Alternative College
There's an explore-exploit tradeoff in job search. In this post I explain that college is well into the exploit side. I propose that you use job shadowing and internships to explore before picking a college and major, or skip getting the degree at all.
What's the point of college anyway? Supposedly it helps you get a first job or climb the career ladder. Maybe it gives you meta-skills like critical thinking or appreciation for life. Maybe it lets you explore careers. Maybe it's just fun.
Why care so much about a job? Having a job is a big source of happiness for people, so we can assume you want this. Now, that doesn't have to mean a traditional 9-5 role in a maze of cubicles. You may be happy doing part time contract work, or volunteering, or doing something low paid that you just find fun. If college is stressful and expensive, you're mostly satisfied with volunteering, and you can afford not to work, then college isn't worth it. Finally, earning to give is probably the best reason to get a degree, and I give some suggestions for that.
Explore vs Exploit:
Ignoring financial constraints, college can be viewed as a way to maximize the expected enjoyment of jobs over your life, or minimize expected loss from unemployment. College is itself a kind of job, with different colleges offering different levels of satisfaction. But if you spend 4 years in college and get matched with a career for 43 more years of life, you're mostly focused on how good that career will be. If you haven't thought about your career, you might aim for something that others enjoy.
You can't aim for all fun careers at once with one college degree, and college might not be the best way to get into a field, so before choosing a major it makes sense to explore these options. Now consider taking a class in an area as a way to explore it. A semester long class is typically 130+ hours of work. An introductory class in an area will cover an abstraction of the subject area that may have little to do with real world job tasks. You will definitely not experience important features of the job like what your coworkers will be like, what your customers will be like, the hours, marketing, and bureaucracy. I claim a much better approach is to try a job shadow or internship. For just 8 hours you can shadow someone at their job for a day (plus the time to find that someone) and see a much realler version of the job.
Internships are a little trickier, because it wastes a lot more employer resources for you to be there for 6+ weeks. After seeing many jobs for 1 day, you should make the minimum possible investment to land yourself an internship. An internship will be different from the real job, but then again your 1st year on a real job will be different from your 10th. An internship lets you spend 240-1000 hours doing something a lot more like the job than a class and get much better exploration value for choosing your ultimate career.
How long will it take to land an internship? Well there are plenty of schools where students do summer internships after the first year, meaning perhaps 6 classes in relevant subjects (not counting breadth requirements). I have also seen plenty of highschoolers do unpaid internships, but this may require a lot of skill or luck. You might think you absolutely have to go to college, e.g. because your parents demand it or because you lack the self control to pursue internships on your own, or because you think a collection of short internships will destroy your CV. If you insist, then there are also gap year internships and co-ops. These are both structured programs that will guide you through the process of taking internships. And because you learn less and less about a job for each hour you spend exploring it, focus on getting many small internships or shadows before taking a few large ones.
So an ideal "college" experience for finding your perfect career might look something like this: Do 50 job shadows each lasting 1-5 days in as wildly varying fields as you can manage. Pick your 10 favorite from these and do 6 week internships in each one. Pick your 2 favorite of these and study for 1 year in each, then do 10 job shadows in each area to find a company you want to work at for longer. Do a 6 month internship at your favorite company in both fields. You spent the normal 4 years and even studied half the time! And even more ideally, spread out each of these stages as much as makes sense - doing 5 random shadows, 1 internship, 5 more shadows... then study for a year after the 5th internship.
Finally, many careers will require a degree. If you find yourself forced to get one, get an online degree. There are accredited online universities that are much easier and faster than the tradition 4 years. Here's one guy who finished in 3 months, though I expect 2 years is more realistic. Strangely, the median is 52 months, the same as in-person bachelor programs.
FIRE:
Another possibility is that your ideal job is very low paying or unpaid. It then becomes worthwhile to earn money early and live on it while doing that job, and you want to spend as little time (or pay the smallest decrease in utility) as you can to earn that money. Coding provides a baseline - You have an 85% chance of getting a job with a bootcamp and it will take a median of 2 months.
You will start off with 71k/yr in salary, but software developers earn on average 145k/yr in the San Francisco Bay Area and can pay 33k/yr to live. At California tax rates you will save 20k/yr starting out and 65k/yr with some experience. With 10.8% annual growth and 3% inflation you can work roughly 7 years and have enough to retire with a 5% withdrawal rate. You might need 12 years to support a family of 4. Please leave an angry comment telling me that this is too high/low a cash reserve for retirement.
