"Today, you have to be able to make a life determining decision right out of high-school, with limited and outdated information and years of the older generations giving you an incorrect view."
I remember being terrified in 11th grade - all my friends were doing college applications, and it all felt permanent. I remember crying in the counselor's office one day, and she didn't understand the pressure.
"I'm being told I have to choose 'a major' in a college, which is going to determine the rest of my life, and I can't even drive yet". "Oh, don't worry, you can always change it later!" (She was nicer than that, but that was the gist).
You can change it later, it just takes a long time to realize it, at a huge financial cost. I chose wrong, but I was lucky that I realized it so soon, after only 6 months. It was a decision made out of laziness as much as anything. I realized that the one programming class I took was way more easy and fun than anything else. I should've gone into CS right away, but for some reason I thought I was way behind the "nerds" who would go to CS, the people who had been coding since they were 6. I thought that I would have no chance in that environment.
That said, not everybody wants to, or can become an engineer or scientist, and they shouldn't. If the choice for a person is between not going to college at all, and going for a humanities education, I vastly prefer they go for the education. I think people getting educated and pursuing their passions are a good thing for society as a whole, if we can afford it.
I remember being terrified in 11th grade - all my friends were doing college applications, and it all felt permanent. I remember crying in the counselor's office one day, and she didn't understand the pressure.
"I'm being told I have to choose 'a major' in a college, which is going to determine the rest of my life, and I can't even drive yet". "Oh, don't worry, you can always change it later!" (She was nicer than that, but that was the gist).