Coach/Dad, the ole train is leaving the station ploy, eh?? I am not so sure I agree with you although, that is a good one!! There is only one problem with that, it is his ticket to ride not yours dad!!
Without knowing any of the circumstances of anyone, you just "kick him in the butt or tell him to get off his butt and tell him the train is leaving the station"!!! You are not going to be sitting next to him when he has every interview, you have to let them grow up eventually!!! The last thing I would ever tell anyone, let alone my son, is the ole, train is leaving the station story, you've got to make a quick decision!!
The problem with that story is what happens if the train was headed to NY and he was trying to get to California, maybe there was a gold rush out there, who knows!! You just put him on the train to the East Coast when he really wanted to go West young man!!! Now once he gets to the east coast, he just has wasted all of the time to get there and it is too late for his appointment on the West Coast with the surveyor, all the Gold claims, and streams are packed with prospectors who just struck it rich 3 days before he got there because they made the right decision!! You just convinced him to make the wrong move!! And maybe his entire future would have been wonderful had he made his own decision!!
Now in regards to your age and mentioning "no one at your age says "if only I had gotten my accounting degree at a different university, I would have been successful"!! You are probably right at your age, but at my age alot of people are saying, I sure wish I would have started this or that earlier, I could have been doing this for x years, saved x dollars, gone x places or done x things!! It is all a matter of perspective!! The ones that get a little older than I say, I sure wish I wouldn't have wasted all of that time doing X, I could have been doing Y and now I don't have time to do Y!!
Anyway, I do appreciate your response, and I hope that you have made the right decision for your son, or at least directed him where you thought he wanted to go!!