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Comment by ghaff | Hacker News Reader

>German system is pretty class-based and forces kids to make big career decisions at a younger age then necessary

At some level I think that's true in a lot of places. I'm not sure, in the US, if you really know what kind of engineering (or whatever) you want to go into. High school pretty much didn't give you a good sense of that in a lot of cases. Perhaps, on this board, there is a disproportionate number of people who always knew they wanted to program. But sure wasn't the case for me growing up. And would probably have done something different than mechanical engineering but--whatever--didn't really matter.

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People have to choose a path at some point. We can’t delay education for everyone until 25 or 30 to allow more time to figure it out.

Many people I know changed paths mid-college career. Many also changed careers post college. The US is relatively forgiving in that regard (as are many countries).

It’s the systems that shunt people into specific paths in high school that are challenging.

I don't disagree. In the US, a least, there's a lot of capability to make changes over time. Obviously, the more specialized and longer the training, the harder/costlier it gets. But so many people I went to school with never really just went to work in a stereotypical job related to their major (including myself). Which is just fine.

> We can’t delay education for everyone until 25 or 30 to allow more time to figure it out.

I mean, we could. Maybe a mandatory year or two of service as seen in other countries, then let them work in low credential jobs for 5-10, and only then go back and seek further education. Could be interesting. It would interrupt progression on complex topics though, expect to have a lot of trouble getting back into Calculus.

It would probably be really helpful for some people, especially those that end up dropping out of college after acruing several terms of debt. Otoh, delaying graduation for those who would have graduated 'on time' is probably a negative.

I think things have changed more recently, but when I was in college it was pretty easy to change from one STEM major to another. I didn't know I liked programing until my first Fortran class.

I did a bit of BASIC in high school and took a FORTRAN course in college. Not much else with computers until later. In retrospect might have done EE or CS though CS was very mathematical and theoretical at the time. (No PCs.)

I did sort of switch as I realized I didn't like college level organic chemistry so just switched to straight Mechanical Engineering from sort of a Biomech thing.

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