Choosing Colleges: A Christian Parent Guide

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Today's podcast question says, "Hi Elizabeth. I'd love some guidance regarding choosing colleges for my kids. Such as what to look for, pros and cons of Christian and secular, how to evaluate Christian universities, et cetera, if our goal is for excellent education and building a solid biblical worldview."

Transcript

Note: The following is an auto-transcript of the podcast recording.

Hello, friends. Today's podcast question says, "Hi Elizabeth. I'd love some guidance regarding choosing colleges for my kids. Such as what to look for, pros and cons of Christian and secular, how to evaluate Christian universities, et cetera, if our goal is for excellent education and building a solid biblical worldview. Thanks so much." Well, this is a really important question because even if you do not yet have children that are in this phase of looking for a college or a university at one point, your children will be in this phase, and so as we know, time goes really quickly, and so it's really a great idea to think about these things ahead of time, even before we're in the phase of having high schoolers who are potentially considering colleges. So we're going to dive down deep into this question today.

For those of you I haven't met before, my name is Elizabeth Urbanowicz and I'm the host of the Foundation Worldview podcast, and our goal on this podcast is to answer your questions so that you can equip the kids that God has placed in your care to carefully evaluate every idea and understand the truth of the biblical worldview.

And so if we want kids who understand the truth of the biblical worldview, we want that biblical worldview to be established even before they head off to the university and to hold the firm while they are there. So a few important things for us to consider. The first question that I think we need to consider when looking at a college for our children, is college the right choice for this child? And this is a question that I don't think too many people ask nowadays, but I think is so important, especially with the cost of tuition and room and board at colleges just skyrocketing astronomically and so many kids not even knowing what they want to do or what the best course of study would be for them. Well, we really need to think through is college the right choice for this child? Are they better suited for a trade? If we have a child who has not really enjoyed academics but is really good with their hands and is really good at fixing things, a trade might be something that they're better suited for. Today, I'm recording this podcast in 2024, and in 2024, many blue collar professionals are making top dollar today. Being a plumber or being an electrician, I mean, those are professions that if you do your job well, you can make way more money than someone who has a college degree, even whether it's a bachelor's, a master's, or even a PhD. So if we're thinking about what is my child gifted at? What is going to help them support themselves and their family one day, that college is not going to be the right choice for every child. So that's one question we should think through.

Another question is, should they take a gap year or two? And so for some kids, going straight from high school to college is going to be the best career path. For myself, I knew that I wanted to be a teacher, and I knew in order to be a teacher, I had to go through a four-year education program to get my bachelor's and then my teaching certificate. So for me, going straight from high school to college was the right choice. Some kids have no idea what they're good at, what they're gifted at, what they're passionate about, and so sometimes a gap year or two can be really helpful. Just giving them an opportunity to get a job and to see what they're good at and what they enjoy about working and what they don't enjoy about working and just getting a little bit of real life experience that can be really helpful before investing tens and a lot of times hundreds of thousands of dollars into a college education.

Also, two programs that I highly recommend you check out, two gap year programs. The Impact 360 Institute has a gap year for students to help them actually develop a firm biblical worldview and really understand what it means to be a leader in all aspects of life. Now, this is a highly competitive program. It is very difficult to get into, but it is a phenomenal program. So highly recommend you check out the Impact 360 Institute's gap year program. Also, Summit Ministries has a gap year program out in Colorado that's similar to Impact 360, where their goal is to develop a biblical worldview, really root kids firmly in a biblical worldview and teach them leadership skills before they head off to the university or wherever they're going to be headed. So that's the first thing that I recommend we all consider is college the right choice for this child.

Now we're going to move into our next question, but before we do, if you found the content of this podcast beneficial, please invest a few seconds that it takes to like this content to subscribe, to rate It, all of these things. Make sure that you don't miss any future episodes. They also really help us meet our goal of reaching as many Christian adults as we can to reach their kids to think critically and biblically in every area. Also, if you have a question that you would like for me to answer on a future Foundation Worldview podcast, you can submit that by going to FoundationWorldview.com/podcast.

