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.

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.