Sadly, many of them acquired lots of debt, and not much else. I advise any young people I get to talk with about post high school education to not jump head first into a degree program. Life won't pass you by if you take a year or two to formulate a plan.
So taking a year or two to figure out how to be an adult is not the worst approach to take.
If more people decide to delay or seek alternatives to college, the higher ed bubble will burst. Universities will not be able to afford the administrative staff they are carrying if enrollments decline.
A year spent figuring out how to be an adult would indeed be helpful. Unfortunately, for students who are still immature and sheltered at 18, an additional year spent having their lives completely managed by their parents seems more likely.
I applaud you for this. There's often so much pressure from every single direction around a young adult to attend college including internal pressure. After having been the first from my immediate family and older to graduate I feel I am also the first in my family to have an opinion or advice worth giving to another person in that position.
The thing I always say is that it's almost worse to go to college with no plan or "track" to graduating and your goals. Maybe you need a year after high school to figure out your direction as you work a job or two to earn some tuition and spending money before you embark on your educational crusade.
I'm not sure if my personal feelings and abilities apply to many other folks but after K-12 (public schooling) and voluntarily enrolling in university (~4 more years of education) I have a really hard time willingly singing myself up to learn anything new in a "traditional US Public education environment" for lack of better words / explanation. So my advice is to get a plan together, make sure you are motivated and mentally prepared to work hard toward your goal, and make sure you get it done in the time you set aside for yourself. From my POV I don't think I could ever willingly mentally allow myself to go back into student mode. Learning is on my time, to my tastes and liking now. But that feeling only started to come into my life after I was able to get my bachelor's degree. That said, what I mean here is: If you are going to go through all the trouble of going to college you might as well take it extremely seriously. Treat it like it's your job, your #1 priority. Everything comes after your education. It doesn't mean you can't have fun or you can't live your life but it does mean that you should be treating your education seriously and more importantly you should be understanding that you are paying A LOT of money to be there. You aren't going to conjure up all the mental fortitude and courage to re-motivate yourself to go back to school once you've mustered up the strength and courage to quit the first time. Don't give yourself a chance to "get back to it" unless you truly have no other chance / better route to take.
I LOVE LEARNING but I DO NOT LOVE the US's curriculum and standardized test-based education system. Having worked with kids (5-10y/o) for over a decade and having gone through everything they are preparing to go through (university, a degree, and the hunt to obtain the start to their career) I can see many of the issues that plague the education system, I see oh-so-many ways that it's failing or coming up entirely too short for our youth, and sadly enough I'm also realizing how simple it sounds to say, "We need to fix the education system." but also how incredibly difficult it is to actually change this system.
Now we are at this pinnacle of an education decision where it seems to feel like we are teetering on a two-decision contest that's been randomly and seemingly created from the system in place which will decide, somewhat, the future of education:
The current and traditional system, which we have in place now, demands we all work hard and achieve to the highest degree in order to attend a good college / university where we will work hard and achieve to the highest degree in order to obtain a great job where we'll work hard and attempt to achieve to the highest degree.
In primary school you work hard and learn the foundations and basics in order to get successfully get to intermediate school. In intermediate school you work hard and gain new tools to apply to your future work you must do to prepare for your future which takes place in high school. In high school you work hard, continue building on your foundation, add new tools, sharpen existing tools and you learn ways to combine tools together, and ultimately you start preparing and applying elsewhere to continue your education in university / college.
I don't remember a single teacher or single talk specifically dedicated toward building a future / career path that had anything to do with going immediately into working after high school. Everything was always pointing towards that next step in your education. If you had a question a teacher couldn't answer about why you must study a certain subject or certain annoying portion of an obscure subject you will most likely be met with something along the lines of needing to know it for the next level of schooling or college.
So that's our current system which we now know is not optimal. We may have known before but now we have evidence in a bunch of different ways and formats that prove that things should be done a bit differently.
Now, what's the other way I envision education teetering if it doesn't teeter toward things staying the same, traditionally? While it may sound 1984'ish I think with our rapidly growing technology that time and energy could be much better spent treating students like prospects, unknown quantities, or "living tools" as they go through their education, find out what they enjoy and excel at, and ultimately where they can create value for society that also compensates them appropriately.
In the same way that an auto manufacturer is looking to save as much money as it can moving into the future one adjustment they might decide on making is standardizing their line of automobiles they manufacture and sell. A semi-recent iteration of this situation that comes to mind is a system where by many automobiles of different classes, shapes, sizes, and marketing segments all share many parts. If Ford has 10 automobile models they make and sell. The idea with the system is to have as few unique parts overall as possible. Having all 10 of the models share as many parts as possible creates many avenues for saving and efficiency overall. Beyond that when Ford hires new talent, unless they are working on the very specific and unique portions of the 10 models, the unique parts that separate the 10 models and make them "unique", that new hire will be working on one of the parts that the 10 models share. If you train the new hire to work on Model 1's drive train you've also successfully trained them to work on the drive train of Model 1 through 10th's drive train as well, since they share as many parts under the cosmetic outer plastic shell as they can, to save money and simplify, as much as possible, their complex assembly line.
