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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]NP here. This isn't the tightest response because I'm being interrupted left and right, lol, but it's interesting so I'm going to attempt getting out a response.

I started out very poor and worked my way into a HYP grad school education, and my DH also has advanced degrees.

College for pure liberal arts at this point baffles me, but I'm not sure what the alternative is.  Seems like we take a bunch of our potentially most productive part of the society and waste them.  We put them together to drink/sleep around, and get inculcated with the professors' views, which due to tenure are often way off-base because they are not subject to market forces.

Then they often go to jobs that have nothing to do with their education; that they could have done from high school.  Sure, this is all fun for the individual but on a mass scale this seems like a tremendous waste of parental resources, and with respect to the young person's time --I wouldn't call it exactly wasted--but it's time that could be put to better use if our system was revamped somehow.

I see your point, OP.  My (tween) kids are straight-A and athletic and we try to help them be well-rounded.  However; my kids are not in your circle, so not sure what people like me would do for an alternative when it comes time for college.

For my DH and myself, the advanced degree helped us gain entree into our profession, and provided us with a circle of peers who were interested in some of the stuff we are interested in, and contacts. I'll have to look back on your post, but I think you said you and your circle had graduate degrees.  I wonder how that plays into your connection with each other.

I was living in a very wealthy part of LA and in a circle maybe not quite like yours but with some similarities.  One problem is the lack of work ethic.  Some (elementary/middle school) parents in my circle believed a traditional school could not handle "their child's creativity" and that was the reason their kid was not doing well in school…but it really seemed to me to be that they and their kids were entitled and the kids not doing well due to lack of work ethic and parental failure to institute any sort of boundaries.  There are lots of schools that feed into this view and will take those snowflakes for a high price.[/quote]

I can't figure out what kind of colleges you people went to, but I went to a selective liberal arts college where people didn't spend most of their time drinking and partying and sleeping around--they spent it in class or studying, or in extracurriculars in their areas of interest. I wasn't inculcated with my professor's views (the hell?), but I did get a lot of feedback and instruction that allowed me to significantly advance my understanding of a wide range of topics (science, math, economics, literature, history, art, foreign language, and social science) and further develop my raw talents in critical thinking, debate, and writing to a sophisticated level. Of course, at a residential college, I also got to practice living independently and making good choices about how to spend my time and how to live my life in a relatively sheltered environment, so that when I graduated at 21 I was fully prepared to live on my own and begin a career.

I don't know a lot of 18-year-olds with the discipline to educate themselves across the range of areas that are important for understanding of the world. You may be able to code well or have an entrepreneurial idea and make a bunch of money, but if you don't know much about people, history, or culture then you are a lot less likely to make great contributions to the world. And I don't think most 18-year-olds have the perspective or skills to really run a fully functioning organization--I have a master's in finance, and you're not going to pick that stuff up on the fly. If your parents can afford for you to learn all this on your own, on the job, great, but I think that's a pretty small percentage of the population and I'm not particularly worried that my kids are going to be left behind. Someone has to actually run the companies that these geniuses are going to be starting. 
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