Jeff Selingo’s book There is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow is a hidden gem. Whether you have a student in high school, in college, or a recent graduate, this is a wonderful resource to share with your student. We think higher education professionals will also find this book eye opening and motivating. In this episode Vicki and Lynn touch on some of the key themes and how they have seen these reflected in today’s students. Understanding some of the issues facing students as they prepare for a career will help you support and guide your student.

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Well, we know that spring is a busy time when you have high school and college students, so this probably wasn’t the best time to assign you homework and ask you to read a book and let us know what you think.  We get it. We didn’t get the response we had hoped for, so we’re not able to share reader thoughts (but we’d still love to hear what you think when/if you have time to read the book – which we highly recommend.)

However, as regular listeners know, we’re always happy to talk about our favorite books and to share some of the ideas we’ve gleaned from them with you. So that’s what we did in this episode.

We both reread Jeffrey Selingo’s book There Is Life After College: What Parents and Students Should Know About Navigating School to Prepare for the Jobs of Tomorrow.

This is a great book for parents, students and higher education professionals so we recommend it to everyone.  (You can read our review of the book here.)

There’s so much in the book that it’s difficult to narrow it down to a few ideas, but to give us some focus, we looked at some of the thoughts to ponder and questions that we sent out in our read-along emails over the last three weeks.

Some of the topics we touched on include –

• Taking detours, gap or bridge experiences before or during college
• How many different ways there are to “grow up” during the college years
• Transferring the knowledge and skills learned in the classroom to other contexts such as career
• The importance of what you do in college vs. where you go to college
• Helping students acquire important career skills in college rather than trying to learn or pick them up after college
• Making sure college doesn’t become a spectator sport with the expectation that there will be a job as a trophy at the end
• Being able to articulate and tell the story of your learning and career experiences as an authentic and true story of who students are.
• Five questions that Jeff Selingo shares that will help students begin to craft their story.

We mentioned an earlier podcast episode where we discussed gap year experiences – Episode #11 – Should Your Student Take a Gap Year Before College?

Vicki mentioned her favorite graduation speech delivered at Wellesley High School by David McCullough Jr. – You Are Not Special. It’s worth listening to – and asking your student to listen to as well.

Jeffrey Selingo’s most recent book is also a must-read for parents and students who are just beginning or in the midst of the admission process: Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions.  You can read our review of the book to find out more.

So much good information here and lots to think about. Maybe your summer beach reading?

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