Now I imagine the other way society could treat education teetering away from tradition toward a new way has to look towards the past in order to succeed any way. They may have to travel to the time where the industrial revolution helped kick start a much needed economical boom here in the US. Sure conditions were terrible and they hadn't thought of every single issue and situation that may have cropped up but at the heart of the issue, the inner kernel? The assembly line was a key to unlocking an entirely new and higher level of ability to create and achieve than humans had ever known prior.
Then it'd be time to find out the best ways, using technology and standardized testing, to provide our youth an education that allows them the flexibility to fit into many different jobs and markets across the entire work force. Using traditional standardized tests and tests that test things other than mental fortitude, which schools are already known to do through Physical Education, educators and students can be exposed to and educated early about different types of careers and specific jobs within them.
The idea is that the education system helps society fill and plug holes in the work force using the potential future work force to do so. What I'm trying to avoid is what happened to my brother. Someone caught in the crossfire of the "YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO GO TO COLLEGE TO SUCCEED!" and the "YOU ABSOLUTELY HAVE TO HAVE A MASTERS DEGREE TO DO ANY WORK IN EDUCATION!". There is no reason, in 2018 where we have so much technology and know how, that so many people should be sinking $100,000's into student loans for degrees that indicate that a graduating student has achieved to a level where they create a specific high level of value in a given subject.
That's all great and good, sure, but when society already knows (whether it's said or not) that there is no special or greater need for workers / employees with that degree or set of skills people like my brother are stuck stringing together part time jobs, squandering his time and previous energy he's put forth, and slowly but surely driving himself crazy and he stares at reoccurring student loan bills coupled with rejections from places he's applied to (if he get's any sort of reply at all).
I'm not sure if it's positive and I'd love to know / see / hear someone else's findings on the specific topic but if I'm a high school junior / senior RIGHT NOW and VISUAL BASIC PROGRAMMING (just bare with me, just making an example here) is INSANELY IN DEMAND right now and the market just can't stop throwing brief cases full of cash at VB DEV's, strike while the iron's hot! There is NO guarantee that by the time I graduate university with a degree in Computer Science that Visual Basic will still be hot and in demand in the market.
In fact I think, knowing what I've known over my short career, that an individual planning their future and skill set based on only that little bit of information would be very lucky to find work that allows them to live comfortably and such as they continue through life -- hopefully able to live their life in peace WHILE paying back those student loans.
Wow, that was long winded, but obviously you can tell I've spent a lot of time an energy giving thought to this specific topic. It's a hard one to find a place to let loose about everything I'm thinking about so I'm sorry for letting it all go here!
Just the exercise would be useful, but even more so some feedback. But then that raises the question, who is equipped to give that feedback? Should an educator tell someone else's kid that maybe they need a backup plan in case the astronaut thing doesn't pan out?
When I was young my father stuck me in front of a publication from the bureau of labor statistics that gave the long term outlook for every occupation they track. It was really great advice that every kid should see (they also ought to make a more kid friendly version, it can be very dry). The big picture stuff was pretty spot on, and it lets you know some hard truths like some jobs will require living in a major city, food service has plenty of openings available but low pay, that kind of thing. It helps you get realistic, even for dream-type jobs like actor or astronaut.
This is more of the kind of thing I wish kids were shown.
Not only show them and teach them skills they'll need the very second they graduate high school, god forbid they are on their own or have no family to rely on. How are we expecting newly graduated 18 year olds to be true participating adults in our society when education teaches them nothing of value?
At least if public schools took a more vocational approach and showed students career tracks with all sorts of options and branches for people with a given set of skills they could at least tuck that information in the back of their mind, they'd know their options and they'd likely gravitate toward working towards the things that they feel they are best suited for.
When they aren't sure that's when teachers, guidance counselors, professionals in different markets (who come in and do assemblies / talks) and parents come into play to help guide a student who isn't quite sure. It's not easy for a pre-adult to decide their career but what I'm really saying and really wanting to see is at least some more emphasis on reminding those kids that life's not all about college. More important that college is creating a comfortable life for yourself and potentially your family and to do that you need to learn how to create value for an employee or society (if you start your own business) before you graduate. Not many companies want to hire people to pay and train them if they have no skills and experience and things like that are becoming more and more rare outside of the trades -- and even then a lot of the artisans and tradespeople seem like a closed off wall if not the type of career most students have been "brain washed" (for lack of a better / less devious word) that blue collar service jobs are below them.
Maybe work study programs for all high school juniors (16/17) and seniors (17/18) in different sorts of service and white collar jobs to give them an idea of how a business works with both blue and white collar workers forming together in a company to make products or offer services. Something to give those students some insight into the way things really are.