Oakland, CA | College Planning: The Coddling of the American Mind Book Review

Hi my name is Erik Wolfers. I’m the managing Member First Main Financial. We’ve been helping our clients with personal finances since 2001.

Today I’m going to do another book review or consideration of a book called, The Coddling of the American Mind. It’s somewhat of a provocative title, but it is a very fitting title.

This book covers many of the issues and explains many of the issues and phenomenon that are dictating some of the open discourse or movements that are happening in our country today. The book does have some opinion in it, but the opinion is grounded in science or fact; but a lot of it’s just an explanation or a story of many things that have happened in our country over the last couple of decades.

The reason I’m bringing this up in financial terms is because we help many of our clients consider funding education for their children—higher education—and private school being pretty significantly more expensive than public universities; and there are trends highlighted in this book about some schools forgoing the mission of discovering truth and teaching critical thinking, and going more towards teaching ideology or teaching someone what to think as opposed to how to think.

So, if you are considering a university with your child—especially private university, a concept has emerged which many people (schools) have adopted, and some schools are not worth paying for because they’ve they’ve abandoned their original mission of discovering truth and spreading truth and teaching people really how to think and become great members of their society and hopefully create positive change—so I encourage you to read it and think about these issues as they pertain to paying for higher education for your kids.

If you are looking for some financial guidance; whether for a one time financial plan or continuing advice on your investments, we invite you to meet with a First & Main Financial planner for a free consultation. We would be more than happy to sit down with you, assess your situation and review our services to help navigate your financial future.