Summer is flying by. College football starts in six weeks. It was just six weeks ago that the high school graduation season wrapped up. I attended graduations in three local, public high schools near my home.

Now I don’t live in Lake Woebegon, where all the children are above average. I live in a middle-class community in the Midwest where I would expect the distribution of IQ’s to, pretty much, fit the Bell Shaped Curve. (See note.) However, these three large PUBLIC, non-selective high schools, in aggregate, send seventy-five percent of their students to college. This is a direct reflection of how the community has been infected with the “college for everyone” plague.

I understand, if you are a Millennial or a Gen Zer, you are being pummeled, day in and day out, with, “You have to go to college,” but somebody is doing most of these students a great disservice by not explaining to Mrs. Moneypockets, “Your daughter, Little Janey, is not college material.”

What the egalitarian “college for everyone” crowd overlooks is how risky and wasteful this is. Only one in four is going to graduate and get a good job. Additionally, we can’t ignore the issue of student loans. Seventy percent will need to go into debt to finance their post-secondary education. When we do the math, it turns out that half these kids are going to be left “holding the bag.” That bag is filled with endless bills for their student loans, and these young people will be under employed or unemployed.

The College Board researchers define “college readiness” as the SAT score that would be correlated with a seventy-five percent chance of getting at least a 2.7 grade point average during the freshman year of college. The SAT score they computed was 1180 on the combined math and verbal test. Applying this test score, we should be sending about 20% of our high school graduates on to college.

Seventy-five percent of the graduates from your everyday public high school aren’t qualified to do meaningful college level work. (Typically, one out of four is going to need remedial work just to get started in college.)

Forty years ago twenty-five percent went on to college. Two decades ago—thirty-four percent. At present, the figure has reached forty-five percent. As that number mounts, many people begin to assume that college is the norm, a rite of passage. If a student doesn’t attend college, he must be an ineffectual loafer.

In this overhyped environment, you are going to have a very hard time objectively determining whether or not you are academically qualified for college, but given the risks, I urge you to try. There are alternative paths to becoming a financially successful adult.

Notes

https://steemit.com/education/@c…

(The Swiss don’t use the SAT. However, using their own protocol they identify the academic top 20% and enter them into their highly subsidized university system.)