How Important Is College?

Miley Cyrus is too busy with her career to go to college this year, and was home-schooled anyway, so it makes sense that her parents are not participating in the tradition of fall drop-offs at institutions of higher learning. Plus, shes a rock star with two new movies (The Last Song and LOL: Laughing Out Loud with Demi Moore) so who cares whether she goes to college?

But for weeks moms of the less famous and more ordinary have been Facebooking about the trauma of leaving their kids on college campuses as if this is the biggest turning point in their lives.

Ive had the trauma of a child leaving, but not for college.

As a teenage father, my older son did not go very far when he graduated from high school. He had to work in order to take care of his daughter, and when he had her half time, every other week, they lived at home with us. He did go to community college and had his own apartment with roommate buddies. But with me acting as co-parent to his daughter every other week, it wasnt exactly like he left the nest. In fact, he brought a wonderful new child into our nest, a girl, which was actually better than if he had gone away to college.

Nothing could have convinced me of that during the months before my granddaughter was born. With my husband and I having earned a Bachelor of Arts in English, Bachelor of Science in Chemistry, both with honors, and a Masters in English with a Specialization in Creative Writing and an M.D. in Internal Medicine, we had certainly expected our first-born to enroll in a university, perhaps our alma mater. So I mourned the loss of dropping Rob off at a dorm and felt bereft and worried. I was sure his future was going to be limited to menial jobs.