Education

Role of Parents

Q. Is there a correlation between parents’ investment levels in children and their grades?

A very pertinent question in the context of increasing disposable income of parents but reducing ‘quality time’ within families, there is no definite positive correlation between children’s grades and their parents’ investment in them. An interesting article titled “Financial help from parents leads to fall in students’ grades”, by Tamar Lewin, January 16, 2013, in the daily newspaper Hindustan Times had the following to say on the question—“a new national study (in the USA) has found that more the college money parents provide — whether in absolute terms or as a share of total costs — the lower their children’s college grades. Students from wealthy families are more likely than those from poor families to go to college, and those whose parents pay their way are more likely to graduate. However, their grades may not be very satisfactory.”

According to ‘More Is More or More Is Less? Parents Financial Investments During College’, (a study by Laura Hamilton, a sociology professor at the University of California), greater parental contributions were linked with lower grades across all kinds of four-year institutions. ‘It is a modest effect, not big enough to make the kid flunk out of college,’ said Hamilton.

‘But it was surprising because everybody has always assumed that the more you give, the better your child does.’

The negative impact on grades was less at elite institutions than at other private, expensive, out-of-state colleges. The higher graduation rate of students whose parents paid their way is not surprising, she says, since many students leave college for financial reasons.

‘Oddly, a lot of parents who contributed the most money did not get the best returns on their investment,” she said. “Their students were more likely to stay and graduate, but their GPAs were mediocre at best, and some I did not see studying even once. I wondered if that was nationally true, which led me to this quantitative study, which found that it is.’

Hamilton found that students with the lowest grades were those whose parents paid for them without discussing the students’ responsibility for their education. Parents could minimise the negative effects, she says, by setting clear expectations about grades and the progress towards graduation.

Unfortunately, in India, there is no research study of a similar kind. It is not far-fetched to imagine the research findings quoted above to be not out of context in India.

Q. What should be the ‘ideal financial planning’ for the higher education of children

Education has become fairly expensive in absolute terms and calls for better planning of finances. There is an interesting twist, however, to the whole context, goals, and the process of higher education – the best quality higher education could increasingly be organised outside formal classrooms! And at the prices comparable to 1990s levels and lesser! Free yet world-class online courses are among the fastest growing ‘products’ on the web! However, such courses are for the adept self-learner!

Not surprisingly, the more important aspect of the ideal financial planning for higher education is about ensuring that your child becomes a self-learner while in school! Indeed, planning for higher education is to avoid the trap of the ‘standard school education’ – weak basic skills of learning, reading, writing and arithmetic; in many schools across the world cause a majority of children to regress with each passing year, and as a result develop an unfavourable attitude towards learning.

A general rule of thumb for the Indian education system, including the IITs (B.Tech graduates prefer to move away from their alma mater for higher education), is that the longer a student spends in the system, the poorer he will be at learning. Thus, expect a Class V student to be a better learner than a Class VIII student and the latter has a better chance of learning something new compared to a class X or XII pass or a graduate.
This table contains data from Government of India reports.
ROLE OF PARENTS

Thus, the entire financial planning for education has to be overturned. Please save for higher education if you are left with spare cash after spending all you can in the nurturance of the multiple intelligences of your child till the age of 18. Invest in a ‘solid’ foundation for your child. Besides, your savings are unlikely to match the inflation in higher education costs anyway.

The changes in parenting and nurturance at home and the resultant pressure on schools to stretch too much to cover-up for poor quality values and overall development context at home, is pushing academic excellence outside schools. In the process, academic education quality has suffered a big blow.

Clayton M. Christensen is among the leading figures on disruptive innovation and this is what he has to say on higher education:

The economic urgency around higher education is undeniable: the price ofn tuition has soared; student loan debt now exceeds $1 trillion and is greater than credit card debt. At the same time, more educatio does not necessarily lead to better outcomes. Employers are demanding more academic credentials for every kind of job, yet are, at the same time, increasingly vocal about their dissatisfaction with the variance in quality of degree holders.

The signalling effect of a college degree appears to be an imprecise encapsulation of one’s skills for the knowledge economy of today. McKinsey analysts estimate that the number of skill-sets needed in the workforce has increased rapidly from 178 in September 2009 to 924 in June 2012.

Therefore, whether institutions like it or not, students are inevitably beginning to question the return on their higher education investments because the costs of a college degree continue to rise and the gulf continues to widen between degree holders and the jobs available today.

“Learning and work are becoming inseparable,” argued the authors of a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research, “indeed one could argue that this is precisely what it means to have a knowledge economy or a learning society. It follows that if work is becoming learning, then learning needs to become work—and universities need to become alive to the possibilities.”

