> jobs require significant education and/training after high school.

To the parent's point; Many college degrees are "just a credential" at this point; and college degree or not, training still has to happen on the job.

I see a trend of millennials (my generation) who go to school to go to school, get good grades to get good grades, not apply the education to the future. Then, there's no entry level jobs (because companies didn't have to train with a recession to get experience) and they jump between unskilled jobs they could have done with a GED or less.

We can also see this with the industry survey the other week of employers saying colleges aren't preparing software developers.

Higher education does have advantages for people beyond jobs; but only if they learn (not memorize) and apply it.

No one's brain is "broken" here. You're thinking on the individual level, the parent to your comment is looking at it from a societal level.

Once someone can read, write, do arithmetic, it's more specialized skills that are needed. There are very few jobs where four years of studying history or political science is necessary. In most cases, a few months of training could do far more than four more years of general education.

The value of a degree for most jobs is it shows an ability to learn. Ultimately, having people spend six figures to send this signal is making society worse off. Employers are looking for the qualities that make someone a good student far more than they are looking for experience criticizing ancient works of literature or solving systems of equations.

Would you go to a 50-year-old with a high-school diploma and tell them they only have high-school level thinking? Of course not. Colleges do not have a monopoly on your ability to learn. Many people read a lot of books, for instance, without a teacher telling them to.

Meanwhile, there are plenty of ways to get through college without getting past a high-school level of thinking.

This is not true. As a Millennial, I know many people in my parents' generation who did well starting with a high school degree. They may have obtained further education later, but not at the beginning. This is borne out by statistics on post-secondary degree attainment by Boomers. The only exceptions were people who wanted to jump directly into professional work, like law or medicine, or, frankly, black people, who have always seemed to have to have an extra level of education to compete in the marketplace.

The problem is that we waste most of those twelve years that we already have people captive for. The high school years are especially egregious. It's a lot of marking time that could be much more profitably used.

Maybe 20% of my high school class ever finished a college degree, of any kind. A lot more went for a few semesters, struggled through some core classes, and flunked out with a load of debt and little else to show for it. The people that are best off are probably the ones that either went into the military or straight into a trade.

The college-prep for everyone model appears to have been a pretty bad failure. The system in my parent's generation where people were explicitly tracked and split into vocational, business, and college tracks appears to have had much better results. The gutting of vocational programs really hurts; it would be easily possible to do most of a trade apprenticeship during those years.

I think 2 years post-HS education is probably optimal right now. Trade schools are often 2 years.

So founding Amazon, Google, Netflix, etc. is high school level thinking? I wish I had gone to that high school.