A seventeen year old is asked to choose a direction using information they cannot possibly have, on a deadline set by other people, with the strong implication that one option is the responsible one and everything else is a fallback. That framing is doing a lot of work and most of it is unexamined.
This is not an argument against college. It is an argument that treating it as the default rather than as a choice produces worse decisions, including worse decisions to attend.
What the decision actually is
Not education against no education. Nearly every worthwhile path after high school involves training of some kind, and the trades, the military, certificate programs, and apprenticeships all involve years of instruction and examination.
The real decision is about sequence and about who carries the cost. A four year degree is instruction first, paid for up front, often borrowed, with earnings starting later. An apprenticeship is instruction alongside paid work, with earnings starting immediately and the ceiling arriving sooner. A certificate program is short, cheap, narrow, and dependent on the field staying the way it is.
Framed that way, the question becomes answerable. It is a question about what a specific person can sustain, what they can afford, and how certain they are about direction, rather than a question about ambition.
The information nobody has yet
Worth naming plainly, because pretending otherwise is what produces bad advice.
Nobody knows whether a seventeen year old will still want to do this at twenty two. A large share of students change their intended field, and that is normal and not a failure. Nobody knows what a given field will pay in six years. Nobody knows whether this particular person will thrive in a large lecture setting or quietly stop attending, and their high school performance is a weak predictor because the structures are so different.
What is knowable is narrower and more useful. Whether they have ever completed something difficult without being made to. Whether they prefer working with people, with materials, or alone. Whether they can currently sit and read for two hours. Whether the family can pay for this without borrowing against a retirement.
What is reversible and what is not
This is the most useful frame available for a decision made with incomplete information, and it is rarely applied.
Starting at a community college and moving to a four year school is reversible in both directions and preserves nearly every option. Taking a year to work is reversible, and admission generally remains available to someone who applies later. Starting an apprenticeship and leaving it costs time and leaves you with skills.
What is much less reversible is debt. Borrowing at a level that requires a particular career outcome to be survivable narrows every subsequent choice, including the choice to change fields, to move, or to take a lower paying job that leads somewhere. That is the asymmetry worth holding onto: the education is recoverable if it goes wrong, and the borrowing is not.
Also less reversible than people assume is the second attempt. A student who enrolls unprepared, accumulates debt, and leaves in the second year is in a materially worse position than one who waited a year, because they carry the cost without the credential. That risk is real and it is heavily concentrated in students who went because it was what you do.
The options that keep doors open
Several arrangements let a seventeen year old commit less while learning more. Community college for general education requirements, with a transfer plan checked in advance. An apprenticeship in a trade that requires classroom hours anyway, which builds a credential and a wage at once. Employer tuition assistance, which a surprising number of ordinary jobs offer and which almost nobody asks about at seventeen. Military service, which is a serious commitment and does come with education benefits attached.
None of these is a lesser version of the standard path. Each of them is a way of buying information about yourself before making the largest financial commitment of your life so far.
What adults get wrong when they help
Two things, mostly. The first is arguing from their own era, when the arithmetic on borrowing and on wages was genuinely different, in either direction. What was prudent in 1995 is not automatically prudent now, and neither is the reverse.
The second is treating the decision as a verdict on the young person. A parent who has quietly attached their own hopes to a particular answer will make it very hard for the student to say the true thing, which is often that they do not know. I do not know is a legitimate position at seventeen and it points toward the reversible options rather than toward the irreversible ones.
The most useful thing an adult can do is separate the money conversation from the direction conversation and have them on different days. Combined, they produce a young person who cannot say what they want without it sounding like a demand.
Handled that way, the default stops being a default. A student who chooses the four year degree after considering the alternatives arrives with a reason, and a reason is what carries somebody through the semester where it stops being fun.