[big-green-man]

I don't really think that's it. When I was in high school, I didn't see my parent's or my friends' parent's success and think "I've got to go to college". I was busy doing what most kids are doing: having fun with my friends and trying to get close to the opposite sex.

What made me think I needed to go to school was the constant inundation from counselors and teachers that my options were college or a mcjob. To a kid that just wakes up one day every late summer and walks into a new classroom without doing anything to make it happen, it seems like college is just the next high school. It's just what you do. Nobody, ever, not once, talked to me about the financial aspect of it. Lucky for me I didn't wind up going beyond a month at a community college which I quit for other reasons, but without those reasons I'd have continued with it because I, like most people my age, didn't know what to do with myself. I had a rough time after that for a few years, but today I can say that I am financially and in general living a much better life than my peers who went to college, and I have a few that also didn't go and several of them are doing wildly better than me. I don't know a single person that went that isn't stuck on a treadmill trying to play it safe and pay down debt. That's their lives, they'll get old on that treadmill, and mine is mine alone.

Long story short, yes, from my observation, most people are tricked. The only people that need to be going to college are people who want to be in medicine, lawyers, people that want to go into academics and do research as a career, and people who's families can afford to give them a liberal arts education just for the sake of it. The rest of us are better served just starting to live our lives.