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Transitioning from high school to college: why some kids go wild

Why is it that some youth group kids go wild after graduation while others don’t? What can youth workers do to prepare students as they leave the relative safety of our youth ministries and begin to emerge into adulthood?

These are questions that the Fuller Youth Institute’s College Transition Project is currently tracking, and they are also questions that CCO staff member, Derek Melleby, thinks about a lot. Derek serves the CCO in partnership with the Center for Parent/Youth Understanding, as Director of the College Transition Initiative. His number one goal is to help connect incoming college students with campus ministry opportunities as soon as possible, so that their faith development will continue through these formative university years.
Derek was recently interviewed by Kara Powell, Executive Director of the Fuller Youth Institute and a faculty member at Fuller Theological Seminary, about the complexities of high school students transitioning to college life.

Fuller Youth Institute: What mistakes do youth workers tend to make in preparing high school seniors for college?

Derek: My experience has actually been that not enough things have been tried to have a long list of mistakes.  Many youth workers are just now addressing this issue for the first time.  But I do think that sometimes there is a failure to offer a gospel that connects with life on the ground.  The “God loves you and has a plan for your life” gospel is pretty abstract and doesn’t get you very far, especially in college.

The mistake that probably trumps all the others is that too much of youth work measures success with the amounts of activity and the numbers of youth that attend events.  Instead, if we can shift our paradigm to think about where we want kids to be in 20 or 30 years and then focus on what might be the most valuable things during the 4-5 years we have them that can help shape them into those kinds of people down the road, we may be more successful.

Click here to access the audio interview, and click here to read the accompanying article, “Youth Group Kids Gone Wild: What You Can Do Now to Prepare Kids for College.”