JH, nice post, and glad to see the success you've had. I have a great deal of trepidation over any 17 year-old having his life so neatly planned. I myself went JC - 4 yr - MBA and I'm glad I did because if you would have asked me at 17 what I wanted to be the MBA would not have been in the picture.
My daughter wanted to be a judge at 16. She's now a national merit scholar at a private university taking music studies while pursuing a career in opera.
My younger boy at 17 wanted to join the military. He ended up with a mathematics degree from West Point and plans to go into the private intelligence industry in a few years. Had no idea he wanted to do that at 17.
My baseball player is still pursuing his dream in the minors. Just recently he told me if it doesn't work out he'll go back to law school. Lucky for him he was nearly a 4.0 student in college.
Coyote, this is why you can't separate baseball from education. There's too much at stake. And from my own experience you can't predict what a 17-year old will do four years from now. At 17 he should not be boxed in with a lifelong plan.
Look, I agree with you 100%. I will NOT separate them in the real world. But for the purpose of this exercise, that is what I was asking. As I said, my kid is no different than others, he might change his mind ten times in the next two years as to what he wants to be. I too went 5.5 years (didn't know what I wanted to do) at a state school, to a top 20 school in my field master's degree. I work for a Fortune 50, and I hire people occasionally, and the absolute last item I look at is where applicants went to school. I concede that if you want to work for Deloitte or a hedge fund, this matters.
Based on your last sentence, my son should go for the JUCO route. He will have two more years to figure out what he wants to be while getting generals out of the way, two more years of baseball growth and development, two more years of maturity, and will not potentially waste $40K on 2 years of liberal arts education when he just might want to be a firefighter after baseball. He can still end up there for the last two years either way. I'm not being a smart-butt here, this could be exactly how things work out.