A recent study was done by SmartMoney in which they sought to ascertain The Best Colleges for Making Money.  The goal was to find out which schools had the best payback in comparison to the tuition cost.  It is an interesting study, and if you care to see the results you can find them here. 

What I find interesting is that people spend countless hours and energy trying to get into high priced institutions when most of the public institutions give them an even greater rate of return on their investment.  And since this is what most of them want, why would you spend huge money and incur huge debt at a high priced out-of-state college or university when you can receive a quality education and likely obtain the same job after graduation as you would from a lower costing in-state institution?  For example, right here in Georgia, the University of Georgia and Georgia Tech out distanced Harvard and Yale in this study. 

However, here is a more crucial question I wish more Christians were asking,  yet unfortunately I seldom hear.  When you go off to college, where are you going to go to church?  I can not tell you how many times people ask me to recommend a church after their son or daughter is already off at school.  My immediate thought was why did not the church decision play a larger role in the initial selection process.  Could it be that we place such a higher premium on education than we do on spiritual growth and vitality.  No wonder so many college students seem to lose their faith and spiritual balance.  In the decision for college attendance church appears to be an afterthought in our priorities and thus we pass it along to our children. 

Here is a suggestion, the next time your child tells you they want to attend a certain school, ask them which church they are going to attend while there.  If they don’t have an answer tell them that selecting a church is just as important as selecting a college (if not more so).  Just as they collected info on the college and the subjects they want to study, so too must they collect info on the church they want to attend.  There are too many good schools to choose from for us to send our kids to one where we don’t know where and when they will attend church. 

Where to go to school is an important decision.  Where to go to church is even more so.