You are 100% correct, however I guarantee you that 99.999% of high school guidance councilors will never recommend anything of the sort because it goes against the education slave trade agenda with which they are engrained; even college advisors wouldn't touch that with a 10' pole.
Then you have to understand that many parents(including mine) are COMPLETELY ignorant of the modern condition of education and they still believe it's 1970 and any degree is an advantage and it doesn't matter where you get a degree from.
You also touch on the bloated charges stacked into education just like banking fees that I was paying even 15years ago......
Computer lab fee - I have my own computer
Rec center fee - Only time I used it was to sleep on a couch between classes
Endless prerequisites that have no purpose what so ever but to add hours upon hours to a degree plan to milk students dry.
Then there is the issue with "community colleges" these are largely nothing but a waste of time, my sister attending one for 2 years(both semesters & summer) and was told that "Everything transfers, it's the same as being at the big universities"...
When she transferred to UNT only 10 hours actually transferred towards her elementary education degree.
Completely concur... Ive got 3x kids at school right now.. one in Florida, one in Louisiana, and one in Arkansas.. and then a 4th kid that finished his undergrad program about 4 years ago..
Our experience both with HS guidance counselors and with university advisors has been they are either indoctrinated.. or they are genuinely worthless (don't care about anything at all)..
That said, Im actually really surprised that the higher ed system in the US is so rapidly returning to what has proven to be a failing model...
A very good friend of mine (who also sits on my firms advisory board) is a senior administrator at a very large public university in Ohio.. he is a Yale PhD, taught at the Naval Academy for a while before moving to Ohio and putting down roots at his current university..
When COVID hit it exposed several major problems with our universities in the US are structured as a business...
With all of the amenities they "pitch" to would be students like computer labs, lazy rivers, monsterous rec centers, etc.. there are deep sunk costs.. they need students ON CAMPUS to have any chance of recouping those costs..
Many universities make a huge sum of money off of student housing and student parking.. their models center around tuitions paying for faculty, and all the other stuff like football games, parking, housing, etc paying for the lazy rivers, rec centers, computer labs, food courts, etc..etc..
For 2 years many universities lost a ton of money.. students weren't on campus, so student housing wasn't getting paid for, computer lab fees weren't getting paid, parking fees weren't getting paid, etc.. but all of those facilities are sunk costs and the universities had to continue pay for them (despite losing the associated revenue and profits)..
The other problem they had was brick and mortar school had been telling the lie that online learning wasn't as effective as in class learning, and that to get a "full" university experience you needed to live in student housing, have access to a lazy river, be involved in the greek system, be able to hang out in the rec center, etc..etc.. that your life MUST center around the university or you really weren't getting the same quality of education and experience.. and now they had to tell a very different story.. .
Now they had to tell both incoming freshman and returning students that they SHOULD NOT postpone or pause their educations because online learning was just as effective, that lazy rivers as a bonus, but the real thing to focus on was attending class, that Universities are all about preparing you for your career field and campus life is something "ancillary"..
And many young people called them out on their lie(s).. Which pushed student enrollments down as much as 25% at some schools, and down about 15% on average across the country...
Granted enrollments were up 5% in 2024.. the first increase nationally in several years..
But you'd think schools would have learned from the COVID experience and once they started convincing students to come back to campus would have found a better and more efficient model that is long term sustainable..
but by 2022, they were all largely reversing course again, and had pivoted back to the original lies... you MUST live on campus.. you MUST attend a school with a huge food court.. you MUST attend a school with a massive rec center.. etc..etc.. or you're not really getting a university education... that online thing is second rate.. (even though almost every brick and mortar university in the US now offers numerous online degrees and Im not aware of any degree program where at least some of the curriculum is available online.. even Harvard has significant pieces of its MBA and law school presented online for on campus students at this point)..
