That's easy to say in retrospect. But when you're a naive and scared 18-year-old trying to navigate a life you don't understand you may not be thinking quite so clearly.

For example I have one friend who was an immigrant. First generation college graduate, parents don't speak English, and his parents take home more working construction than he does. That wasn't what was sold to him, but he bears all of the risk and all of the responsibility.

For those that aren't immigrants your most likely source is parents or counselors or advisors, nearly all of which were encouraging the same thing.

You've just had "college is the only way" drilled into your head for the 13 years. You've been told and conditioned to understand that if you do not go to college, you will be flipping hamburgers for minimum wage. The people telling you this are your parents, your friends' parents, your teachers, your principals, your guidance counselors. All of these people are supposed to help you, right?

Of course, you've also go to contend with the fact that it's culturally acceptable for your parents to toss you out on your ass the day you hit eighteen. So you're faced with the prospect of having to go it your own, at eighteen with no life experience and probably very little savings. There's probably very few jobs in the area, and it would be hard to live off them. Or you can just sign your name on a piece of paper and be whisked away to the mythical land of college. Who knows, you'll probably get to drink with your bros and get laid. Sounds like a great time?

At a certain point this stuff stops being "think for yourself" and is just straight up indoctrination. Maybe you're lucky and your school district has some kind of alternative program for trades, or maybe JROTC and you figure out the military isn't a horrible option. For most? It's not even a consideration, it's college or a life of failure. I can't really blame a lot of folks for not realizing how shit things would be. They were brainwashed.

Assuming that 18 year olds should be capable of calculating cost-benefit analyses and execute long-term planning en masse is entirely too optimistic. Our schooling is way too bad to expect that, and our brains aren't even fully developed until the age of 25.

The fact that so many young people feel the need to go to college to get a career in the first place is a sign that our economy is highly imbalanced right now. People shouldn't need degrees to live a comfortable life, yet here we are, completely thrown off due to an extreme drop in demand for labor.

One of my favorite things to knock on about is how we live in a capitalist society but our compulsory education doesn't ever address basic finance & economics. Most of these kids have no idea what interest is or what their post graduation payments are going to be like unless they've had the fortune of a knowledgeable parent or teacher taking the time to explain things.

It's kind of shameful to me that I was 30 years old and getting an engineering degree before I ever encountered the idea that money has a time value, hence interest.

I agree 100%. Out of my 4 years of high school, which included several AP classes, the best class I ever took was personal finance. It taught me how to manage money, calculate the cost of retirement, and think about what money is in the first place. Without the class, I would have severely suffered once I got on my own. The year after I graduated, the school removed the class because they felt it was irrelevant.

The cynical side of me tells me the system is made this way so the rich stay rich. Seeing the direction this country is going in isn't doing anything to change that idea for me.

I really doubt there's some cabal of rich people that don't want others to understand interest. If anything, it would be to their advantage to have more potential business partners floating around out there.

I think the reality is more likely that people working in schools are public employees, they tend to be apathetic or hostile towards capitalism, and not terribly interested in boring business stuff. These are the people who set the curriculum.

Public employees in most other developed countries seem to do a pretty good job, though. Why do you think they succeed where America fails?

Major citation needed on that one i'm afraid. Pretty much worldwide, the public sector and government are regarded by many as slow, excessively bureaucratic and failing the youth.

You think they're doing a good job of educating the public school students, particularly in terms of money? I don't think I've got the information to agree or disagree with that. I'm inclined to say they're not succeeding where the US fails, but, again, not really qualified to say.

What is interesting is that, for many people, it doesn't really become a capitalistic society until they turn 18. That compulsory formal education you mention, and the social norms surrounding it, often shields the youth from the real world, taking the lessons the real world can provide them away until much later in life, as you experienced.

It seems like at this point at lot of the education we feel is necessary exists simply, and perhaps ironically, to make up for the lack of that exposure one has to reality because of the heavy focus on formal education through one's formative years. I would even suggest that we've created a situation where the more formal education one receives, even more formal education is required to make up for what what education was lost in the process.

