Just as a social and economic matter, it seems to me to be overwhelmingly likely that dropping out of high school will do long term and maybe permanent damage to your ability acquire significant money and free time. Dropping out of high school is very likely to be the worst thing you can do with your life right now. On the other hand, getting straight A’s (which is not an intellectually challenging task) is likely to pay off more than anything else you can invest your time in. I’m not saying that that’s the way it should be, I’m just saying that that’s the way it is.
An hour spent on maximizing your grades in high school is for almost everyone one of the most financially efficient hours you will ever get an opportunity to spend. And you’ll need money if you want the independence necessary to make a difference.
Barring some extreme mitigating circumstances, top colleges will throw your application in the trash the moment they see anything but a high school diploma littered with A’s. They won’t read your writing sample, or your personal statement, and so they won’t know about any of your efforts to educate yourself. They do things this way because they get thousands of applications and they need a way to screen out ~70% of them without doing any real work. And if you’re white, male, and not attending a well-respected high school, it will take more than good grades, but that will at least get your foot in the door.
Unschooling is great, but if it comes at the expense of the kind of schooling where you get a piece of paper at the end with a bunch of A’s on it, then it’s very likely to be an economic and social disaster.
So here’s my advice: Don’t drop out of high school. Get nothing but A’s from now on. And spend the rest of your free time learning about what you find most interesting and valuable or hanging out with friends. Learning how to deal with people, both instrumentally and morally, is not a low priority.
I’m not sure, I just think that it’s overall quite likely. Admissions is probabilistic, in that you never know who you’re admitting given so little information, so you just want to admit those applicants who seem most likely to be successful students. It’s understood that not everyone who lacks a high school diploma with a bunch of A’s on it is going to be unsuccessful, nor is everyone with such credentials going to do well.
But suppose you were getting many more applications than you had time to read thoroughly, and further that reading and evaluating applications is a utterly miserable task. You’d probably come up with a way to weed out all those applications that are very unlikely to be worthwhile without really reading them. If you had to come up with a criteria for weeding people out, given high school GPAs, SAT scores, essays, cover letters, etc. what would you do?
Well, you can’t quickly process essays or letters. What you can do is put all the GPA scores and all the SAT scores on a spreadsheet, weight them however you like, and slash however many off the bottom so that you end up with a manageable number of applications and then read those. Most people with a just a GED or a bad GPA or a low SAT score are going to end up by the wayside. It’s a stupid, prejudicial way to handle any one application, but it makes sense as a way to deal with thousands.
This isn’t how everyone does it. But this is how a lot of places do it. And the more applications a school gets, the more likely it’ll employ such a method. And good schools get a lot of applications.
Just as a social and economic matter, it seems to me to be overwhelmingly likely that dropping out of high school will do long term and maybe permanent damage to your ability acquire significant money and free time. Dropping out of high school is very likely to be the worst thing you can do with your life right now. On the other hand, getting straight A’s (which is not an intellectually challenging task) is likely to pay off more than anything else you can invest your time in. I’m not saying that that’s the way it should be, I’m just saying that that’s the way it is.
An hour spent on maximizing your grades in high school is for almost everyone one of the most financially efficient hours you will ever get an opportunity to spend. And you’ll need money if you want the independence necessary to make a difference.
Barring some extreme mitigating circumstances, top colleges will throw your application in the trash the moment they see anything but a high school diploma littered with A’s. They won’t read your writing sample, or your personal statement, and so they won’t know about any of your efforts to educate yourself. They do things this way because they get thousands of applications and they need a way to screen out ~70% of them without doing any real work. And if you’re white, male, and not attending a well-respected high school, it will take more than good grades, but that will at least get your foot in the door.
Unschooling is great, but if it comes at the expense of the kind of schooling where you get a piece of paper at the end with a bunch of A’s on it, then it’s very likely to be an economic and social disaster.
So here’s my advice: Don’t drop out of high school. Get nothing but A’s from now on. And spend the rest of your free time learning about what you find most interesting and valuable or hanging out with friends. Learning how to deal with people, both instrumentally and morally, is not a low priority.
Thank you very much. How sure are you that top colleges will trash unschooling applications?
I’m not sure, I just think that it’s overall quite likely. Admissions is probabilistic, in that you never know who you’re admitting given so little information, so you just want to admit those applicants who seem most likely to be successful students. It’s understood that not everyone who lacks a high school diploma with a bunch of A’s on it is going to be unsuccessful, nor is everyone with such credentials going to do well.
But suppose you were getting many more applications than you had time to read thoroughly, and further that reading and evaluating applications is a utterly miserable task. You’d probably come up with a way to weed out all those applications that are very unlikely to be worthwhile without really reading them. If you had to come up with a criteria for weeding people out, given high school GPAs, SAT scores, essays, cover letters, etc. what would you do?
Well, you can’t quickly process essays or letters. What you can do is put all the GPA scores and all the SAT scores on a spreadsheet, weight them however you like, and slash however many off the bottom so that you end up with a manageable number of applications and then read those. Most people with a just a GED or a bad GPA or a low SAT score are going to end up by the wayside. It’s a stupid, prejudicial way to handle any one application, but it makes sense as a way to deal with thousands.
This isn’t how everyone does it. But this is how a lot of places do it. And the more applications a school gets, the more likely it’ll employ such a method. And good schools get a lot of applications.