My Son, the Dropout?

What's a Druish Mother to do?

My spawn is considering not taking classes this winter/spring semester in college and working instead. Partly because money to pay for the semester is tight (but we could manage it) and partly because we might move before the end of the semester.

My husband is against him taking a break from college, saying that jobs are hard to find and we probably won't move till after the semester is over, if we move at all. The whole 'why we would move' thing would take a blog post of its own, and husband doesn't want me to post that. I WILL say that we are not being foreclosed on - we rent, so it's not like we haven't been paying the mortgage!

Spawn went to the campus yesterday and talked to an advisor there. He wanted to know if it was a problem going back to school if he dropped out for monetary reasons, when he had to decide by, etc. The advisor had just had that SAME conversation with the previous student s/he had seen. And has been having that discussion with HUGE numbers of students. Families can't pay the same amount that they have been paying towards college. Student loans thru' the government have been cut back. Student loans thru' banks are harder to get.

We're lucky - neither we nor he have taken any loans to pay for spawn's college education. So if he does drop out, he won't have to deal with paying those back. Nor will he have to when he DOES eventually finish college. I expect that many of the other students facing this decision have that extra pressure on them.

I dropped out of college for a while back in my wild youth - it was clear my grades weren't going to get me into law school, and I needed to decide what to move into next. So I went to secretarial school (the same one my Aunt Ann had gone to some 40+ years earlier!) and did secretarial then administrative assistant work until I returned to college. So I'm comfortable with whatever decision the spawn makes, as long as he works. Even if it means working at McDonalds.

Stay tuned.....