和尋求一個好工作。當然找個心儀並高薪的工作也可以是上大學的目的，不過每個學生的目標不一定一致，而且父母和孩子的目的也可能不一致。父母用自己的生活曆練來引導孩子少走些彎路當然好，不過也要允許孩子自己去犯錯誤。年輕不就是用來走彎路的嗎？他們也有本錢有時間。
這個podcast裏麵Northwestern校長的經曆也很有意思。
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/what-exactly-is-college-for/
you might think Schapiro himself attended an elite college. He did not; in fact, he barely made it to college at all.
SCHAPIRO: I went to an under-resourced public high school and most of my friends were not college-track.
This was in New Jersey, in the early 1970s.
SCHAPIRO: They had a very good auto-mechanics thing, and they had a hair-dressing thing. I once spent a summer in the graveyard shift of UPS loading trucks. I made $1.71 an hour if I remember correctly, the minimum wage. I worked as a dishwasher in a catering place, and I worked for one summer on an assembly line in a factory.
But Schapiro did have a strong incentive to apply to college.
SCHAPIRO: I didn’t want to go to Vietnam. I had no intellectual interests at all. But fortunately, I tested okay on the SAT, so I got a merit scholarship to go to Hofstra, which was pretty much an open-enrollment commuter school.
Hofstra is a private university on Long Island. Even today, its acceptance rate is around 70 percent, so way less selective than elite schools like Northwestern and Williams; their acceptance rates are, respectively, 9 percent and 15 percent. At Hofstra, Schapiro was just trying to do well enough to keep his scholarship and avoid Vietnam. And then he found the economics department.
SCHAPIRO: I just fell in love with the life of the mind.
After graduating from Hofstra, he got a Ph.D. in economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
SCHAPIRO: It does show for me the randomness and how many people who could have pretty successful academic careers who just never get the opportunities. I don’t think I was the smartest of my friends at Union High School, but they never had the chance, and I did.
Schapiro is a quintessential college success story: he went from loading trucks for the minimum wage to making around $2 million a year as a college president.