By breaking down learning into competencies—not by courses or even subject matter — these knowledge providers can cost-effectively combine modules of learning into pathways that are agile and adaptable to the changing labour market.

And over time, the industry-validated experiences that emerge from the strong partnerships between online competency-based providers and employers will ultimately have the power to override the importance of college rankings and accreditation.

Q. What is the parental dilemma of the educated middle class?

This question is very interesting as well as significant. For instance, the growing middle class is a cause of cheer and attraction of the world towards India as a business destination and it is setting a virtuous cycle of economic growth. However, the growing middle class is not an unmitigated bliss; many of our current socio-economic dysfunctionalities are rooted in the expanding middle class.

It is public knowledge that ‘being middle class’ is a particular construct of the mind but it is another matter when the most intensive global research on creatively accomplished persons ends up discovering the same. In a 30-year longitudinal study of over 90 creative persons, which included two Indians – Late Pandit Ravishankar and neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran – Mihaly Csikszentmihaly discovered that nearly 90% of those researched came from either the upper class or the lower class of society. Mihaly Csikszentmihaly is a world authority on happiness and creativity.

The inference from the research was loud and clear – middle class is very averse to risk – it does not actively ‘allow or support’its children to take up long and unpredictable creative pursuits.

It is in this context that we can now see why the overwhelming majority of educated middle-class parents want their children to pursue the supposedly ‘safe careers’ such as ‘software engineering’, law, medicine, MBA- similar to their professions. In the end, such children may end up under-achieving their potential because they would be pursuing careers similar to their parents in very different times and not make the best of the better start in life (compared to their ‘successful’ parents). Incidentally, there is more ‘bad news for middle class children’ – fathers are particularly ‘conformists’ and strongly prefer their children to seek ‘safe careers’ and not try to reach out for the moon and risk going nowhere.

And there is a gender bias too – daughters face lesser ‘safe career’ pressure. The study found that, out of every ten male creative persons, three had lost their father before they reached their teens and out of every ten female creative persons, two had lost their father before they reached their teens. Mothers tend to be more liberal in educating their children.

We, authors, know families where parents have chosen ‘safer and high return investments in real estate, gold, stocks’ over world-class education to their children (with all the means to do it). Many of us may also know of ex-NRI friends whose children carry American or British citizenships and they live in houses worth over USD 1 million but find the fees of the American or the British schools in India to be way too expensive (at USD 25,000 per annum per child!)

Moving on, let us see some more evidences of the ‘middle class dilemma’. One of the important reasons why Japan has been losing its scientific innovation edge is the increasing choice of liberal education among the children from educated middle-class homes. Children of yesteryear’s engineers, doctors and scientists do not like the regimented professions of their parents. This mega shift in career choice, coupled with a totally controlled immigration policy, dealt a deadly blow to Japan’s industrial reinvention over the past two decades.

A similar situation grips the USA too, in terms of liberal career choices of children. However, the USA carefully crafted an engaging higher education and a welcoming immigration policy to attract the best of the world to its fold and has been able to ensure a good supply of the brightest professionals to the widest realm of ‘regimented technological domains’.

Indeed, choice-based espousal of liberal professional pursuits is a natural fallout of education and prosperity. We, the educated parents, have to grow to find a middle path with our children. On one hand, we must let our children discover themselves and choose careers that best fit their dream life styles, and on the other, we should work to influence their career choices by creating more possibilities through an education system that realistically equips every one of them for ‘a million careers options’.

We should also expose our children to the realities of the multiple roles to be performed as they grow up; one has to be a great spouse, parent, housemate, professional, support aging parents, worthy citizen of the neighbourhood/city/state/nation/humanity and so on. Once again, the middle-class prefers its children to ignore all roles for the sake of the most economically rewarding professional careers; and surprisingly, even daughters are being groomed to accord the highest priority to the most economically rewarding professional careers.

Indian homes and children cannot be an exception to this expression of upward social mobility. Yet, it must be emphasised that liberal professions are hard to take off and for most creative pursuits it may take up to a decade of exceptional hard work to gain a semblance of professional success, if one is among the lucky ones. It also requires too much longitudinal parental support – monetary and emotional.

It is a hard choice being an educated middle class – especially juggling with the world of EMIs, globally competitive careers, working spouses and the resulting ‘soft parenting’.

Reproduced by permission of Edupreneurs Foundation Imprint
copyright (c) 2015, Edupreneurs Foundation Imprint , Parent 3.0

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