Tag: college guidance

Gifted to Serve: Spiritual Gifting and High School Students

The Via Sabaste was a Roman road that cut through the heart of Asia Minor, bringing traffic of all sorts through the small town of Lystra. Well-formed routes such as this enabled the rapid expansion of the church in the first century. Despite the ease of travel, Paul’s first visit to Lystra could not have gone worse. When Paul and Barnabas healed a crippled man, the locals insisted that they were Zeus and Hermes (Acts 14:12), offending the two missionaries and inciting the local Jewish population to stone Paul (Acts 14:19). Undeterred, they continued to preach the gospel, making many

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Guiding a New Generation: Six Alternatives to College

In this series on college guidance, we have worked within the framework that most if not all students are destined to attend a four-year college. I began by questioning the current state of affairs in higher education. There is a massive educational-industrial complex that serves as the gateway to the industrial economy. However, many recent developments have seriously impacted the role higher education plays across the economy. Despite the rising costs of higher education, the value of such an education remains high. Thus, college likely remains the normal outcome for high school graduates. Yet, a growing number of alternatives have

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Funding the Dream: An Honest Look at College Financial Aid

One of the biggest investments you can make in life is in the education of children. With the rising cost of higher education, many are questioning this proposition. Has the traditional four-year college remained a good investment? Or has it saddled the next generation with a debt burden too great to bear? In this article, we will do a little bit of cost analysis to determine whether students, parents and schools should continue to aim for college placements. We will also look at how financial aid works with some guidance on how to navigate a fairly complex set of factors

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Playing the Game: The Typical Rules for College Entry

Let’s be honest, there’s a game being played here. College entry has traditionally been about a very few factors that tell so much about a high school student’s ability to play this game, and not so much about the individual qualities that make that student an interesting person with the potential to be a great addition to the academic atmosphere as well as student life. Now COVID went a long way towards changing the game in radical ways. And we will get to some of the new currents in admissions such as student interviews. For some students, they adeptly navigate

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The State of Affairs: Higher Education as an Educational-industrial Complex

As I begin this series on college guidance, my aim is to take seriously our mission to cultivate lifelong learning and flourishing. We must begin with the current state of affairs. We really cannot guide students into the higher education of today without taking stock of the long backstory of colleges and universities. Industrialization has had a massive impact on higher education, transforming these institutions into destinations for most high school graduates as a pipeline to the job market the industrialized economy created. As we go into this historical review, we will keep in mind that much of what our

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academy

Apprenticeship in the Arts, Part 4: Artistry, the Academy and the Working World

In his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skills Trump Passion in the Quest for Work You Love, Cal Newport argues against the well-known Passion Hypothesis of career happiness. He describes the Passion Hypothesis as the idea that “the key to occupational happiness is to first figure out what you’re passionate about and then find a job that matches this passion” (4). It is well summed up by the ever-present, popular advice to “follow your dreams.” As Steve Jobs said in a 2005 commencement speech at Stanford University, “You’ve got to find what you love….[T]he only way to

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monopoly game with dog in the dog house

School Is a Game: Finite and Infinite Games in Education

This is a website about education, particularly pertaining to thinking about education differently. Jason, Kolby and I really enjoy discussing educational philosophy, and hopefully you, our readers, enjoy and benefit from our peculiar take on education. In addition to being educational philosophers, we are also teachers – educational practitioners. What we talk about in our weekly posts we are also trying to live out in the classroom every day. Even though we write from a place of deep thought about educational ideals, sometimes the reality of the daily classroom means we get to workshop how those ideals play out with

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