We actually never really gave our kids only those two choices, they just joke about our emphasis on ROI on college investment because they have friends now graduating with debt and no job prospects, and they are glad to not be in that spot. So it took a few years, but for once they kind of see now that not all our advice was totally useless.
It is like the Mark Twain quote, "When I was a boy of fourteen, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be twenty-one, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years"