you can't afford college unless you have money, and you can't earn money unless you go to college.
not really. there are tons of scholarships and other assistance. hardly anyone who goes to college is writing $30-100k checks.
Then I took in person classes at 18/19, fixed my GPA and generally did well. The only classes I really struggled with was Japanese and later French.
With Japanese I pissed my Korean girlfriend off, and had to drop it. French I took for a pass/no pass and absolutely failed.
You absolutely can get a BA by 20, but I'd be more interested in WHY you'd want to speed run academia. Sounds really stressful...
1. You want or need to be making money instead of spending it.
Eg, no family wealth involved; you’re paying for everything yourself
2. You don’t enjoy the high pressure (ish), test-driven environment and want to be doing more meaningful work.
Etc. The number of people who don’t want to spend money and time in college might surprise you. I even know some very academically successful ones with this attitude.
Even if you have all the money in the world, US high school standards are very low. With some affinity for reading and access to the internet, one can be learning at a far quicker rate, even without sacrificing social life outside of school.
Many kids in the US already do this via Advanced Placement testing, but some states also allow high school students to take college courses.
So the AP as a means of saving $$$ loophole has been hard closed.
And in hindsight of course that's how it works, both because the university isn't keen on cost savings but also because every student is coming loaded with APs. AP physics isn't "college physics" anymore it's just high school physics and the optional prereq to Physics 101.
I believe it's this point of view that leads to the common perception of higher education among the actual working class - that the American college experience was once something great, but got so watered down in pursuit of ideals other than education that it has essentially turned into a big summer camp for the adolscent offspring of the rich to extend the "party" of youth for a little bit longer, hopefully increasing their social credit score in the process, with actual learning being a "nice to have" along the way.
Do you have examples? I haven't gone systematically digging into this, but the general impression I've gotten is that this sort of explicit demographic filters are largely associated with the "equity" crowd rather than the "merit" crowd.
Extending the party of youth is roughly one of the benefits of social welfare. When we took the children out of the factories in the 1920s, we extended their youth. When we sent them to college, we extended their youth. When we economically constrained them with high real estate prices, we extended their youth.
Extending youthhood is fine, so long as we do it appropriately. For example, if we did it right, someone entering retirement enters a new youthhood of carefreeness. If we do it wrong, someone enters youthhood in theirs 20s as a dependent of their parents. There's a lot of wrong versions of the last thing I said, where people are kept children in academia to be parented indefinitely by tenor.
It's delicate. We want to provide as much youthhood as possible in a good way, if we can.
As to your first point, you can only be speaking of white men. To this I'll say, white men that come from the same economic situation should have access to the same scholarships. That's a easy one to fix. If you are working class then you are working class, this life is hard enough already.
What was all this student loan forgiveness talk about then? Scholarships apparently haven't been cutting it, otherwise there wouldn't be a trillion plus of outstanding student loan debt.
Luckily, software jobs in the beginning of my career was a strong market, so I aggressively paid them off early into the pandemic. About 3-4 years post grad. But I know that's not the normal story.