As of 2002, only seven states had extended child support to age 21 or beyond. In most others, court-ordered support ends when a child is 18 or finishes high school. Not surprisingly, analysis at Cornell University of a study of 27,000 high school students in the 80s and 90s showed that children of divorce were 40 percent less likely to apply to a selective college, and half as likely to attend.

It’s not just the lack of financial support, it is also the physical and emotional disruption that stalls some kids in their academic careers. Some see their grades fall, and never get back on the academic track. Others drift away from school, sports, and authority figures.

So, especially if you are a single mom, in this season when prep classes begins for SAT and ACT tests, when you are planning to haul your high school junior around the country to visit four-year colleges, when the college applications are filing your child’s inbox, and application fees are waiting to be paid, stop.

Although most parents would have a hard time admitting it – I did – not every child belongs in college. And a lot of kids should not go to college straight out of high school.

Putting yourself in the poor house trying to earn or borrow enough to send him or her to college is not a sound investment in your own future.

The average cost of a four-year college education at a public university or college right now is $75,000, including tuition, books, fees, room and board, and travel to school, but not including spring break, the new laptop, and a cute winter jacket. At a private institution, it’s $152,000.

Think you have a few years ahead of you to save that up? If your child starts college in the fall of 2016, the average cost of a public college four-year education will be $116,000, and a private college education, $237,000.

That’s a whole lot of spaghetti dinners for the next eight years. And no nights out.

Why do people go to college? Most adults remember why we went, if we went. It was something noble about ideas and meeting people from different cultures.

But does that apply today? Does it apply to your child, or does your child (like mine did) want to go to college because everyone else is going, because it’s a way to get away from home, and because once there, it’s possible to major in beers of the world.

Colleges and universities market themselves like the latest cell phone, with the stereotyped “three under a tree” covers of brochures (two guys and a girl, one white, one black, one Asian) and wide-angle photos of swimming pools, cafeterias, and bucolic walkways.

Kids buy into it, and so do their parents. Applying to college has become as automatic for seniors as posing for senior class pictures. And sometimes the parents are more enthusiastic about the idea than the kids.

Moms: What if I said that most kids go to college now to get jobs (good!) but that college is no longer an effective way to get a job (bad!).

Do you think college is the only way to be successful? Over and over we are told that college graduates earn X more than people who only graduate from high school.

Let’s say that’s true. But why is it true?

Is it true because the Bureau of Labor Statistics doesn’t compare college graduates to people who have education beyond high school, like a certificate in electrical work, auto repair, hairdressing, or massage therapy?

As far as careers are concerned, how does an electrician, or a plumber, or a car mechanic stack up against a BA in economics, English, or computer programming?

The first group will always have work, for one thing, because you can’t outsource your plumbing to Bangalore and you can’t get your car repaired in Manila. The second group may be able to teach (with some additional teaching courses), or they might fold sweaters at the Gap.

And consider this: Do people who go to college earn more because of what they learned (expensively) in college, or do people who earn more tend to be people who were good students in high school, whose parents had the money to send them to college, and who fit into the college mold?

Another way of saying this: Do people with Harvard degrees become successful because of Harvard, or is it the successful people who get accepted to Harvard? (See Christopher Jencks's report "Inequality: A Reassessment of the Effect of Family and Schooling in America.”)

And, finally, as more and more people get college degrees, having a college degree becomes less and less valuable.

All of this, of course, applies as much to you as to your children. It’s not always the best idea to get a four-year college degree. Especially if your maintenance payments are ending and there are young children at home.

I’ve interviewed women who discovered that they absolutely loved doing electrical wiring. So this applies not only to women with children, but to all women. Think about what the job market needs, and get certified to do that. Sometimes it takes as little as a year.

The world will always need health care aides, and property managers, dog trainers and cake decorators, legal secretaries and government bureaucrats who get their jobs through civil service exams. (No matter which party is in power, you can be sure that government is always going to get bigger.)

Just consider what some people pay to a stone mason to lay up a dry-stacked stone wall: around $15 a square foot. And they pay extra for the stones.

Brigid McMenamin wrote a blistering piece in “Forbes” magazine called "The Tyranny of the Diploma” that said, "A hefty 21 percent of all degree-holders who work earn less than the average for high school grads."

So if you’re a single mom, and you have a child who is not a high-achieving student interested in learning for learning's sake, who has not taken advance placement courses and not read through college catalogues as eagerly as they pawed through the new “Lucky,” maybe college isn’t the answer.

There are lots of suggestions in my book “Success Without College”, which can be bought used on Amazon for as little as $4 (and I get none of that). But it is also a matter of common sense.

If your son loves to bake, maybe he would like to go to a culinary institute. (Chefs are now like rock stars.) If one of your children wants to be on the radio, they don’t need to go to college for that. There are academies that will train them in radio technology and broadcast techniques.

Sure they will need something to talk about once they get on the air, but they can figure that out while they are working for $45 a week in some backwater radio station on the 3 am shift.

If your daughter just loves beauty magazines, and has an entrepreneurial bent, she might be able to run her own salon. While I was writing my book I met hair dressers who made $100,000 a year (hint: specialize in color, not cut), and waiters in steak houses who made even more.

Some people are happy working as a waiter for four nights a week, and spending their days on their fishing boats.

Why shouldn’t it be you? Why shouldn’t it be your child?

Sitting on that fishing boat, it may be possible to read great works of literature, to become an expert on navigation and the stars, to paint seascapes … in other words, to educate yourself in exactly the kinds of things that people pay lots to learn while they are in college.

Zachary Karabell asked in the 1999 book "What's College For? The Struggle to Define American Higher Education", "on a more pragmatic level, does college truly lead to better jobs?"

He answered his own question with "Not necessarily. The more people go to college, the less a college degree is worth."