My employer has offered me a promotion, but it requires me to relocate. For many reasons, both personal and professional, I’m not keen to move at this time. If I decline the job will it hurt my career?

Well, declining a promotion is not typically a successful strategy for career advancement! Whether or not it will actively hurt your career there depends on what expectations the employer had about your willingness to relocate, whether future opportunities would also require travel and how you handle rejecting the offer.

Where the latter is concerned, keep your options open by expressing how appreciative you are of the opportunity, but saying that for family reasons — at this time — you are unable to relocate. Quickly add that you are committed to your career and to the company and that you’d like to be kept in mind for future opportunities. If you’re good, you’ll get another shot. But if you turn that one down too, don’t come back to me wondering why you’re stuck in your career.

In five years, our older child will be ready for college; the younger will be ready three years later. We’ve encouraged college as a goal for the opportunity a degree can provide. But with tuition hitting absurd levels, I no longer believe it’s as worthwhile an investment as it was in my day. Might work experience augmented with selective coursework eventually be considered comparable to a four-year degree with no work experience?

Trust me, with a 16-year-old and a 7-year-old myself, I feel your pain. However, from a purely financial standpoint here are two other numbers you need to know: The unemployment rate for people with college degrees is around 4 percent, while the rate for those with only a high school diploma is over 10 percent.

Want more? On average, college graduates earn significantly more than non-graduates, more than making up for the cost of the tuition over time. Finally, and perhaps more important, are the qualitative life benefits that are impossible to quantify — the experience, knowledge and relationships that one develops by going to college, and the opportunities that are created as a result.