grades and the pressure that comes with both kids feel the need to exceed high expectations and the stress continues to rise these choices might not be right for everyone vote tech trade schools the military and many other options are available to us it seems like many of the many of my peers are only making these choices because they want to get into universities like penn state and the university of pittsburgh so why is it the kids have such a narrow focus when it comes to getting an education after high school when it comes to post high school education kids seem to want to thing and one thing only today on the edge we're discussing the stigma behind not going to college and whether or not college is right for everyone today i'm sitting with mrs tiffany kogan and mrs two teachers in peter's township high school who are here to discuss just choice choices after high school how are you two i'm doing well how you good now the reason i had you both on the show is because you chose less orthodox colleges i'd say can you guys let me know what those are i went to college in greenville pay for my undergrad and then i went to kane university for my master's i went to university of pittsburgh for my undergraduate work and i got my teaching certification from slippery rock university and i've also taken some classes that california university of pennsylvania and then what do you teach here i teach high school spanish and i teach high school english perfect we're both a p teachers now why do you think the stigma around not going to college started because i know it it wasn't as big a deal at least back in my parents day but in my grandparents but now it's like everyone needs to go to college when you think that started and why i've seen it happen actually fairly recently i believe probably within the last three or four years i saw all eight major shift and you know if you've seen it solid career and i think it also has a lot to do with the fact that it's a big business on a lot of fronts right i was going to ask him regarding colleges do you think colleges are in some way to blame for the high pressure to go to college as you said it was so large business now absolutely do i want to first start by saying that i feel very strongly that if you are interested in an area or a content or a career that requires university then you go to university but if you are interested in other aspects or walks of life i think that other avenues are totally political i think oftentimes we're equating careers with success with happiness which i don't necessarily totally agree with yet so some of the areas that you wouldn't necessarily go to college for the stuff like media arts those kind of degrees right or perhaps for instance one of my former students went to cosmetology school and she went to a community college and got a business associates degree and she's doing fantastic things she's loving life and i think that she always knew that college wasn't necessarily an avenue she wanted to pursue but her parents were very supportive of the decisions that she was making because they knew alternately that success doesn't necessarily mean they mean it's different for different people you know and to add to that i believe that everyone is born with a gift and i think if you don't use your gift in life then you are cheating yourself and i really do believe that i mean human beings will always need a haircut right so we're always going to need a hair stylist i think it's a wonderful career to get into and so i just wish kids would follow their hearts more and and use the gifts that they were given right when you mention that kind of what i immediately think of is all of my peers who want to be doctors lawyers engineers but that's not necessarily what they want what they actually want to do right what do you say to the kid who lives more rural area i'll say idaho who can't who wants to make movies but obviously idaho is doesn't have the biggest right media industry would they would you recommend they go to college they can get good contacts with internships and stuff like that or is there a better avenue for people like them absolutely i think that i think that everyone just needs to follow their heart and if your gift is making movies and you want to pursue that and go move to a bigger city study those things but if that's not what's in your heart and that's not what makes you you know that's not what moves you then don't and i think so many of us are just focused on what brings in the most money what looks good and that's not necessarily the most important thing in life i think happiness is but i also think that i think there's also been a shift away from taking risks and so i think that risk is a scary word for a lot of parents i think the parents do the very best job that they can with the resources they have and the love that they have for their children but i think oftentimes we don't allow kids to take risks on a multitude of levels we've gone from allowing kids to walk by themselves somewhere you know i think things have just changed and i understand that they've change for reason but i also think that risk taking and maybe perhaps not having the intended outcome and pulling yourself up and assessing the situation those are life skills that you need in all facets of life so if you're doing something just essentially please someone and i've been through this i went to school because i went to school for such a science degree because my parents that's what they do and i was one hundred fifty five percent miserable and when i called home and said this is not necessarily something that i want to pursue for the rest of my life i got some flak i'm not kidding you but at the end of the day looking back to my mother and my father and i always talk about the fact that i am where i need to be regarding the parents you've talked about how they need to protect their children do you think that by pushing college on an ad is just one more way because while college is not as nearly structured as high school is it is still more structured than just sending them off into the world do you think that's possibly why they might be pushing for that more than just go out on your own see what you can do absolutely nothing the easy answer is well well mrs cook and i are both parents and i think that every parent wants better for their children than they had and so you do want them to go on to something that will help them be successful you want them to be safe you want them to be secure but at the same time we have to be careful that we're not pushing our beliefs on our children so i think it's it's interesting because you want to you want to do what's best for them but at the same time what's best for them might not necessarily be what you think is best it might be what's in their heart which we both had a we both had a girl who went to school here who decided to take a gap year she in another student took a gap year this year and they went to panama for the year and i remember quite vividly having the conversations with her about what people will think is this a good move and she came back to visit and she said it's the best it's the best experience she's ever had and i think people are also very fearful of the gap here because they think that