Having the Tough Conversation

Given the role money plays in college and career options, we believe it's critical that you and your teen address the topic head-on and use it as a foundation for a broader discussion about the meaning of work. Going to college or university is expensive: the cost of tuition, room, board, books, expenses, and for many students, the added cost of earning little or no salary while they're in school. We say more about financial aid in chapter 12, but even if your family qualifies for financial aid, you may still be expected to make contributions that stretch your budget.

As much as we might wish the opposite, financial realities play a significant role in determining what college and career choices are realistic. Many of my more affluent college classmates could afford to take time off after graduation or take a job with a comparatively low salary because they didn't face the same financial pressures I did to cover my own cost of living. My less affluent classmates had even greater pressures than I did since they had not only the cost of living after graduation but the cost of repaying loans.

I enrolled in college in the late 1980s. At the time tuition, room, and board at a four-year public university totaled just over $4,600 per year, while those costs averaged more than $13,000 annually at a four-year private university. I had almost no idea what my parents made or what it cost them to provide a home for my brother and me. The most I'd ever earned in a year was a few thousand dollars from a couple of part-time jobs. Although my parents were extremely generous and offered to cover the cost of my undergraduate education, I had no way of knowing what, if any, financial pressure my college choices would put on my family.

Shortly after I enrolled in university, I decided to change my major, which meant transferring to a different college within the university and nearly tripling my tuition. This decision caused tremendous stress for my parents. A lot of that stress came because they worried that my new major, history, would limit my employment prospects (more on that in chapter 5). But another important source of stress was cost. As a seventeen-year-old college student who had never made a major purchase in my life and who knew little about my parents' financial situation, the impact of my decision wasn't clear to me. In fact, it never occurred to me that my decision to change majors could upend the financial plans my parents had carefully made over several years. To make it work, they took out a home equity line of credit even as they faced the prospect of paying tuition for my younger brother just two years later, something I didn't know at the time and probably wouldn't have understood because we rarely talked about money.

As you and your teen think about college and career decisions, it's important to consider your finances and what work means to you—and to be transparent with one another. Your children can't understand the economic realities of their choices on their own. With the benefit of hindsight, my family could have avoided a lot of anxiety and focused on realistic options if we had tackled these issues long before I ever built my college list and submitted my applications. Here are a few questions we think it's important to ask and answer right up front:

• Who will pay for college and for how long? There's no right answer to this question. In some families, parents or grandparents pay for college. In other families, parents or grandparents contribute a portion of the overall cost. In my case, my parents agreed to pay for four years of undergraduate studies. I knew going in that I needed to finish in four years or I'd have to find a way to pay for the remaining time. I also knew when I started college that if and when I decided to get a master's degree, I'd pay for that on my own. This was useful in helping me to think about what I would do when I graduated.
• How much have you saved for college? Qualified tuition plans, commonly called 529 plans, can be a great way for families to save for college, and they provide some tax advantages. Beyond that, kids and families can also save money in traditional savings and investment accounts. But before your teen chooses a college, have a conversation about how much you've collectively saved.
• Will your teen work during college? According to a report from the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce, more than 70 percent of college students work while in school.¹ If your teen will be working, be sure to discuss what portion of those earnings will be used toward college tuition.
• What can the family afford to spend on college? After you consider savings, discuss how much of the family's income can realistically be spent on college expenses each year. Be sure to plan ahead as any other children in the family approach college age. In the end, only you can decide what is affordable for your family.
• If there's a gap, what options are available, and who will pay? Are you or another adult willing to cosign loans on behalf of your teen? Is your child likely to qualify for merit-based funding, such as academic or athletic scholarships?
• Do you have a contingency plan? Discuss how you'll handle changes to your plan. Consider the effects of losing a job or a serious family illness or the inevitable annual increase in the overall comprehensive cost of the college. Data from the U.S. Department of Education suggest that 80 percent of students change majors at least once on their way to a bachelor's degree, so discuss how you would react if your teen wants to change majors or transfer to another institution.
• Where do you expect your child to live after graduation, and who will pay expenses? My dad was very clear that I could live at home, at no cost, for up to six months after graduation. Beyond six months, I was expected to find my own place to live at my own expense.

After you have a clear picture of the family's available resources, you are ready to take the next step and help your teen understand what it costs to live.

Setting Expectations

A couple of years ago, I had an opportunity to speak with a group of students at a local high school about their plans after senior year. Graduation was coming, and nearly all were heading to college in the fall. They were excited and looking forward to the next step in their lives.

The conversation moved through many different topics, but I found the discussion about life after college especially interesting. In fact, it was a generation-defining experience for me.

When I was growing up, my parents would, in good humor, often remind me how much easier my life was than theirs had been at my age. I had my own room, while they had to share. The school bus picked me up just outside our front door, while they walked to school—uphill both ways, my dad used to say, to amplify the point. (I mostly rolled my eyes as any good teenager would.) What they were hoping I would learn was that I was pretty lucky and that I should not take my situation for granted. Someone, in this case the two of them, made it possible for me to grow up mostly shielded from the realities of making a living and making difficult trade-offs.

