Last Words of College Advice

College for Christians - Conclusion

Nine months after we started, we’ve reached the end of my college guide for Christian families, which I’ve been publishing here at Substack since last fall! Whether you’re a teenager, a parent, or anyone else playing a role in someone’s college journey, I hope you’ve found College for Christians helpful.

I’ll go back and do some final edits now that the writing is complete. But now that I’m not adding new chapters, the entire book will be available only as part of my Substack archive, which is open to paid subscribers. So I’m going to celebrate the end of the project by offering a special discount on paid subscriptions:

Click this link anytime before the end of August to get a year’s worth of full access to College for Christians (and everything else at The Pietist Schoolman) for just $25 — both a 50% discount and roughly the cost of the book had it been published more traditionally.

I love writing, but I hate writing conclusions. I never know how to wrap things up, so most of my blog posts just… end. My last words are always the weakest parts of my books.

So as the weeks counted down and my list of unwritten chapters for this serially published book grew shorter, I worried how to complete College for Christians. I thought about just reiterating some of the principles I’ve mentioned multiple times in earlier chapters — Your choices in college are more important than your choice of college… Always trust that you have something to learn from every experience… Keep discerning your calling — but, well, I’ve already mentioned them multiple times.

So what can I add that’s both new and helps sum things up?

Fortunately, since starting the book, I’ve had a few more chances to talk in real life to people like those who would read College for Christians, and those occasions inspired two more suggestions to flesh out: one for prospective students; one for their parents.

Students: “Find your version of college sports”

When I first shared my table of contents midway through this online publication process, one of my colleagues asked why I didn’t have a chapter dedicated to college sports. It was a good question, since I think about sports and higher ed all the time! My basketball and baseball careers ended in high school, but I follow those and other sports semi-religiously. I probably spend less time writing than I do driving my teenaged children to tennis, track, and volleyball. And I regularly teach a course on sports history at a university where a quarter of the students compete in intercollegiate sports.

That share isn’t unusual for smaller private universities, but the half-million or so student-athletes active in NCAA-sanctioned competitions make up only a tiny fraction of America’s 16 million undergraduates. And much as I love both sports and higher education, the former can warp the latter, especially at in the top tiers of the NCAA’s “money sports” (football and basketball). So I stand by the advice I gave back in ch. 6:

…unless you’re an athlete yourself, be careful not to let sports play a significant role in shaping your college decision. Games are the events on campus that bring together the largest share of the university population at one time, and the emotional power of athletic competition deepens the attachment of students and alumni to their university. But if what you care about is being part of a college community, then it doesn’t matter how successful its teams are; you can cheer on your friends even if they lose every game and have no desire to go pro. Be aware that large universities use their sports teams as marketing levers, boosting interest well beyond their natural recruiting areas through activities that aren’t central to their mission. Whether you want to go to college for personal transformation, professional preparation, or sheer exploration, sports should be well down the list of criteria for the 97% of students who are not going to be NCAA athletes.

Nonetheless, there are significant benefits to being a student-athlete, particularly in Division III sports. So when I had a chance to try out a College for Christians workshop for some high school students in Illinois,¹ I found myself closing with this advice: “Find your version of college sports.”

If it’s not football or fencing, soccer or softball, find something else you can do at college that will:

1. Form the whole person, not just the mind. Especially at Christian colleges like Bethel, you’ll often hear the language of “whole-person” or “holistic” education. But it’s all too easy at academic institutions to focus on intellectual formation, and to neglect the other parts of yourself. One benefit of sports, in particular, is that they’re constantly pushing athletes to attend to the needs of their bodies (fitness! nutrition! sleep!!) and how they connect to their minds, spirits, and relationships. Whatever extracurricular activity you dedicate yourself to, try to pursue an interest that will let you complement or supplement classroom learning with other means of physical, emotional, and spiritual formation.

2. Teach you to set goals. As I mentioned in ch. 18, each of my syllabi includes a list of learning objectives. That’s meant to help clarify the outcomes of learning, but I wish that more students would bring their own goals to my courses, rather than just doing the minimum that I ask of them. So I always appreciate that student-athletes in my classes are not only accustomed to working hard and managing their time, but to setting goals that will keep pushing them to grow in multiple ways. If you aren’t a runner like my daughter, who aspires to set new personal records during each track season, find another activity that will teach you how to set short and long-term goals whose completion relies on motivations more intrinsic than grades.

3. Let you learn from practice and failure. I also appreciate that the student-athletes in my class resonate immediately with some of my typical educational mantras. They’re accustomed to the idea that practice is as important as performance, so when I give low-stakes assignments that let students get better at specific skills, I’m sure my student-athletes think about the drills that they’ll be doing later that afternoon — and how those repetitive activities prepare them for the higher stakes of their next game, meet, or tournament. But still more importantly, athletes know firsthand that failure conduces to learning. My baseball players make outs much more often than they get on base, and my basketball players would be thrilled to miss just 60% of their three-pointers. They’ve long since learned both how to learn from their strikeouts and airballs and how to forget them and try again. If you don’t share their love of those games, follow your passion into another activity that will give you chances to practice, then to learn from failures in performance.