Given how well-liked coding is, this very fast time to retirement very likely beats other jobs. It seems almost certain that college can't beat it, since you have only 3-8 years left to save 750-1400k. That means a job paying 260-420k/yr right out of college.
Earn to give:
If you want to earn as much money as possible then you don't need much exploring. In this case you just want to race for a high paid position. The highest paid fields in the US are
Physician - 205k
C level executive - 194k
Dentist - 183k
After this the next highest paid field earns 152k, so this is unlikely to be the best option unless you fail to achieve the options above. Let's ignore C level executives since there’s not a clear path to become one. To become a physician you need a bachelor degree, then a 4 year medical school, then a minimum of 3 years of residency. To become a dentist you just need a bachelor degree and a 4 year dental school.
You have great chances once you get into medical school, with 94% of students completing the program within 5 years (and 83% within 4 years). These students have at least an 88% chance to pass all 4 steps of the medical licensing exam on the first try (and if they retake a step they have a 74% chance to pass). 93% are then matched to a residency. Finally, 96% complete their residency. In total, there's over an 80% chance to become a doctor once you're accepted to medical school. If you fail to get matched it's also possible to get licensed as a general practitioner with 1 year of internships.
It's likely that your specific bachelor degree and medical school program affect your residency, and ultimately your salary. The best programs are often not what you expect though. You may improve your chances by attending a school with a high rate of medical school applications per capita, such as UCLA or UT Austin, but there are many reasons this could be correlation and not causation. It may be worth getting a fast online degree (in 2 years) and then transferring to a "good" school only if you fail to get into a medical school (or dental school).
Other goals:
Now let's talk about the other goals of college. There's a little evidence for meta-skills from college. I don't know what to say about this.
Fun is a strong argument. College clearly has consumptive value. Can we measure it? Does the expected value change over one's lifetime? Each extra year of college tends to be less new and exciting than the previous, which is part of why it's so popular to stay for only 4 years. I expect each year number of college (first year, etc) to have slowly diminishing returns with age, so that starting at age 18 is a bit better than at 19, etc. If you can't measure this, you can at least estimate the size of the effect for use in your calculations.
Will you be able to make friends while working? Well you can easily show up on a university campus to attend events and clubs after work. While there might be some special bonding to be gained by enrolling, keep in mind that only 13% of people’s friends were met at school (and another 12% through other friends). The standard deviation on the difference in age between friends is 6.9 years so, as an 18 year old, you can make friends with 25 year olds at work while normal people are doing this magic college bonding. Furthermore, friendship has a halflife of 7 years, so the difference between friends from college and elsewhere will decrease over time.
One common claim is that your highschool friends are going to college now and you want to fit in by going at the same time. The expected number of friends going to school with you decreases with distance. If you go to college outside your home metro area you will have basically no friends going with you. By the end of college you may still be friends with your highschool friends, but college has little to do with that.
Generalizations:
There are other places where you can do a lot exploration by thinking outside the box. For an easy example, consider a PhD. Firstly, you should do a masters if you can afford it. Yes, you will get a masters when doing a PhD and get paid for it. But what if you don't like the subject? Half of PhD students drop out. I estimate you spend 1.5 years on a master and this extends the PhD by about 0.5 years, which is almost surely worth it.
But the even better strategy is, as I said before, shadows and internships. Find professors who will take you on for short research visits, which typically range from 1 week to 1 year. Do this for at least half a year before applying to a program.
You can also try this with jobs. You will spend a median of at least 4 years at a job. Each time you switch, apply to enough places that you get at least 2 offers, which, as a nice bonus, will let you negotiate your starting salary. When you apply to places, ask them if you can shadow. In my experience there's a solid chance they'll say yes and this will give you a lot more info than the Potemkin village of the interview process. If you can afford it, leave your old job and consider even doing an internship at one or two places before signing on full time.
If you really want to be a college student, you can do shadows and internships for this process itself. Many colleges offer a summer experience for highschoolers. If you can do 4 of these during highschool you spend less than a year exploring and get to pick your favorite among 4 colleges, which is far better than going in blind.