On that day, in that classroom with those seniors who were approaching graduation, I saw myself as a teenager and learned a new appreciation for the challenge parents face in teaching their kids about how to make their own way in the world. As we talked, it became clear that these sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds started with the assumption that the physical comforts that their parents provided were the baseline. Even as they went off to college and ultimately started out on their own, they expected to have at age twenty-one or twenty-two what their parents could now afford. These teenagers had a limited understanding of what they could reasonably expect to earn after graduation from college and an even more limited understanding of what life costs. Even if they understood the idea of a mortgage or monthly rent, they often didn't have a clear picture of the amount, and they didn't have a full appreciation for the other costs they'd incur: taxes, food, utilities, insurance, gasoline. Most assumed that things would just “work out” or that their parents would make up the difference, not surprising since a recent survey found that a third of U.S. households provide financial support to adult children.²

Before committing to college and career decisions, it's important to take time to set expectations for what life will look like after graduation. Just as you should agree to the financial parameters that define college costs, you and your teen should lay out a financial plan for graduation and beyond.

We suggest the following:

• Build a postgraduation budget. Give some thought to where and how your teen might want to live—for example, urban, suburban, or rural location; type and quality of housing; solo or with a roommate. Estimate costs for rent and other expenses, including taxes, food, utilities, insurance, and any costs of commuting to work. If you expect your teen to have to repay college loans, be sure to estimate the monthly payments.
• Based on income needs and on interests and strengths, make a list of careers. Many career search tools, including the U.S. Department of Labor's CareerOneStop (https://www.careeronestop.org) from the U.S. Department of Labor, allow you to search salary and wage information for various careers. These data can help you find jobs that align with interests, strengths, and financial needs.
• Research college costs. The U.S. Department of Education compiles apples-to-apples data on tuition, fees, room, board, and expenses for colleges and universities throughout the United States. You can find the most recent information at CollegeNavigator.gov and on many other college search websites. The actual costs may vary dramatically based on family income and other factors, however, so you'll want to look at the net price in addition to the list price. Read chapter 12 on financial aid in this book for more information. Compare these costs to what your family can afford to spend and to what you've included in your postgraduation budget.
• If there's a mismatch, start over. Ideally you will have found a great match that aligns interests, needs, and financial realities, but if not, it's better to address that issue early. Later in the book we'll look at some alternatives, including 2 + 2 programs that allow students to start earning a bachelor's degree in community college, where tuition and fees are much lower, before transferring to a state university to complete the final two years.

The process of building a postgraduation budget is an opportunity to bring transparency to future financial discussions, and it serves as a foundation for discussing career and college decisions. By helping your teen understand the cost implications of different living arrangements, you can prompt a discussion about the trade-offs he or she is willing to make. Sharing an apartment that's a short distance outside the city center can save a lot of money and increase flexibility when choosing a career or selecting a college. Living at home for a time after graduation, if it works for all family members, can make it much easier for a recent college graduate to accelerate loan payments or build savings. Conversely, high-cost living arrangements can be overwhelming for many young people early in their careers in almost any field.

What Role Does Work Play in Your Life?

Much of this chapter has focused on money, so much so that I'm worried you might think I'm putting too much emphasis on maximizing earnings. We started with money only because it drives a lot of the discussion. With money comes greater flexibility for both career and college choices. And if the choices you make are not aligned, you can find yourself struggling to meet your basic obligations. But once you've figured out the financial realities and understand the minimum that you'll need to support your career and college decisions, it's crucial to look at the broader role that work plays in your life. This is where profit meets purpose.

As an undergraduate, I knew I needed a job after graduation. To move out on my own within the six-month time frame my dad set for me, I had no choice. With the need to pay my own rent and buy my own food, my first job was mainly about economics. For my first job after college, I worked as a technical writer. It wasn't glamorous work, but it could have been a lot worse. I got early access to new computer software, which appealed to the tech geek in me, but writing detailed instructions for word processing and database applications got a bit tedious over time. As a twenty-one-year-old recent college graduate, however, the job fit into my life quite well. I enjoyed my coworkers, I got some good experience to put on my résumé. And I was able to pay my rent while putting away a little money in savings.

After a couple of years, I took another look at the role that work played in my life. Having saved a little money and proved to my parents that I was employable despite my liberal arts education (more on that in chapter 5), I decided to pursue an MBA. By complementing my liberal arts degree with some formal training in business, I figured that I could make myself even more valuable to a future employer. Enrolling in business school immediately after earning my bachelor's degree had not been an option for me. My parents and I had agreed that I needed to pay for any graduate studies, and I didn't have the money to stay in school. But the decisions I made that got me to my first job provided some flexibility, which I exercised when I went to business school.

Truth be told, I wasn't the classic MBA student. I completed my core courses but took about as many non–business school courses as I could that would still count toward my MBA—including courses in music and history that I wished I'd had time to take as an undergraduate. What business school became for me, however, was an opportunity to find meaning in work.

