I think you’re maybe avoiding hearing what joshsmother is saying – maybe it conflicts with ideas about how you got where you are or what you’ve been able to do for your kids.
The reality is that college is necessary for most kids at this point – but it’s a small minority of kids who have parents who can guide them in this manner. The fact that information is available is beside the point. If a parent can’t use the information, it might as well not be available.
Why wouldn’t a parent be able to do that? The parent’s own background is a major determinant of whether or not they even think to look for such information or find it important. That’s why so many schools, including state schools, are huge on first-gen programs now: the culture and business of academia is intensely classbound and exceptionally difficult for people whose parents aren’t wealthy and don’t have advanced degrees to navigate well, and everything is fast-moving and high stakes.
Then there’s the fact that many parents simply don’t have time. When a parent’s getting by on four or five hours’ sleep a night, no, there is no time for major research expeditions into some unknown online world. Sorry. When a parent’s taking care of frail elderly parents or disabled siblings or a disabled spouse, no, there isn’t time. And no, saying “find someone to help” isn’t an answer, either. People too busy to manage college searches for their children are also short on time to make social connections and reciprocate for favors. If they’re poor and their friends are also poor, their friends are also unlikely to be helpful here, too.
If your parents are immigrants, then unless they’re highly educated, the odds that they’ll have the cultural fluency to navigate the bazillion cues for how to apply successfully to the right schools – very slim. Very, very slim. And this generation is one of the biggest children-of-immigrants generations we’ve had in a very long time.
Finally, if you’ve spent any time as an adult in the world of wage work, you know that there are vast seas of adults out there who have trouble reading and figuring simple sums. New worlds of highly complex info are not where they’re equipped to go. That’s why training in so many jobs is engineered to be so simple. If those are your parents, those are your parents. And you’re likely to get beat up hard by academia when you attempt college, unless you find a sherpa there, or – more likely – a sherpa finds you.
In the US, roughly 30-40% of all kids are growing up poor, with a smaller percentage in federally-defined poverty. Most of them need to go to college, too. I guarantee that their parents are not well-represented here, and for good reasons.
While I get that one’s own bootstraps can be well-loved, it’s unkind not to recognize that having the bootstraps in the first place is a matter of fortune. And in a society where college is more or less a necessity, arranging things so that not being like you, or me, is going to punish your child longterm – it’s simply wrong, and I think it’s bad for the society as well.
As for the “is what is” notion – frankly, I deeply resent the amount of time and work it’s taken to throw money at a university that surely won’t deserve it, and I can’t even imagine how livid I’d be if I didn’t work at a university, so that at least there’s some advantaged derived from the whole horrible game. I’ve told my kid I’m happy to bake cookies for the revolution whenever her generation gets around to it.