Interesting points. I think there's definitely something to be said for education curricula having lost the plot. It seems more and more to me that a lot of the first few years of college is really just teaching things you should have already learned in high school.

I also think we've drifted towards thinking that all education takes place in a school. Things like parental mentorship, working a job while in school, extracurricular reading or building things for fun are falling a bit by the wayside. Education is (or should be) a lot more than attending lectures in a classroom, even at the middle school and high school levels.

My GF is a school counselor, and one of her constant sources of frustration is how much stuff is getting pushed onto schools to do which really isn't in their provenance.

>>One of my favorite things to knock on about is how we live in a capitalist society but our compulsory education doesn't ever address basic finance & economics.

That is largely high school math + common sense.

They actually do teach a lot of life skills at school. One just needs to pay attention.

The true reason why people take personal finance later in life is because they burn their hands, and learn the lessons the hard way through some failure.

Just a side note: I always take issue with the "brains aren't fully developed until 25" factoid. What does "fully developed" even mean? We certainly learn things after the age of 25...isn't learning brain development?

I've put a link down below, and you can find many more if you google "brain development 25". Basically, in adolescence people go through a phase of synaptic pruning, where the brain rewires and gets rid of a lot of unnecessary connections. During this time, certain parts of the brain involved in long-term planning, repercussion prediction, impulse control, social status, and a lot more don't function nearly as well as normal. This process continues up until about age 25 and ends with the prefrontal cortex, which handles some of the more complex computations like planning and long-term goal attainment. Many consider this the reason why people in their late teens and early twenties are goobers who are more worried about social status and having fun than meeting long-term goals.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1411647...

You're assuming a proper amount of intelligence/decisiveness at ~18 years old. I was a fucking airhead at 18 (11 years ago) and, like most kids, listened to my parents as I thought they knew best. They were not financially intelligent and as a result, put me on a precarious path with the best intentions of me having what they understood as a better future.

I also chose a path back then (working in television) that has nothing to do with what I ultimately developed an interest in (software design/dev) later into college (when changing majors would have racked up even more debt).

> You're assuming a proper amount of intelligence/decisiveness at ~18 years old.

18 year olds don't lack intelligence, they (in general) lack impulse control and the practical ability to effectively weigh consequences of concrete decisions (evaluating them in the abstract is not a problem.) This ability generally isn't fully fenced until the mid-20s.

It's sort of sad how much we have infantilized ourselves in this generation. We're almost to the point where somebody who is turning 30 is less mature and capable than someone 100 years ago was at sixteen.

100 years ago, manual labor was still a dominant slice of the economy; a sixteen-year-old who uncritically followed the advice of their parents would probably not be screwing over their career.

And if they could attend college 100 years ago, it was worth the investment.

I still find it disappointing how dysfunctional we expect people to be these days. My grandfather had four children at my age, and had fought kamikaze pilots off Okinawa.

At age 9, Abraham Lincoln's father left for half a year. Abraham had to take care of his sister, hunt for food with a rifle, and chop wood to stay warm. This was in a 1-room house with no running water, no electricity, a dirt floor, and no privacy.

He turned out OK with that parenting, even elected president. Modern social services would have put him in a foster home.

Society and the state have decided that people this young can't think for themselves. We already have stuff like drinking laws which say you cant handle alcohol till youre 21, but here please decide the course of your life and if you want to get into 10's of thousands of dollars of debt right now. We also tie Fafsa money to your parents with little recourse to do anything if they don't decide to help you out. Society expecting 18 year olds to follow these rules, but also be responsible and critical thinking adults is just being hypocritical

We need the state to do all that hard thinking for us. That is why we (millennials) were so enthusiastic for Sanders. We were duped when it came to education but, let me tell you, our political intuition is right on target.

You're right

One aspect that supports useless degree seekers is that it's not about "today's" job market, its about having the degree forever to give an advantage in any job market

Oops!

The first thing the mob will do is come for the intelligentsia so no use telling people that their parents were wrong or that they were gullible