Well both are right. Yes, 17 year olds need to fully grasp these decisions, and yes colleges and gov should do more, much more, too. For example my gf's now do

Well both are right. Yes, 17 year olds need to fully grasp these decisions, and yes colleges and gov should do more, much more, too. For example my gf's now doing her 2nd master's to become a teacher, in a field which, surprise, there are no jobs in. Now frankly she mostly knew this, wanted to do it anyway because she's got the resume to get that 1 job that opens up every 5 billion years and she's really passionate about teaching this field. But what struck me was that a few days ago as she was complaining about her job prospects, I said 'your uni has a responsibility here, too', and I went to the website to see if they offered any support. Got to the 'employability' page, and it essentially said the prospects were 'good'. In reality, the employability of this particular degree is probably in the bottom 5%. I mean this is the Netherlands, tuition is $2k a year, it's a 1y programme and student loan rates are currently 0.01% (fixed until 2020, and averaged < 1% in the past 20 years), so it's fine. But for other institutions in other countries, that's blatant false advertising bordering on the criminal as we're talking about multi-year time investments in addition to tens of thousands of dollars. And I see this all the time, but institutions and governments aren't currently willing to be dead honest about job prospects.