Thanks for all the effort that you have put in this. Very interesting information.

There appears to be an inherent assumption that 18 cannot be an age of great intellectual development, but that is probably based on the lengthy monopoly our current factory school system has had. Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Lincoln, Emerson were tutored or self-taught: they learned how to learn and became intellectually curious. Before the factory system came into place, there was no reason why a person could not accelerate through material. After the monopoly was in place fortunate individuals had parents that went outside the system, as Norbert Weiner’s did, to produce ‘child prodigies’. Home-schooling is bringing that possibility back for many families, as it did for my youngest two kids, who finished with ‘high school’ materials and moved on to Yale and MIT years before other kids. The current age step-locked cohort system is not serving us well.
Secondly, my four kids have different degrees in Mathematics/Physics, German Literature, History and Software Engineering. The point was to create critical thinking skills and intellectual curiosity, not to wallow in a pointless disparaging of recognized human endeavors: law, engineering, medicine, theology, anthropology, literature, etc. all can provide fertile fields for an active mind to till for more than one lifetime. It should be noted that ‘intellectual curiosity’ often inspires creative individuals to explore interests other than their professional tasks; and, well-thought out university programs should intertwine intellectual developments in science with philosophical and cultural developments. This failure to coherently develop the western tradition in colleges, is perhaps the lacuna that makes our Teacher’s Colleges so disastrous and result in the emphasis on pedagogy without content that further contributes to an ineffective factory school system monopoly that stiffles our kids.

Correct me if i am wrong but isnt it illegal for an employer to insist on some form of an aptitude test before employing a new hire?
If that were true then the government itself would be guilty of breaking that law. For example, the military administers the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) to all who want to join the enlisted ranks. I don’t know about the other services, but the Air Force administers the AF Officer Qualificaion Test to those who want to become officers. Likewise, I’ve read that the Post Office administers an aptitude test to aspiring letter carriers. Do people who want to become federal civilian employees still have to pass the Civil Service exam? Many local police and fire departments also have qualification tests.
Like Buzz said, the test does have to pass scrutiny to prove it isn’t biased against minorities. For private companies, the potential legal hassles might make it not worthwhile. In that case, requiring a college degree even if the job doesn’t really need it is a screening tool.

I agree with most of this, including a stint in the military before college, which is what I did. (My Vietnam-era GI Bill paid a hell of a lot more toward my education than today’s pale version, too.) But I take issue with your assertion that only mathematicians, engineers, and their ilk are the only ones who know how to “deal with complexity and adapt to changing job requirements.” In fact, I find it quite the opposite.
I majored in philosophy, which immediately brings snorts from most who hear it. Yet I’m the one who waded through the world of ideas and concepts for four years, and I’m the one who has learned to think both concretely and conceptually. Most important, I’m the one, thanks to such wide reading in many challenging ideas, who has the Grade-A bullshit detector.
I find the technocrats the least imaginative and usually the first to fall for the baloney so readily shoveled our way by Hollywood, Madison Ave. and Washington. It’s the technocrats who know how to do something but not whether we should do it.
I’m disappointed you sell the liberal arts (at least the concept of it) so short.

The point about some time off from education is very significant. I remember returning to college in my early 30’s because I needed to learn something, something specific, in a very short time (3-6 months). I was amazed at all the slow-moving teenage drones surrounding me, every one of them convinced that it was going to take 4 or 5 years to graduate, *and that they had that much time to waste.*

Your wife is spot on – I remember some of my undergrad, however, after my four year stint with the military, I went back to graduate school full-time in another type of engineering and I remember almost everything I studied then – I wanted to be there, I was motivated based on interest in the subject and I realized how ‘easy’ the life of a full-time student was compared to my time in the active AF. I was the only one in my graduate class who had come back to school after working for awhile – most of the others had come straight out of their undergraduate studies. The joke was that I had my homework done the night or the day after it had been assigned. To this day, I attribute my success in my current field to the fact that I paid attention in graduate school and wanted to be there. Maturity does wonders for focusing one’s mind.

Actually, Aristotle was writing for eighteen year olds. Eighteen himself when he went to Athens, he became Alexander’s tutor when the latter was thirteen. Maybe we should try teaching our kids to be great-souled? That or powerpoint.

It seems to me just by eyeballing it without any empirical evidence that the difference between having a graduate degree versus an undergraduate degree today is about the same, in terms of job security and opportunity as it was to have a college degree versus a high school diploma in the 1950s. Not only have we had grade inflation but a change in the value placed on the respective degrees. We look down on someone with “only” a high school degree when, in fact, that is exactly what they need to do the job they have always wanted to do. Conversely, there are now thousands of people with advanced degrees that are out of work because of market saturation and economic downturn. It seems that this change over the last fifty-sixty years has not been a positive one.

I think one reason few people want to put college off for more than a year is because the expectation that mom and dad will pay the tuition comes with an unstated expiration date that is generally uncertain, but perhaps just about that long.

Henry James, Aristotle and others were writing for adults.
Not too long ago, nineteen-year-olds WERE adults.