ACTIVE career preparation STARTS around age 14

Advice for TEENAGERS : ACTIVE career preparation STARTS around age 14. 

( From some article : I made a separate comment on OP, and that spiraled into advising a mom about her kid's college choices. Notes below are about the latter, not about my original comment. )

I grew up with the advice "go to college, study everything, figure out what you want to do based on that". This was VERY BAD advice, because colleges are NOT DESIGNED TO HELP YOU ANSWER THAT QUESTION. However, my parents didn't know any better, so I appreciated the opportunity.

My own experience : went to college not to make money but to learn stuff, didn't think the kids OR professors there were fully aligned with my interests, so ended up doing most of my own academic study in the library under my own direction. Undergraduate class of 2005, Bates.edu FWIW, but I haven't been back ever, so can't speak about the present state.

Presuming you have a fairly smart kid who needs to maximise economic opportunities such as not to be steamrolled by the economy regardless of interests :

• 1. college isn't always the best thing to do : they might skip college now, and go back later, and they might have a better chance of (i) getting in, (ii) getting financing from the school, and (ii) multiplying the value of what you can take away from the institutional experience.
• 2. if your kid's like me, and optimising for learning ignoring money, then the answer is much longer ( not addressed in this note )
• 3. the simplest approach is to optimise for money of course, which means six-figure annual USD paycheque upon graduation, with elite internships for every summer before that. This is the safe route, because once you log a few years of work with the brand-name corporations, you can usually use it to swing bigdik around any class-oriented situation : be it social laddering, business development, job applications, or just getting into another school ( the strategies for these are mainstream, you can DYOR )