4. Force you to work as part of a team. As a stage of modern life, college is all about learning autonomy — making your own decisions about your time, your relationships, your values, and your future. So I’m not surprised that most college students prefer to behave like individuals in their classes; I’m sure, for example, that “group project” is the least favorite kind of assignment for most of my students. But the very term college implies collective effort. So I appreciate that students who play sports as part of a team — or perform music or drama as part of an ensemble, or fulfill a role within student government or on a student newspaper —  understand deeply that college involves learning to be yourself within a community in which your success depends on more than your own effort. That’s something that Christians should especially value, as members of a Body whose different members have been called to different vocations and given different gifts… but all for a shared purpose (see Rom 12:3-8 and 1 Cor 12).

So whether it’s an intercollegiate or intramural sport, an artistic ensemble, a student organization, a research team, a study session or Bible study, or some other group, spend at least part of your time in college as part of a small community in which you need to work together with diverse people who will encourage and challenge you to help fulfill your common purpose, as you work through inevitable misunderstandings, disagreements, conflicts, and other struggles.

Parents: “Keep praying”

One reason I decided to write this book at this point in my career is that I’m on the verge of becoming part of its audience. In the months it’s taken to write College for Christians, my kids have finished their first year of high school and are now planning their first college visits for the fall of their sophomore year. So I’m increasingly seeing higher education not just through the eyes of a professor, but those of a parent. I’ve generally tried to address myself primarily to people my kids’ age, but I’ve always imagined someone like me reading the same chapters over their shoulders.

So as a last word, let me repeat something I said earlier this summer, when I took part in a Bethel faculty panel for Minnesota Private Colleges Week. As they start college, I told those parents, the best thing you can do for your kids is to pray for them.

Or more precisely, keep praying for them, since if they’re like me, those parents have been praying for their children since before they were even born. Then again at every stage in their education, when (as I wrote in the one chapter aimed exclusively at fellow parents) it’s only natural to feel both excited and terrified for the people you love most in the world, as each step they take into increasing independence takes them further out of the safe, loving environment you’ve tried to create at home.

Prayer, then, is both a continuation of your ongoing vocation as a parent — a calling that will keep you loving and teaching your children long after they finish college — and a way to remind yourself that college takes your kids beyond your immediate care and out of your control. Even if they choose to live at home rather than move into a dorm, they are still young adults who are exploring their identity apart from you. They are still transforming their beliefs and values apart from yours (though not necessarily against yours). They’re still preparing for careers that will give them responsibilities and resources independent of yours.

So the very worst thing you can do as a parent of a college student is what would have seemed ordinary and responsible mere years earlier: to intervene in their education, inquiring after the details of teaching and learning and advocating for them when anything seemed confusing or objectionable.² Fortunately, I’ve had only a handful of interactions with so-called “helicopter parents” during my twenty-plus years as a college professor; far more often, I don’t even meet mothers and fathers until graduation, when I get to thank them for entrusting their sons and daughters to the care of people like me.

But the key word there is trust — as it is in so much of higher ed.³ By all means, ask your kids how their classes and other college activities are going, attend their games or concerts if you can, and offer counsel when they seek it. But more than ever before, you now need to trust them to make their own choices and to learn from their own failures, and you need to trust their professors, coaches, resident assistants, campus pastors, and other adults on campus to play their roles in the educational process.⁴

It’s never easy to trust in those ways, especially since the stakes of higher education seem so much, well, higher. But having spent years helping your child to “put on the whole armor of God,” you can now send them to college equipped with the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, and otherwise just do what the Apostle Paul wrote next: “Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication” (Eph 6:13-18). As they enter a stage of development that you cannot control, let prayer teach you to release your children into the unfailing, loving care of the God who will “keep [their] going out and [their] coming in from this time on and forevermore” (Ps 121:8) — the college years included.

Acknowledgments

Now that I’m done, let me thank a few people before I move on to whatever writing project comes next!

• Sam Mulberry, my Bethel colleague and frequent collaborator, who helped me start thinking through College for Christians by co-hosting a podcast version several years ago. (He also designed the cover image that I’ve used in the final Substack version.)

• All my other friends and colleagues who are a bit farther along in their own parenting journeys and shared insights from their own experiences of helping their kids navigate college searches and transitions.

• The guest experts who let me interview and quote them about different facets of higher ed in Part Two: Alex Hintz on financial aid (ch. 3); Rick Ostrander and Joe Thackwell on Christian ministries at public universities (ch. 6); Kyle Peach on admissions and college fit (ch. 8); Chris Moore, Cristian Arias, and Jamie Shady on the experiences of first-generation students (ch. 9); and Walter Kim on growing in faith in secular spaces (ch. 11).

• The Bethel students who took time at the end of the Spring 2025 semester to complete an anonymous survey whose responses I quoted often in Part Four of this book.

• Everyone else who shared suggestions and other feedback via comments here, on social media, and in real life conversations.

1. An activity I’d love to try again with other school or church groups! Email me if you’re interested in setting something up.

2. Note that under the Federal Educational Rights and Privacy Act, “[w]hen a student reaches 18 years of age or attends an institution of postsecondary education at any age, the student becomes an ‘eligible student,’ and all rights under FERPA transfer from the parent to the student.”

3. On that theme, see the end of ch. 20.

4. Especially in the second half of the book, one of my goals here is to help make college more transparent and less frightening, which hopefully makes it easier for parent-readers to offer the level of trust I’m asking for as we finish.