Spinning this off from
another thread.
But absent national academic awards, published research, or something of equal worth, I would make sure my kid had a HS diploma.
In a situation like this one, why would someone even want to waste time in college?
Though TBH, I've begun to wonder about the depth of the research that high school students do. I'm a scientist, and I've taught undergraduates in a novel research-skills course that I designed. My students needed a LOT of guidance in a research lab, and they knew a lot more than high school kids. Plus, they were adults. I have serious trouble imagining that high school kids could do anything but trivial work in the vast majority of cases. While I do think that some PG+ kids could get below the surface, we all know how rare those kids are, and then you'd have to winnow that number to the ones who are also interested in working in a lab. That's not many kids compared to the number getting university research experiences.
I may be also jaded because a researcher I know has told me that the teenagers in the departmental labs enter information into spreadsheets (or something similar). They get non-critical tasks that don't require a lot of knowledge. I mean, seriously, how could a high school student have the kind of knowledge needed in a research lab?
This whole idea bugs me a bit --- not because I'm against the idea of kids getting experience in a research lab, but because the entire process seems to be more about gathering fodder for college applications and less about exploring a career possibility. It's the arms race aspect of it that gets to me (well, that and claiming that entering someone else's data into a spreadsheet for someone else to analyze counts as research).
