As a typical kid in the US, it's virtually impossible to ever go anywhere on your own without getting a car. And the chances are high you won't get a car anyway, because your parents can't afford to buy you one and, well, how exactly are you supposed to afford your own car as a jobless kid?
The only way is to get a minimum wage job and suck out a considerable amount of time from your high school studies and extracurriculars, all just to have a car. But educational achievement is ranked very, very high in priority in the US, so a lot of kids who understand that are going to choose to just forgo the car completely if their parents can't get them one.
To top it off, most kids in the US have, up until college, never experienced a walkable microcosm of society, outside of shopping malls. The idea of living in this little walkable world is so exciting that it becomes worth the cost. It's like taking a (short) lifetime of observing all the systemic problems with American life and then finding a new little world that recognizes all those problems and fixes every one.
In that sense, in the US, going off to college comes with this tremendous sense of relief, where you feel like finally, for the first time, life is starting to make sense. Almost all college students will ask themselves repeatedly on first matriculating, "why the hell wasn't life like this in high school and earlier?"
In general, many people need to detox from a childhood that lacked sufficient freedom to explore and become a full human being. Their internal programming then takes college and its new freedom as an opportunity to rectify that. It is quite a reasonable approach given our K-12 schooling setup and its intense control of children's time during the day.
It's kinda too bad that the expected path is to go right to college after high school. Because,although it can be a lot of fun, it's an awfully expensive way to "detox" if one isn't even taking advantage of the school and its resources. I might have been more productive being a ski bum for a couple of years before heading to school.
I think the year-off strategy is a good one. Too many people go back to grad school almost just for a re-do. 18 is too young to pick a career - I switched majors twice in the first two years.
I want to formulate a better set of options and incentives for my kids. To start, I could chip in for some tuition if they take a year off, or just minimally support them for that year as long as they leave home. The pull of peers (let's go to college together even though we'll drift apart after!) is strong, though.
gp may be on to something about detox. I'll have to allow them experiences growing up (provided they don't get taken by CPS).
Pretty much everyone throughout human history, outside of recent Western history, would probably disagree with that. By 18 you were expected to be a self-supporting adult.
I think 18 is too young to pick a career only if you wait until you're 18 to start thinking about it. If you're encouraged and allowed to explore your interests earlier, you should have a pretty good idea of what you'd like to do by the time you're 18.
After further discussion offline, I came to that conclusion too. Before college, I only had a vague idea of what I wanted to do that had no connection to reality or my temperament ("Building spacecraft is like model rockets, right?"). Doing practical work and going on field trips gave me the real taste of careers, and if I had gotten some of that in high school or sooner, yeah, I would've been looking at schools based on the major I ended up with, and done better, faster.
I was given free reign to explore my interests, but maybe not actively encouraged, especially where you need to go meet professionals in their workplace. I'll try to correct that with the next generation. A car factory or construction site can be just as fun as the zoo.
And if work is fun and part of a balanced diet, there's less need to 'detox' from life for a year, or four years.
I think people have a completely idealized idea of the past. Yes, by 18 you had a career: you were a farmer or you'd been an apprentice for some time. Your formal education had probably been over for quite a few years. That was 100 years ago, 60 years you would've gone to a trade school.
Youd also probably be living with your parents until you got a job, often longer, depending on how well off you were.
While you obviously have the freedom to do what you wish, I got the impression that colleges are going further along the path of hand-holding to cater to those who can't/won't make that K-12 transition. From speaking with my coworkers who were alumni of the university I was attending and were of the same major, it really seemed like the rigor disappeared. The amount of times a professor would extend deadlines, cull portions of an assignment, or just flat out cancel it because of students complaining became enough to drive me away from classes. In several other courses, we had adjuncts that were former K-12 educators and they frequently treated us as their former students. In fact, the final straw that lead to me leaving the university entirely was an incident where I was castigated by an adjunct German professor for the atrocity of discretely pulling out my phone in order to translate a word so I could properly ask a question of the professor. This was only a few years ago, and having tutored a few friends through the years, I have a good idea of the state of things. They haven't changed.
Looking back, I was guilty of this attitude at various times.