Given GPAs, I’m having a hard time believing your second point.
As for your first, I bet a lot of teachers wished the parents of their students gave enough of a crap to try to get their kids in GATE programs. And I say that as someone who spent years on the board of the GATE parent support group in our district. A far bigger problem is the high percentage of parents who go to teacher meetings. My kids teachers tended to say that the parents who showed up were exactly the ones who didn’t need to.
Far more likely also are teachers and administrators who don’t believe in GATE and find it easier if every student is like every other student. We moved into our district after GATE evaluation, and I plead guilty at pushing our daughter into being evaluated for GATE. Which she got into. Since she got a Fulbright after college, I think we were justified.
The people who push tend to be those with higher level degrees who give a shit. I’m all for it.
Yeah…dumb people 
Everyone has sort of touched on many of the issues. One of the main beefs I have is the social promotion in school and the demand by parents that their precious flowers be given higher grades. I got a resume the other day where a candidate said that she graduated high school with a 4.45 GPA and was 7th in her class. Seventh!!! 4.0 is supposed to be perfect and be valedictorian.
The local school system did away with valedictorian and salutatorians because before they ended it, the local high school had four co-valedictorians and six salutatorians.
This carries over when the state provides free tuition to a four year in state school for every student with a minimally competent GPA and minimally competent ACT scores. Now more kids go to college making that degree not as lucrative. Plus they have student loans (the state doesn’t pay for books, room and board, lab fees, etc.).
Further, these kids skate by taking easy classes and getting degrees which in no way prepare them for the real world. Even most well meaning parents that instruct their kids in what courses to take are working off of information that they used 25 years ago.
Now grad school is becoming the new “4 year degree” and young people are entering a world where, in addition to all of the problems discussed in this thread, they start life massively in debt.
A good start to solving all of this would be to stop the social promotion and the grade enhancement. Let high school prepare a person for most middle class jobs and leave college for those seeking professional careers.
The idea seems to be that if we make college more accessible to everyone, then everyone will have professional jobs and have a comfortable standard of living. In reality, it keeps raising the bar. Imagine a world where every single person becomes a doctor, lawyer, or engineer. Someone will still have to pick up the garbage and wait tables.
Society will always have the upper class, middle class, and lower class. There is no sense is making kids go to school to age 22 and beyond, racking up six figure debts, just to stay middle class. The "free college"solution a la Sanders and Clinton just keeps bumping this up. If such a thing would pass, then grad school will become the new college and getting a doctorate will be the thing that young people need to get ahead and go to school until age 26, still piling up debt.
This is at least step one to addressing the issue. Don’t saddle young people with six figure debt just to get ready to compete for middle class jobs.
In 1971, my father got a job as the HR manager in an electronics factory which was still being built. One of his first tasks was hiring over 500 people, most of them for blue collar jobs. He figured that they needed some sort of tests, it couldn’t just be “first come first serve”. Warehouse workers needed to be able to drive without running into walls and lift relatively large and heavy objects, most of them were male. Production workers needed attention to detail and the ability to perform soldiering tasks on tiny parts: overwhelmingly female. Which Dad reckoned made sense: the guys came from working in the fields, their idea of “delicate” involved not hitting things too hard rather than not hitting them period; the women came from housework, they were used to sewing, chopping food…
The tests were kept in place through big changes such as the advent of integrated circuits and of soldering baths. They would sometimes get a young guy or two for summer jobs in Production, usually kids who were studying Electronics at the local trade school, but no permanent guys in Production (either line or management) unless they got there in a sideways move.
The first guys to get hired directly as Production line workers were college graduates in the ‘90s. Guys with degrees in Law (Bachelor’s, not Doctorate), Business Administration or Philosophy, working side by side with ladies’ their mothers’ ages whose schooling had ended at age 10.
One thing I see is many parents who, wanting of course the best for their kids, insist that the child has to go to college or even on what specific field of study the child must undertake. Son is allergic to reading and his first impulse upon encountering a new machine is to open it up but ah, since the parents respect lawyers very much, he must become a lawyer.