that means you'll never go to college but i think that if ever you want to travel or if you want to experience other cultures or if you want to gain some perspective that's the time to do it because you're not going to have an opportunity when you're my age or you have other responsibilities and then when you're young the responsibility is to yourself to figure figure it out it's funny that you bring up the gap here i was actually overcome having a conversation with my dad just about that last night and he thought it was a great idea and for whatever reason the first thought that popped into my head was exactly what you say which is o back to you know when i was younger you know the concept of backpacking across europe and staying at the youth hostels was hot you know it was like wow i really want to do that but i've seen at least four or five students from this community who have gone to do those things and who are perhaps interested in linguistics or international politics or you know just perhaps humanity and they have come back different people i think more mature and more ready to make a decision as to what they want to do i think that we have this crippling idea that we're trying so hard to make it that we're not necessarily realizing what it is we're making do you think that the pressure has all of that increase for the work i think of the kids that are so i know for me personally without that increased pressure of not having good grades and not be able to get into the right college that i probably wouldn't be working as hard but at the same time that you've got to balance that with how much stress you're having where do you think the positives and the negatives outweigh other going to let me just go can take that and i think that a little bit of fear is a good motivating factor but i think a large heaping dose of it is why we have an increase in causes anxiety and so if there are specific parameters and believe me i hold my kids to my own children as well as my students to a high standard i expect i expect them to perform but at the same time if we are constantly pushing grades and test scores and i mean every myriad of the adolescent life if we're totally focusing on what they should be afraid of we're not focusing on what their success could look like i think that's i think it's a problem and i do i do to mrs coke and shared an article with her students and also with me and i read it was from time magazine and i know you read it as well and i wrote down a quote from it that i love and it goes along with what mrs koch in saying it says we need to make sure that as parents and as teachers that we don't perpetuate a fear based understanding of success  and i do feel that that fear based understanding is permeating peter's times of high school i'm and probably other high schools in the area other competitive competitive high schools that article is one of the reasons i wanted to have this show it was because i remember reading one part of it where the father had told his daughter i will pay you one hundred dollars in order to get a c and i put myself in that situation and i honestly don't think anybody could have paid me enough which at the time bothered because i'm like you're paying me money to do less work why shouldn't i feel comfortable doing that which is why i don't like having this discussion absolutely just an interesting concept i don't i still don't know exactly why i wouldn't want to be able to have a c but yeah i mean what are your thoughts on that process well i think quite honestly this is what i think i think that seems to us indicate mediocrity and i don't think i don't think it's anything indicative of only this area i think in general there's such a competitive level to get into different schools and we pay attention to the princeton review rankings and we pay attention to all of these numbers we pay attention to a lot of numbers but numbers you can't quantify quality always and so i think that the see is scary on a bunch of different levels because no one necessarily wants to be just average but i think that it just really depends on why you are striving for the a are you striving for the a to learn the material because education to me has become transaction  and i see that as a little bit of a problem because it's always well i put in this much effort and this is what i should be getting and i don't know for always honest with ourselves about our efforts and and sometimes we have good days and sometimes we have bad days we are human beings and i think that the quantify ability of things that are are problematic that's a good spot to stop for now we'll be right back after a break with more discussion with mrs koch and this is my grandfather served in world war two spending time with him were the best memories of my life i became a physician because of my grandfather so i can help others like him i can't imagine working with better doctors or more dedicated staff fulfilling my life's mission with the help of my team and thanks to these veterans i'm proud to be a doctor and i'm proud to honor my grandfather every day search v a careers to find out more  of different colleges long story short i applied to three colleges only three colleges when i was a senior which is unheard of nowadays i have students who applied to ten fifteen twenty colleges this year i applied to grove city i applied to penn state and i applied to till college i went and visited all three schools and i was accepted into all three schools and i chose teal the smallest school of all three and people made fun of me people asked if i was going somewhere called feel worthwhile and made fun of it because it's called a deal college home or greenville p a home of chill college that's all that exists out there and everyone made fun of my decision however i got a full ride based on my high school  academics i qualified to be in a competition for four right scholarship and i did win that so i've never paid for college and that was a huge deciding factor and also when i showed up on my first day for the visitation i fell in love with the campus it was small it was intimate i met spanish professors because i knew i wanted to be a spanish major who made me feel welcome to make me feel important the programs there were excellent i wanted a small class size i didn't want to be a number and before i even graduated from t o i was actually offered my first teaching position which i had to decline because i was hired at peter's township not too long after but  because of that one hundred one on one attention that i received and because of the opportunities the resources small class size looking back i would not have changed my decision for anything and i got my dream job right out of college i'm here preview back off of what this is also saying i looked at a bunch of different options and slippery rock hard for me essentially the same thing that she's speaking of i had a very very close connection with the professors before i graduated i had the opportunity to present at three national conferences with my professors and at some of the other schools that i looked into which were good schools i just didn't feel like i would have gotten what i needed to jump into this profession because when you start your first day as a teacher