our current paradigm (yes, tech is also to blame) is producing generations of co-dependent adults who have never failed. In fact, they have not-failed so hard they are by many measures, failures. We cannot blame the economy alone for Gen X’s dwindling numbers of marriages, children, homeownership and high rates of financial and logistical reliance on parents. These society-destroying trends can also be traced back to micro-managed, bullet-proofed childhoods. Kids who were never given the gift of being responsible for their own futures simply never grow up.

The machine that facilitates this is thankfully crumbling before our eyes. On the high school academic front, AP classes and their promise to earn college credit are now understood to be an expensive joke run by a profitable company plagued by a decade of scandal. In many affluent communities pricey SAT prep is a foregone conclusion even though studies found it is not effective for most teens. ADHD meds and IEPs that have been considered de rigueur for academic success are now being broadly challenged.

Related: freerange parenting is finally getting some uptake, with parents heeding the research (and their own exhaustion) that finds that kids need to just hang out with other kids and away from adults and stop being carted around to structured activities.

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Value of college degrees in freefall

But once you get that degree from a prestigious school, you have a leg-up, right? Not so fast. The ROI that $100,000 per year fancy degree is waning. The value of any college education has never been lower, in part because costs are so high, with the real and perceived advantage of a degree plummeting and the education-career connection fuzzier by the day.

Increasingly, employers are not impressed with Ivy League degrees, and graduates from name-brand schools are desperately struggling to find any employment at all. In fact, the employment gap between high school and college grads is at its lowest level since the 1970s, with the gap near zero for young men.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland

Source: American Institute for Boys and Men

Of course, parents are In a chat with a white, educated parent-friend who lives in my neighborhood and played the school-choice game hard, the role of AI in education came up.

Me: Real question: Why do our kids need to learn to write well today?
Friend: Because top colleges expect them to know how to write write.
Me: Why do our kids need to go to top colleges?
Friend, astonished: So they can get these really good jobs we want them to get!

That perspective was maybe relevant 10 years ago. This is what I am reading:

Spooked by AI and Layoffs, White-Collar Workers See Their Security Slip Away

Office workers are hanging on to their jobs for dear life

—Wall Street Journal

Goodbye, $165,000 Tech Jobs. Student Coders Seek Work at Chipotle.

As companies like Amazon and Microsoft lay off workers and embrace A.I. coding tools, computer science graduates say they’re struggling to land tech jobs.

—New York Times

AI and broader economic forces have rendered a guaranteed college=>career path all but moot. While some version of traditional universities will have a role going forward, my friend’s blind faith in the system is sorely out of touch.

I used to make the argument that college is valuable for building a networking of peers, but this perk is diluted by the fact that today many colleges are commuter-heavy and alumni networks weak, while LinkedIn, WeSork, industry Slacks and conferences are universally accessible.

Best students not going to “best” colleges

The strongest evidence that the higher-ed bubble has burst is market trends. Fewer kids are applying to Ivies and the like. Declining birth rates and flip-flopping test requirements play a role.

The rollback of DEI initiatives will be credited by some and blamed by others for this shift, but the cracks in higher education were visible long before DEI became a political flashpoint. What’s collapsing is an older bargain: that relentless credential-chasing reliably produced upward mobility.

It is being replaced by student disillusionment.

Growing numbers of high school students accepted to the most elite schools are now heading to schools in the U.S. South — Georgia Tech, North Carolina State, Clemson, Elon — which promise lower costs, moderate political culture and just more fun.

These kids and their families, I assume, think like me: Why compete in a game that has no rules?

College pressure and the cost to parents

Photo by Tim Gouw on Unsplash

I raised my kids over the past two decades in a world that bullied parents by way of sensationalist academic research (attachment parenting, I’m looking at you) and a free market that capitalized on the vulnerabilities of contemporary men and women navigating the upheaval of gender norms and a rapidly changing economy. Mine is a generation full of professionally successful but guilty mothers, high divorce rates and disenfranchised fathers — all swirling in a pressure cooker to both earn more money and devote more time to excel in this college-parenting-industrial pipeline.

But the implications are bigger than stressed-out parents and under-employed young adults. Whole local and national economies are built on the higher-ed-parenting industrial complex. I think to my neighborhood’s skyrocketing home prices for which young parents happily pay for walking proximity to my city’s highest-ranking public elementary school. School zoning has been a hot political issue in recent years, and the winners are rich homeowners (they won: no bussing) and the ever-growing private K12 schools that profit from the frenzy to ensure every deeply mediocre student entrance into the very best colleges. Like many cities’ tourism sectors, mine profits handsomely from youth travel sports, a $92 billion per year industry.

What would happen to communities, states, the nation if tomorrow we woke up and decided higher is ed is a big scam and we’re collectively not participating in this pyramid scheme any more? What would happen to you, personally?

Think of what you invested as a parent in pursuit of this rigid, vintage success formula: prenatal vitamins and acupuncture, baby music classes, milk warmers and organic swaddlers among infinite infant products and educational toddler toys, boutique daycare with foreign language immersion, allll the lessons, tutors, therapists, classes, specialists, camps, cross-town commutes early Saturday and during rush hour, hours spent on calls navigating scheduling and payments and insurance claims, missed work meetings, unapplied-for promotions, fights with your spouse or co-parent, screaming matches with your kid, adult conversation sacrificed for indulging every interruption in the name of being present, of unimaginable exhaustion from the grinding, relentless pressure to constantly be on, to always be engaged and developing and hovering and parenting all the goddamn time.

The expense is enormous: financial, professional, emotional, mental, relational. And it was all a lie. And that is just the lie that parents must now digest. We dragged our kids into this quagmire, as well as our relationships, our dreams and ambition and mental and physical health and common sense.

The evidence was there all along, but we ignored it. Look back on the past 20 years of articles about how women are so burned out and the gender gaps that plague our pay and wealth and leadership and sleep and holiday mental load and uninterrupted time and it all points back to this mess of a promise that we as parents and mothers need to do all the things to give our kids all the advantages to be successful. But these things never included meaningful friendships or marriages or contributing to our communities or lifelong healthy bonds with our kids, because when we measured our own success as women and feminists, those are not the metrics we use. Those metrics are pay and wealth and leadership and sleep and evening the score with our husbands.

No, the metric for parenting success has been get our kids into good colleges so they can make at least as much money as we do. Moms, women: we chose to take this on because our identities are wrapped up in successful parenting and successful parenting means raising successful children. And that, until 5 minutes ago, has largely meant acceptance in a good college and upward economic mobility.

And now that is all over and we are free to do better.

Next I will write about what what we must do instead.

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