<p>Ken, I hope we someday can sit down and have a beer together (or a lemonade or whatever suits your taste, as I realize plenty of people aren’t into beer). On many major points, we agree, like a child’s safety and happiness are far more important than when someone finishes a certain form of education or even <em>if</em> they ever finish a certain type of education. The problem is these issues are not like knowing 1 + 1 equals 2. It’s hard to know what is a reasonable level of safety, for example. Some adults never fly, fearing it isn’t safe, and even more would never jump from a plane (myself included, at least till I am either in my 70’s or terminally ill, whichever comes first) even with research showing that airplane travel is about the same risk <em>per hour of human involvement in that form of travel</em> as train, boat, and car and research showing that riding a bike is actually is <em>more</em> dangerous based on number of fatalities per hour a human engages in the activity as we just aren’t comfortable with the notion for whatever reason. Our son wants to both pilot a plane and jump from one, and despite my knowing the <em>odds</em> are he’d be fine in either, I’m not comfortable with either and he’ll have to wait till 18 to do those, though I don’t look down on my friends whose kids were flying planes as young teens.</p>
<p>We also agree that finishing early is not a goal in-and-of-itself. If we had that mindset, we’d have allowed our son to apply to college at 6, grad school at 12 or earlier (a mentor wanting him applying at 11), encouraged him to apply to the MBA or JD before the MS/PhD (as it would be more likely to "set age records), let him apply to grad school of some form while still a senior in college (especially as that could have left open the possibility of a $300K Jack Kent Cooke for funding and while he is fully funded for the MS/PhD by MIT, he’s currently got a hankering to attend Harvard for the MBA and JD and there is no school merit aid for that and I am guessing won’t go just because he refuses to take tuition or living expenses money from us and refuses to take loans for anything other than real estate or a business start-up (well, unless you count using a credit card, but I don’t as he pays those off in full every month and so isn’t truly using them for “loans” so much as convenience).</p>
<p>As for the kids who “go to community college and transfer to a mediocre university”, I don’t think most do that. I know people who started college very young at CC’s and have gone on to top tier colleges for undergraduate school (for example, Carnegie Mellon is where one of my son’s favorite friends since age 8 went, though he was 16 by the time he moved to PA on his own; I am thinking the guy we met who started undergraduate school at MIT at age 14 in the late 90’s had some CC credits under his belt first, but am not positive). But going to a “mediocre university” - by which I suspect you mean not in the top tier - is not the end of the world. My son went to a third tier college and he <em>did</em> have intellectual peers there. He has noted that some of his friends from his math courses and philosophy club at his third tier school are more intelligent than a majority of MIT students (as in these “no name U” students were indeed equal to those in the top 10% of the students at MIT). It’s not like the entire student body will be intellectual peers, but that’s not going to be the case even going to a top U for some kids and even at a young age and again, not the end of the world as you don’t need to hang out with everyone in any given school. Do most workers hang out after work with every employee in their company? Do they feel remorse due to having a few friends at work that they do things with outside of work rather than doing things socially with every EE?</p>
<p>Our son’s education hasn’t yet ended, so I can’t say where he’ll “end up”, but he is currently at the U that was ranked number in all four areas of his study (math, CS, physics, and engineering) when he started at MIT (Princeton this year is ranked first in math and MIT is second, and our son is not at all upset by this change, nor are we parents), so it’s not like a different path where college was delayed longer than it was would have gotten him to a better doctoral program eventually. And I feel the third tier college actually had a LOT of benefits over MIT, to be honest, and am quite glad he had that undergraduate school’s experience in retrospect (even though it was only chosen due to being close to our home at the time).</p>
<p>I agree that just because you can doesn’t mean you should. I also feel just because people think you can’t doesn’t mean you can’t and just because some people will frown upon your choice doesn’t mean you shouldn’t still go with that choice.</p>