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the cost of them seems to have risen and the financial aid most need has decreased. MMM That makes a whole lot of sense. Not.

Would you believe, the large spikes in the cost of college tuition that began in the 1980s started off as a marketing tool? You heard me. Parents, flush with cash from the Reagan economic boom, would look at a college that charged too little, say "What's wrong with it?", and send their C-student Bush clones to the more expensive ones. This started a race.

Faculty were pleased, 'cause it meant that, for a brief while, their salaries rose slightly above those of dustmen, and their buildings rose slightly above the levels of elegantly facaded tarpaper shacks.

Managers were pleased, because it allowed their salaries to reach to a tenth of one percent of those of their counterparts in industry (which seemed a fortune) and expand their patronage (sorry, their staffs), all while making significant contributions to the instutional endowments.

Students were pleased, because in the rush to make the richest ones happy the colleges erected new luxury hotels (sorry, dormitories), and their educational standards declined to keep the kiddies in school (and paying, of course). The decline in standards, of course, depressed the faculty, who (especially in the sciences) were simultaneously being told to earn as much of their salaries as possible some other way (for instance, through research grants and contracts). So teaching responsibilities devolved to the lowest possible level. Chinese-speaking first-year graduate students. At least that's what it seemed like to those being taught - real Chinese graduate students usually spoke English better than the natives.

Besides which, university teaching is best suited to produce - university teachers. This works in the sciences, where teaching and research go (uneasily) hand in hand, and there's market for the science elsewhere only in specialized domains - you need the twenty-year social investment in a discipline, through university research, before some wonk can run off and make an "instant" fortune with it in a business. Doesn't work very well anywhere else. Does it?

I tell any junior high schooler or early high schooler who asks the same thing. Figure out what you wish to do with yourself. Be honest about your abilities and willingness to work - if you're not, stop. Work that out for yourself before you start again. Once you've set goals, ask whether you need college to meet them. If you do, do what you need to to get into college, and the one that will get you what you need at the least possible cost. Not the one with the cutest cheerleaders or the best record in football. If you don't, don't go. Work out instead what you need to do to succeed, and do that.

I think I'm finally beginning to run down on this topic ... :)

...that most kids don't know what they wanna be when they 'grow up'.

Yeah, and I confess I relate to this less well than others. I pretty much knew what I was after by the age of 14, and was fortunate enough to get to do it. I know that's rare.

I had one kid that "knew", and one kid that didn't. To the one I said "go for it". To the other I said "close no doors". I would say the same thing I said to my "other kid" to children who are still looking: don't do anything (e.g. underperform in secondary school, go to college before you're ready and get trash grades that will make reentry that much harder) that will close a door before you're ready to close it yourself.

(Unfortunately people I trusted were telling my kids other things, often without my knowledge. The kids suffered, they're still working life out as young adults, and I'm no longer with the people I once trusted. Sigh.)

is an age limit

Would you believe, once upon a time we had one of those, at least for impecunious males. In Europe, it was called "compulsory military service"; in America, the draft. We know what has happened to those.

I think limits are, well, limiting. There are 15-year-olds I'd trust with my life, and 50-year-olds I wouldn't trust with a toilet flush. A person should be able, ideally, to pursue whatever talents and drives that person is granted, at that person's good time, assuming always the Hippocratic Oath of Career Choice - yes, "do no harm". But The Machine doesn't like to have to think about what it does to people.