I finished my MBA in 1995, well before tech start-ups captured everyone's imagination. In fact, the entrepreneurship program at my business school at the time consisted of a single course, which, as it turns out, is one of just two courses I took in business school that I still apply in my work nearly every day. The clear expectation for a “good” business school student at the time was to do well in school and then find a job with a big company. But that didn't appeal to me.

While many of my classmates found internships between their first and second years of business school with companies like Goldman Sachs, Procter & Gamble, and Pfizer (names that would have made my parents very happy), I decided to stay on campus that summer. I got a part-time job in a research lab at Cornell's College of Engineering called, creatively enough, the Engineering Multimedia Research Lab (EMRL). While an internship at any of the firms I mentioned would have given me worthwhile business experience, I decided I wanted to go a bit deeper in technology, something the EMRL was well suited to do. The year was 1994, and the Netscape web browser would be introduced that fall. While my friends and classmates were building spreadsheet models in their internships, I had an opportunity to work with a prerelease version of Netscape and begin experimenting with what would come to be called the World Wide Web before most people had even heard of it. As we started to see how easy it would be to share information through a simple online interface, those of us working in the EMRL got very excited. Our mission that summer was to explore ways to improve undergraduate engineering education, but we could see immediately that the potential applications spanned education and virtually every industry.

Although working in the EMRL was my job, it also sparked a greater interest for me in technology and convinced me that I wanted to start my own technology business. While working in the EMRL, I met Shaun, with whom eight years later I would cofound Naviance and sixteen years after that would coauthor this book.

When I finished my MBA in 1995, starting a business simply wasn't in the cards. The role that work played at that point in my life was to repay my student loans. My newly minted MBA, combined with my EMRL experience, did help me find a good job working as a technology project manager for the Thomson Corporation (now Thomson Reuters). In that role, I worked with a variety of Thomson-owned companies, one of which, Peterson's, published education directories. I did a couple of projects with Peterson's before being offered a full-time opportunity. By 1999, I'd convinced Shaun to join me at Peterson's, and we worked on an intrapreneurship project to launch a new college-search website. By 2001, the two of us had saved some money and were ready to take more risk. In 2002, we launched Naviance—an online tool that millions of students use to make career and college decisions—which gave us an opportunity to combine our interests and our strengths in an entrepreneurial venture and allowed us to find an even greater sense of meaning in our work.

Finding Meaning

We hope that everyone can find meaning at some point in their career work that provides intrinsic value rather than just extrinsic reward. But the reality is that meaning comes in different forms at different times. As I've tried to illustrate with the story of my own career development, the process of understanding interests, strengths, and meaning in work provides a long-term direction, but it doesn't mean ignoring current realities.

Many of the students we've worked with need to make career decisions based on short-term needs. With the pressures of meeting living expenses and repaying student loans, compromises between what you'd most like to do and what you can afford to do at a particular point in time are inevitable. That's not an argument against understanding interests and strengths or a reason to abandon your quest to maximize meaning in your work. Instead, we think it's an argument for calling out the search for meaning in your work and making that an explicit part of your long-term plan.

Those who study workplace performance are particularly focused on measuring engagement, which is the level of emotional commitment employees bring to their work. Engagement is a good proxy for the meaning that employees derive from their jobs, and it's strongly associated with higher levels of performance. Unfortunately, employee engagement is pretty rare in the United States. According to Gallup, nearly 70 percent of U.S. workers are not engaged at work, which costs the national economy between $483 billion and $605 billion per year.³ The benefits to employers are considerable. Companies with highly engaged employees enjoy higher performance and lower costs than those with less engaged staff. But there are substantial benefits for employees as well, reflected in lower rates of turnover, fewer work-related injuries, better-quality work, and higher levels of productivity.

One way to think about your level of engagement at work is to ask yourself whether you view work as a job, a career, or a calling. Professor Amy Wrzesniewski at Yale University's School of Management identified these three categories in her research on employees' perceptions of their jobs. Although higher levels of engagement can be correlated with certain types of jobs and workplace seniority, those correlations are not absolute. The differences among a job, a career, and a calling are about mind-set.

The well-known story of three bricklayers is one of my favorite ways to illustrate the power of finding meaning at work. When asked what they were doing, the first of the bricklayers answers flatly, “I am laying bricks.” The second, with a greater sense of awareness of his work, answers, “I am building a wall.” The third, with a full appreciation of the purpose of his work and a clear sense of meaning, said, “I am creating a cathedral that will stand for generations.” Each of these individuals had an identical job. Each earned identical wages. Only their perspectives differed.

The story of the bricklayers helps to show that it's possible to find meaning even in a job that can feel repetitive or mundane. In my own career, the knowledge that I had a plan—not turn-by-turn directions, but a general sense of direction—helped me to find meaning at each stage even as I made the short-term trade-offs that were necessary. At points where that sense of meaning started to fade, I knew it was time for a change.

Notes