But you are right, it isn’t the only way. I place high end developers - some I pay $100 an hour to (contract, so they are their own companies paying their own benefits). A number of these guys didn’t go to college. And there are other paths to financial stability - trades can be good - especially if you have the will to start your own business and leverage the labor of others - the very comfortable family across the street started as a hairdresser and a mechanic - they own a salon/spa.
And you are right that adults have no idea how long it takes to do something. We’ve had to work with our college student on helping them write papers - and it just takes forever. The patterns I see immediately, that keep me from having to outline through every sentence, they just aren’t practiced in seeing. The language that comes naturally to me, for them starts as a first draft of casual language to get thoughts onto paper and then a second draft where the language formalizes. The tricks I know to research quickly, they have had to learn. As a History major, they are looking at primary sources that are 200 year old handwritten script - for a kid who barely learned to write in cursive (why teach it?, everyone types) and has never had to read it - that just takes time and practice - what the Professor can read like I can read my mother’s handwriting, the students spend hours over. And really old people like me, we had to learn to do this all with typewriters, so your patterns of thought and language and habits of spelling and punctuation were firmed up in a much less forgiving environment. For me, being able to cut and paste and move sentences around is freeing…for them, its almost too much flexibility - like a toddler looking at too many choices. Three years in its better, they are learning…but it isn’t something you are just able to do.
And some of their college struggle has to do with lack of high school rigor - i.e. they managed to graduate from college prep courses with enough credits to enter college as a Sophomore - and had never written a rigorous research paper or knew what a peer reviewed article was. But that has less to do with the amount of homework…and more to do with the syllabus which was “teach to the AP exam, which includes being able to write an essay on the fly - not an eight to ten page research paper.”
(The kid is REALLY good at writing a five paragraph essay on the fly, because that was what high school trained them to do. And answer multiple choice questions.)