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Comment by wyager | Hacker News Reader

I dislike the condescending attitude of the author towards the young adults (referred to in the article as "children") attending college. The author claims that leaving home to live at college poses a "serious psychological risk". Are we talking about 18-year-olds or 5-year-olds? Are we afraid that these more-or-less fully fledged citizens, whom we allow to drive, smoke, enlist, vote, marry, and have children, are going to end up crying for their mommies and daddies because they left home too early? Ridiculous.

Where these "psychological risks" exist, it's probably more a symptom of failing to ween teenagers from parental dependence and teach personal responsibility than it is a symptom of college life.

To quote a younger friend of mine, who started college this year after bumming around Europe for a while: "After spending a few months 'in the wild', living in this relatively very supervised college environment seems absolutely mundane."

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Fully fledged citizen and adult are two concepts that deserve a distinction: http://hrweb.mit.edu/worklife/youngadult/brain.html

Most 18 year olds are nowhere near mature enough to take college education as seriously as it deserves to be taken.

>Most 18 year olds are nowhere near mature enough to take college education as seriously as it deserves to be taken.

But they're mature enough to kill for and be killed for the national military (sometimes against their will), contribute to governmental policy decisions, and have children?

Just because their brains are still plastic doesn't preclude them from making good (or at least reasonable) decisions.

>But they're mature enough to kill for and be killed for the national military (sometimes against their will), contribute to governmental policy decisions, and have children?

I don't think they are mature enough for that, no. We weren't arguing that part (at least not yet). 21 would be a much more reasonable age for that, but 25 would probably be best. There's a reason that you can't rent a car below 21 and that you have to make a significant extra payment below 25.

Are you proposing preventing people from having children below 25? That seems incredibly draconian and intrusive.

Are you also proposing preventing people from joining the military below 25? In terms of a male physical's peak, 25 is pretty late on in the game to start trying to train him to be a soldier.

No, I'm not proposing that at all, however, we certainly discourage people from having children at a young age. Military leadership could fairly easily adjust its recruitment practices, it relies far less on physical aptitude nowadays. Regardless, I don't really think this tangent is relevant to the discussion of college education.

You can shift mean college attendance age in a myriad of ways. Off the top of my head, bring public universities back under federal funding, reduce the for profit motives. Then start preferentially admitting students with a year or more of work experience as well as the current academic standards.

Honestly I think many 18 year olds would be well served to go through a good 2-4 years of national service before university. Being a private in the Army takes a lot less maturity and self-direction than being a freshman in university.

There has been some research which suggests that there are some psychological risks in going to college. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2010/09/15/leibow

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