Okay, so after we've asked ourselves the question, is the college the right choice for this child? If we have determined yes, college is the right choice, then the next question I think we need to ask ourselves is, what is the goal of our child attending college? Now, the person who wrote in this question said already the goal is an excellent education and building a solid biblical worldview. So if that's the goal, then I think that's really going to help determine where is the best fit for your child. The goal is going to ultimately determine the outcome of where is best for your child to attend. And now I also think the course of study that your child is choosing is also going to help determine which is the best fit. I already mentioned that I knew I was going to go into elementary education, and so for me, it was very clear that I was going to go to a Christian college. I mean, my parents did encourage that, but also just knowing I wanted to get a biblical view of education. Now, in all honesty, I went to a Christian college and there were some good things about the college and there was also a lot of issues with it. So in my education courses, I did not believe I actually got a distinctly biblical view of education. It took me kind of years of actually studying what does the Bible actually teach about training children? How has education been impacted by secular worldviews? Before I really had a distinctly Christian view of education, however, the view of education that I got at my Christian college was much better than what I would've gotten at a secular university, that it would've been much more indoctrination into a secular model of education. And especially nowadays, if you have a child who wants to go into education, I think a Christian college really is the only option because all of the things with the way our culture is progressing, so much of education and education is just going to be focused on gender and sexuality and critical theories and things that we don't want our kids immersed in and we don't want them to have to teach. So for something like education, I think Christian education is really the only option versus engineering. I have a friend right now who's son is about to graduate high school and he is incredibly bright. He is at the top of his class. He's got an incredibly high SAT score and he wants to be an engineer. And so for him, it was wisest to actually choose a top engineering school, which right now the top engineering schools in the US are not Christian colleges. So it made sense for him to actually choose to go to a secular university rather than a Christian college. So our child's career path, the goal of what are they going to graduate with a degree from is going to determine whether a Christian university or a secular university is going to be the better fit.

Now, here's just some general guidelines that I would give of things to do and how to investigate depending on whether you determine a secular university or a Christian university is the better fit. So if a secular university is a better fit, like for example, for my son, not my son, I don't have a son for my friend said who's going into engineering, they've determined that a secular college is the best fit for him. So a few things to do if you have determined that this is what's best for your child is when you go to the campus actually spend time sitting down and meeting with either department heads or professors. So spend time getting to know who are some of the men and women who are going to be investing in your child's life. Ask questions about what is the focus of the program? What does it look like for someone to graduate from this program? What are the professors' goals for people that, for students that graduate from this program? Then also ask for a list of the required coursework because you want to just to understand the scope and sequence of what are the classes that are going to be taken, what are the professor's goals in these classes? You can ask for sample syllabi so that you can see what are the goals of each course that your child is going to be required to take. And I would recommend that you actually have your child involved in this process because your child is the one who's going to need to take ownership of his or her education. And so you can go in and ask these things, but then as you the syllabi and other things, you can say, okay, here's what we're going to do when we go home over the next three weeks. I want you to read through some of these syllabi. I want you to identify what are some of the main goals in each of the courses. Where do these goals align with the biblical worldview and where do they deviate from the biblical worldview? Just so you're getting your child to think critically through what they're going to encounter in classes.

