Ross Boone doesn’t understand it. We don’t either.

Money is available for those deserving and those in need to help improve themselves and their prospects for success by attending Paul D. Camp Community College, or any college. Yet, few young people seem interested in applying for it.

Boone, who heads up PDCCC’s Suffolk campus, is president of the East Suffolk High School Alumni Association. The Association has four scholarships available to children of ESH alumni to attend TCC, but takers are hard to find.

That’s puzzling, not to mention frightening for what it means for our future.

Attending college is a privilege, one that past generations have worked hard to achieve and cherished. It was a parent’s dream that their children got that opportunity and they instilled that dream in their children, worked hard, saved and sacrificed to make it a reality.

That’s not always the case anymore. It’s not that parents don’t want their children to have a better life, they do. It’s just that so often today, instead of instilling our children with a thirst for knowledge and a desire to succeed, we just buy them stuff. As a result, they grow up feeling that the better things in life should be given to them.

They are in for a rude awakening. While we haven’t felt the pinch so much in Hampton Roads, across the nation jobs – any jobs – are becoming harder to come by. Applicants are many and those that are better educated have an advantage.

Children need to learn that the good things in life are handed on a platter to only a fortunate few. The rest have to work hard and persevere and even then there are no guarantees. Schools can’t instill that. It’s up to parents.