And would you really want your parents to be your venture capitalists? Your parents may not be focused on getting to a quick exit like most traditional VC investors, but if the whole point of them releasing the money in tranches is because they don't trust your inexperienced judgement, that's just a recipe for your parents second-guessing your every move as a founder.
Children need to be able to fail, and quickly and safely recover from that failure - college, with poor freshman year grades and learning to live with less-than-perfect roommates and all the rest, is a much better way to impart that than letting your kids blow through a quarter million dollars with little more to show than a high school diploma at the end of it.
There are hundreds of cheaper, safer, and more responsible ways of doing that long before then.
I don't think colleges in US can be as hard as universities in some european counties. Especially where universities are free.
I would be curious to hear if there are some exceptions.
So for many people, acquiring signals is a complete waste of time and money.
I suspect that for the latter ones (how many? maybe 20-30) that wouldn't even be educative at all.
18 year olds are idiots (source: was one) and are simply not capable of managing organizations of adult humans.
Basically this means more or less that on the day your son (or daughter) becomes 18 you put on the table 2,000x100 US$ bills in a few neat stacks and ask him/her whether he/she likes it better to:
1) Study (hard) for the next 5 years (possibly in a remote city), living with one or more co-students in a tiny apartment and receive - say - some 500-600 bucks each month for petty expenses
OR:
2) get - here and now - all the 200,000 US$ as long as they are used ONLY in expenses related to the building of a new company, but of course with no particular form of control on expenses, as I trust you and you are big enough to make your own decisions.
With rigorously invented numbers (i.e. pure speculation or guessing), I would expect that out of 100 choosing option #1 70 would get after 5 or 6 years studying and a degree (without student debt to hunt them for the rest of their life) a decent, qualified job (and income), 20 a somewhat underpaid job, 5 no stable job/income and 5 (for one reason or the other) something else.
Of those that chose option #2, I would expect that 5 manage to build a "successful" company, 15 a more or less good company (anyway providing enough income to have bills paid and raise a family) and 80 either building a company soon going to Chapter 11/bankrupcy or building no company at all.
The good question would be how many of 18 years old would choose option #1 over #2?