Often the reasoning employed makes very little sense. My sister in law wanted to be a physical therapist: 4 years of college, main sources of employment are the UHC system, private clinics and small practices either by yourself or with a partner. Her father declared that unacceptable: she must become a doctor! Six years of college, followed by a huge exam with on average takes 3 years to pass (and that’s how long she took), followed by 4-5 years of specialization, in order to work in the UHC system or in private clinics, for the same salary as a physical therapist and with worse hours.
And all that boils down to “orientation”, but of the children - and their parents!
About the colleges:
More students equals more money. Colleges dont care if that money comes from tuition, loans, or the government they just want it. Who cares if society actually “needs” more college grads.
So any program to cut down on the number of students going to college will get resistance.
In our district students taking AP classes get a bonus on the GPA considered when applying to UCs, so at one high school this kind of thing would be very normal. In fact there was a 17 way tie for valedictorian. Turns out that lots of those kids were cheating (Wells Fargo effect) but still.
MIT, when I was there at least, did not publish class rankings since I suppose many students were nutty enough without them.
I’m not sure if it’s the plan so much as the preparation, though. Some people know what they want to do by 16, but a lot of the time these are people who have their life in order in at least some way.
Other people may be gay or trans and closeted in an unaccepting community, or have recently developed an adolescent onset mental illness, are working at a convenience store to help pay their family’s bills, or be dealing with a toxic home life. The whole college and career selection years at that age put tremendous pressure on people to excel at a volatile age, and it seriously over-rewards people who are, by and large, part of privileged groups (both in the social justice and economic sense) and not suffering from severe but treatable mental illnesses.
It’s not the bumbling about that kills you, it’s the fact that you have a pretty narrow window from maybe 16-20 to decide these things, and that can be hard when you’re lacking treatment or a support network for whatever is happening to you.
Of course, people can and have succeeded in spite of the odds, have been unusually determined, have known since before the issues hit they wanted to be <X> and nailed it, or have managed to succeed and rise to affluence and fame at the age of 40 after being stuck in middle management at a fast food place since high school. But the odds are stacked against them.
I’m not sure it’s tractable to combat this societal career arms race, but it makes me uncomfortable that we expect people at a volatile time in their life to form a plan for the next 40 years, because in practice most of the people who will succeed at doing that are those who can afford the mental energy to focus on it. I don’t think most people fail because of poor planning (I think some do, but not most), they fail because they have to worry about other during that narrow formative age.
Someone with a well thought out plan is going to have considered the possibilities while preparing it. While the plan may not work out, odds are she is going to able to adapt better than someone blindly stumbling around.
If your plan involved working really hard in junior high and high school to make it more likely to get admitted to a good college, you are going to do better no matter what your major is. Same goes for exploring non-college apprenticeships.
There is no more a “war against stupid people” any more than there is a war between adults and children. “Stupids” (for lack of a better term) just don’t know any better. And because of the Dunning-Kruger effect, they often don’t know how much they don’t know any better. So Smart People will tend to surpass them. Smart People are not infallible, but they are able to process more information, see the big picture and apply reason and logic to make better decisions. That is why we tend to drive them towards more analytical or strategic jobs. But often being smart and focusing on the big picture makes you blind to the little pictures.
The problem is that there are more Stupids than Smart People and they don’t have the mental capacity to understand nuanced solutions to complex problems. Smart People will often try to rationalize with them, but that is an ineffective approach. Stupids won’t understand the rationale, especially if it contradicts what their anecdotal observations or “gut instinct” tells them. So they will feel like they are being “tricked” and become frustrated and angry.
Trump understands this. Hilary Clinton and much of the media and educated electorate does not.
It doesn’t even have to be that well thought out of a plan. Often just having a vague goal and then taking steps towards that goal is enough. Although generally speaking, getting the best grades you can from the best schools you can get into isn’t a bad start.
Nonsense. Sure, opportunities tend to close as you get older. But there’s nothing stopping someone from deciding to go back to school or starting a business at 30 or 40 or later if that’s what they want to do.
I was excluding plans like “The NBA will sign me” or “me and my friends will get signed for a record label and become rock stars.”
As I recall it, the survey wasn’t about GPAs, but about more intangible, un-measurable things like, Are you smarter than your peers, are you of better character/stuff than your peers, etc. And the vast majority considered themselves to be in the top half of the student body, and 40% ranked themselves in the top 10%.