and use and i remember very vividly this happening standing in front of the first theory class saying i'm responsible for your education a portion of it at least it's almost like parenthood when you look at a child and say am responsible for you so i think that the one on one interaction the continue ability to have opportunities that wouldn't have been offered to different schools those were the biggest motivating factor time when i got hired here but i'm very happy here in we think that our i know i can speak for you i think our skill set is appropriate for what we're doing and he new york city cause it's going to stress you out the response was but it's n y u law and why do you think it is that kids are willing to sacrifice their comfortability with a campus for the school well unfortunately i think the name of the school is a huge driving force here i think the name matters here unfortunately now and i'm not saying that that's one hundred percent a bad thing i had a student class recently just tell me the reason we want to go to these big name schools is because we worked so hard our entire life and we want to go to a school that reflects the work that we put in to these last twelve years and i totally understand that however if it doesn't feel right to you and it's not going to give you what you need to be successful or you can feel uncomfortable there i would highly suggest that kids do a little bit more research beyond what it's ranking is  and i think the other thing that i find very interesting too is they go to him and king and then they apply there with maybe not having visited several of the schools and so i think sometimes you know you can't go to every school and visit i understand that you know there are limits but i think that narrowing down the focus a little bit and saying what opportunities are on me being in a three hundred person lecture hall does this university have for me so i'm not just advocating smaller schools i'm advocating i think human interaction with the faculty or the you know the teaching assistants or the resources or the opportunities they would like for kids to start looking maybe at packages rather than just pedigree right and we talked i had mentioned that in the opening about alternatives to colleges vote for the military i mean even today those are still not exactly again they're not looked up at as much as colleges but they were in my opinion they probably work just as well what are your thoughts on that well you always need a plumber a mechanic an electrician a mortician i mean i hairdresser a chef i think that often times i'm amazed i actually have a student in my class who goes  tech in the afternoon and i was having a conversation with him and he's really enjoying it and so i think there's also this stigma and enigma how could he be in an a p language class and at the at the same time well everyone needs to be able to communicate and he's kind of pursuing something that if he wants to pursue it right after high school he has the ability to have to be gainfully employed and then perhaps will say you know what i want to do this or maybe i want to go into business he has some ability and i think sometimes we don't look at those situations as definitively as we should and there are so many options but i mean i don't my experience i keep hearing about the major schools and that's it how how my able to look at the smaller schools or get more information on abilities i know that some of my kids have used navi ons to kind of navigate where they're interested in going i also think and i suggested to some of my kids earlier this year that they take the as  because the as the test also gives you some understanding about some of your passions or strengths and it doesn't work for everyone but i think it's another avenue that you know you could perhaps look at so immediately that's what i would say the immediacy of being in this building and what you have at your disposal the other thing is i know the counseling office has tons of visits they have schools coming in here all of the time i don't know how highly they're attended you know you don't know i live there tended either i mean is my hearing about them but but i know that they have i mean they are very in even the board by the library there are some schools there that i'm kind of like well i haven't i never even thought about this place going to college fairs stopping why is it that kids don't feel the need for you to look for those but i mean do you feel that it's the parents who don't necessarily push the small colleges or is it the school where along the line do you miss those personally i think that if it's a parent's first time at the rodeo that you do what everyone else does will be a better equipped because we're in a high school but i feel for the parents who this is their first kid and you have a conversation at a barbecue and the mother walks away and goes oh  i don't even know what to do you know i think it's kind of crippling a resource for parents i think would be beneficial because then they could guide you know you often talk to friends and if you have children the same ages you have a lot of common conversations and so i think that sometimes things are overlooked from those perspectives because it's more of a word of mouth kind of thing i would think beyond all of the ratings and everything else when it's all said and done let's be honest we were just talking about this does it matter where you go to college some people would say yes and i think to a degree  but it doesn't really matter where you go to college just in my experience and after teaching for fourteen years you've been teaching for eighteen we see where our students end up in life their score on an e p test i barely remember i often don't remember it i remember what they do after college if you work hard if you're passionate if you show up if you're right if you don't respond to them all if you are a people person if you're trustworthy responsible have a strong work ethic it doesn't matter where you go to college those a job and you'll keep your job and you'll be respected in your profession i think going back to the fact that if you stumble sometimes and you're able to pull yourself up those are the lessons that build character and i think with the perusal of life and without the opportunities to look at what is available to you and actually tried to do those things i think it's more difficult for you to make a decision that's purely your own without any outside influence that's the perfect message that we should be ending on just making sure that kids know that they don't have to go to college or if they're going to want it doesn't need to be the best it's the person they are that matters and that's how that's how you get places in the world thank you both for being here with me thank you again i hope today's episode of the edges helps some of you take a new look at whether college is right for choice for all kids trade schools going into business for yourself and plenty of other options are available instead of attending university because college isn't right for everyone and the way kids stress over getting into into it is an unhealthy and attract detrimental thank you for 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