College is also a great time to figure out what you don't want to do. While some people already know that they want to be a Pediatrist at 16-17 when they are researching college, others might think they want to be a (insert career) but they have limited experience actually interacting with that field.

Some of the smartest people I've known going to the Ivy league schools seemed to change what they wanted to do while there, or got their degree and then did something completely different- realizing that they enjoyed learning about the subject but didn't want to work in the field. It isn't that they didn't have initiative, but figuring out your entire life at 17 and researching/meeting every professor for every college that you're applying to is both time consuming and expensive.

I'm not sure it's so productive to get caught up into the rat-race to get into a good school. After all, there is a tremendous amount of emotional energy and effort expended by a great many people to this end. What if the lion's share of that energy could be devoted to substantive work? Ok, so many will claim that a lot of the things that they did in High School to pad their resumes were also "substantive work." Let's be real about this, though. By "substantive work" I don't mean educational opportunities, or some sort of scale model preparation or role-playing for what you might do in the future, I mean actual value-added, getting paid for it in the market work. What if even half of that which is just "preparation" could be harvested as real work?

I'm sure that this would result not only in increased productivity of the economy as a whole, but it would also result in superior educational experiences.

Also, there is no reason at all why this has to be structured in a way that gets in the way of "figuring out what I want to do." In fact, I'll bet that actually doing work will provide better information on which to make those decisions.