Then also highly recommend you check out campus ministries. What are the different Christian ministries that are on campus? And look for a ministry that provides both a firm biblical worldview and solid community, because in a secular environment, you're going to want most of your children's friends to be coming from this campus ministry because you're going to want them to mainly be influenced by other people who are coming from the same worldview. So some questions you're going to want to ask yourself as you check out the college ministry as do they provide strong Christian relationships? Do the kids, the students that attend this, are they pretty close knit or do they just see one another on Wednesday evenings when they meet for their meetings? Then does this campus ministry encourage participation in a local church? Because we're going to want our kids as they're away at a secular university to not just be surrounded all the time by people their own age, but to also have older people speaking into their life. We're going to want them to be able to invest in younger people. And so does this campus ministry, do they partner with the local church? I know that where I live, there's a university in my town and my church actually partners, I think it's called Baptist Collegiate Ministries, and we partner with them and a lot of the students from that ministry end up coming to our church because we believe that it's really important for students who are Christians to be plugged in to a local church.

Another thing to ask yourself is do they help students view their classes through the lens of Scripture or are they merely trying to help students live moral lives on campus? Because if one of the goals is that our children are going to exit this college with an intact biblical worldview, we're going to want people on campus who are going to be helping them view their subject matter through the lens of Scripture, not merely just encouraging them not to party, not to get involved sexually, not to do anything that's immoral. Do we want the campus ministry to encourage them to live godly lives? Absolutely. But we also need a campus ministry that's going to encourage them to view their classes and everything they're learning through the lens of Scripture.

I know that from my church that I grew up in New York, one of the ministries that church or the missionaries that church supports is a college ministry up in upstate New York, and I know that the husband and wife in that campus ministry have gone through the Colson Fellows program to make sure that they're what the students on their campus are going to be facing and how to help them think through all of the things they're facing in their classes biblically. So something I would highly recommend is that you attend a meeting of this campus ministry and meet the students, meet the people who are leading it, just so you can get a feel of what is going on here.

So those would be my recommendations if a secular college is the best fit for your child, if a Christian college is the best fit. I think that in some ways it's even more important to find out what's going on at a Christian college because just because the university has the label Christian does not mean that your child is going to be actually instructed in a biblical worldview. In fact, sadly, most Christian colleges that I am familiar with are actually going to be chipping away at that biblical worldview rather than bolstering it. So my recommendation is if you decide to send your child to a Christian college, don't focus on what the tour guides and the admissions counselors say. Tour guides and admissions counselors are usually wonderful. They're usually very loving people. They're usually very friendly people. When I attended a Christian liberal arts college, I was a tour guide there, and I know I loved the admissions counselors that I worked with. I loved getting to interact with different people on campus, but I also know that what is presented on paper and in scripts, it's not like colleges are purposely trying to deceive, but a lot of times what's presented in those scripts is not completely accurate. So rather than focusing on what the tour guides and the admissions counselors say, my recommendation would be to actually sit down with department heads and resident directors. Super important just to know what is the focus of certain departments and their studies.

I can tell you that for a decade and a half before I started Foundation Worldview, I lived just a few miles down the road from a very, very well-known Christian college. They would call themselves the flagship in Christian liberal arts education in the US and there was a lot of great things going on at the college. However, there was a lot and still are a lot of not great things going on at the college. I actually had two friends of mine, not close friends, but people that I knew who were professors at the university. One of them was a professor in the sciences, another one was a professor in education, and the stories that they would tell me just saddened me so much to know what was actually going on in a lot of the classrooms. For example, my friend who is the professor of science, she said, you wouldn't believe what the discussions are in the science department meeting. She's like, I am one of only two science professors who does not believe that humans got here through the evolutionary process. She's like, and most of the professors' goals is to break down what kids have been taught in their homes and their churches about God's role in creation. And I was like, oh my gosh, I can't believe this. And then another friend of mine who is a professor, she told me one time, she reached out to me for just help with some guidance. She was co-teaching a class, and she said that her co-teacher on the first day of class had it in the list of things to do to have the students state their preferred pronouns. And so these are all things that are going on at a university that is a Christian university that is considered fairly conservative.

