This thread really seems to have touched a nerve with parents.

My point of view is that university exploits gifted students and gives them little in return. Even if tuition were free, going to university will interfere with real success. The big-name schools got their reputations not by exceptional teaching but by admitting and graduating bright students. Less able students have some of that prestige rub off on them, but the top students would have learned as much in lower-ranked schools, or more by studying on their own.

The long-term goal of most parents and kids is for the kids to form their own flourishing families in due time. The resources needed to do that fall into three principal types: financial, social, and emotional. The financial resources are more often a consequence of the social resources than the cause, and likewise the emotional resources are a precondition for the social resources.

Intellectual resources can help support all three, but contrary to the usual supposition, intellectual resources are not so easily affected as the other three. The raw amount a person learns is largely set by their innate capacity, but the particulars of the selection of what to learn and in what order are somewhat free – though limited by one's degrees of interest in various subjects, and interest is a form of emotional resource.

The emotional resources give the impetus to set goals and to allow persistence, confidence and persuasiveness in the face of rejection, failure, and conflict. One crucial emotional resource is the ability to act in one's own interest without undue moral anxiety, in particular: to not be squeamish about business, to regard persuading and directing people as worthy methods and making a modest profit for time and trouble as being only proper (and a high profit, even better). Despite the fact that these are core tenets of our economic system, it doesn't come naturally to most people today to really believe them, as shown by the scarcity and free-thinking character of entrepreneurs compared to the glut of conformist job-seekers. It wasn't always so. Self-employment, sole proprietorships, and small trading were once the norm in the US. Why the change?

Conventional school has as its unstated primary reason for being the desire of adults to reduce youth's competition with adults for money and mates. By teaching certain attitudes and norms in the form of unquestioned assumptions, such as “school is education”, “keeping you apart from the real word is to your benefit”, “profit is wrong”, “you can't succeed except by school” and “school is more respectable than parenthood or any business”, this competition with adults can be prevented even after leaving school. This sets the interests of the students at odds with adults, including their parents.

Natural allegiance is to one's family rather than to one's generation or sex. Setting women against men and children against parents, breaking up these crucial social bonds that existed long before governments – this alienation is not accomplished by chance, but to enable would-be authorities to interpose themselves as intermediaries in every human relation. This alienation starts with schools alienating children from themselves -- their thoughts, their labor, their time, their knowledge, their standards, their goals -- they are taught that nothing is theirs, all depends solely upon the system's judgements.

You can plan a different path for your children, one that has a better chance of arriving at the real goal than schools' empty promises. Plan for them starting independent businesses and think about how they will find and attract good spouses. What do they need to know? What actions, what projects can they do? I have some definite ideas, but this is getting long.

"Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with," the Mock Turtle replied...-- Lewis Carroll