[quote=flu]
99.5% of the population aren’t Bill Gates or Larry Ellison who don’t need college because (1) they are exceptionally brilliant AND (2) because their parents had money and were well connected.
As much as we would all like to think our kids are brilliant or exceptional, most likely they are average to above average at best and no where close Gates/Ellison. For the remainder of the 99.5% of us, it’s hard to argue that not going to college opens more doors/opportunities than those that do.
Often times, folks like to take the most success cases and extrapolate that as it is more common than the norm. For every Bill Gates/Ellison that didn’t “need” college there are several thousands that arguably could have done much better with better education. IF that wasn’t the case, this country wouldn’t have so many folks struggling financially working at a dead end minimum wage job indefinitely or the majority of people in this country stating that the american dream is dead. If you look at a lot of these cases, you can’t help but ask if these folks would have been better off with some better education, because many of them barely graduated from high school. What we do know is with their limited education and limited skill set, they remained stuck at their predicament.
Even IF you were able to succeed without higher education decades ago, that was then. This is now. This world will increasingly get more competitive. The world is a lot smaller, with more people hungry competing for the same resources. It’s estimated than in Asia, top rank universities are pumping out 1 million highly educated STEM degree graduates EVERY YEAR, not including them ones from Eastern Europe, Russia,etc. These are people who are going to be more educated and more knowledgeable over the next decade. Call it evolution or call it modern day version of darwinism.
So, yes, you will need to help your kid(s) out as much as you can by opening as many doors as you possibly can, without breaking your wallet.
This is especially the case if your kid(s) don’t have the personality to compete or driven to complete something no matter how difficult something may be nor understand that moving forward things aren’t going to be easily “given” to them on the global scale, as it might have been more readily “given” to their parents or grandparents, when there was much less competition. My kid is one of with a personality that unless something drastically changes, my has zero competitive bone in their body, so things are going to be tough for my kid, unless somehow we can even the score a bit.
Two part plan is
(1) helping open doors for your kid(s) to survive on their own in their endeavors, whatever it maybe
and
(2) as a backup plan, setting up a trust fund for your kid(s) and teaching them how to manage their money well so they can live off of it case whatever reason things from plan #1 goes south, which these days is an increasing possibility.
#1 is under attack by global competition and #2 is under attack by those that haven’t planned for their kids future and now wants to wealth redistribute it back to make up for deficiencies, some of which was self-inflicted by being facetious and giving up opportunities that were available when times were good, simply because “(someone) didn’t like it”.
Folks that want to gamble with those odds and think their kids are going to be in that exceptionally 0.5% brilliant category also have the money to back up their kid’s dreams and forgo college because they think “they don’t need it”…Go for it. Good luck.
No politician from any party is ever going to “fix” this, because it’s not a problem that probably can be “fixed”
FWIW: founder of GoPro graduated from UCSD. While also brilliant, part of his success can be attributed to his dad’s help: his dad is/was an investment banker. Bill Gates parents were close friends with Warren Buffett. This is not to detract these brilliant people’s accomplishments, because even with that much help, majority of folks from (wealthier) background still wouldn’t have obtain the successes of Gates/Ellison etc. But let’s face it. With that sort of financial support from their parents, it’s kinda hard for them to screw up, short of a being a drug addict.[/quote]
Agree that college can usually open up more doors for your average student. Just pointing out that the elite universities cherry pick the students who are already most likely to succeed. Even state colleges filter out those who are least likely to succeed; though their standards are less stringent than the Ivies, they still require certain GPAs and SAT scores in most cases.
So, do colleges create better, more successful people, or do they simply certify those who are already smarter, more driven, and more likely to succeed?
FWIW, “globalization” has existed for most of human history. And societies consisting of a few wealthy people/families who are served by the remainder of the population who lives in relative poverty has also been the norm throughout history, with a few notable exceptions. We (the masses of working people) are not getting poorer because of increased competition, we’re getting poorer because wealth and power are being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands as the benefits of increased productivity get “redistributed” from the workers to the owners of capital.