So it's really important to sit down and meet actually with the department heads and resident directors to ask hard questions. So with department heads ask pointed questions about their view of the subject that they're in charge of. How, I'll give some examples whether it's communication or education or business. So to ask how is studying communications here different than studying communications at a secular university and really pay attention to the answers that they give? Do they just give some surfacey level answers saying, oh, well here communications is all done to the glory of Jesus. Yes, hopefully it is. But how are the actual communication courses taught from a distinctly biblical worldview versus a secular worldview and the goals of communication and the view on why it is that we as humans can even communicate? Then thinking about education can ask, what parts of the education system here in the US align with God's design for the education of children and what parts of our current education system show the impacts of the fall? How does the department head or the professors, how do they answer these questions? Do they have a distinctly biblical worldview where they are viewing parents as the primary educators of their children? Do they see a lot of the breakdown in our current education system in the US because of the breakdown of the family? And so actually asking these hard questions, you can ask, how are business classes taught from a distinctly biblical worldview? How is the worldview behind the business department training students to view business through the lens of Scripture?

Then set aside some time to actually meet with a resident director at one of the dorms and ask in on this campus, how are students counseled when they encounter an issue, when students sin and against the community, what do disciplinary procedures look like? What are the main goals of fostering community on this campus? Just to ask some questions that are really going to get to the heart of what is going on. And then something that I think is always very helpful. Your child may not like this very much, but if you can have meals in the cafeteria and ask to sit with students, make sure they look like they're friendly and you're not going to be bothering them. But when you sit with students, you can ask them questions about what they like about the college, what they wish were different, and you can just observe the type of conversations that they're having amongst themselves, and that's going to let you know a lot about the type of student that this school attracts.

Now, one thing I want to say before we close out this podcast is if the goal is to get for our child to have an excellent education and to continue building a solid biblical worldview, we can't wait to start this until the college years or even the high school years that we have to lay a strong foundation in the elementary years. And when we do this, what we're doing is we're setting up our children on the trajectory of having a firm biblical worldview by the time they leave home.

I think about my own experience that since my first years of students have started to graduate, not all the time, but usually once a year, I would get a Facebook message from the parent of a former student asking me for some guidance because their child had gone off to a secular university and left the faith or had gone off to a Christian university and was considering leaving the faith or just had all these wacky ideas and was asking for guidance. The really exciting thing for me once I started teaching Foundation Comparative Worldview curriculum to my students is since those students have graduated, I have not gotten any messages from parents. Now, it's not a one-to-one correlation, meaning I taught this curriculum, therefore all the children are Christians. No, but it is an indication that there was some change in these students. In fact, my first year when my first year of students who went through Foundation Comparative Worldview curriculum with me were in their freshman year of college, I actually got texts from several of them that were explaining to me how at their conservative evangelical colleges, they were seeing in their freshman level Bible classes or other classes that they were taking, that the professor was coming to that class actually with an alternate worldview. Now, I was in no way excited to receive these texts because it meant that my former students were actually sitting under professors who were claiming the name of Christ, yet were teaching things from an alternate worldview. But I was really thrilled to receive these texts in knowing that they had the foundation that they needed, that they were prepared with the critical thinking skills. They needed to recognize that even on their Christian college campus, they were being instructed with an alternate worldview. And rather than just absorbing that worldview or letting themselves be impacted by that, they were asking good questions in class, they were writing papers, they were having class discussions to help their other students and their professor to actually think through is what we're talking about actually distinctly biblical, and that is what we want for our kids. So highly recommend that you check out if you haven't yet, check out our Biblical Worldview, our Comparative Worldview curriculums for children. Those curriculums go together, ones for kids ages four and up, the Biblical Worldview. The Comparative Worldview is for kids ages eight on up, really laying a solid foundation for a distinctly biblical worldview and preparing kids to encounter alternate worldviews and recognize how they do not align with reality.

Well, that's a wrap for this episode, but as always, my prayer for you as we leave this time together is that no matter the situation in which you and the children God has placed in your care find yourselves, that you would trust that God is working all things together for your good by using all things to you into the image of His Son. I'll see you next time.