We must all make decisions in our lives.  Some of them will prove crucial to our futures and well-being, while others will become irretrievably lost in the void of our forgotten past.  So what happens when one of those life-changing decisions is set before you far before you are ready or able to accept the burden?  That is the question that is plaguing the minds of far too many young people these days.  Students, who, starting in the middle years of high school, are continually pressured to make career and lifestyle decisions before they are even allowed to buy cigarettes.  Modern youths are expected to plan out their lives before they are given a chance to even begin to live them.  With the increasing specialization and sophistication of good jobs educational institutions are squeezed to teach ever-expanding material to students over the same period of time.  The result of this trend is a lack of flexibility in within majors and a policy of education reminiscent of an intellectual boot camp.  Although an effective means of educating students able to figure their lives out at the ripe old age of 16 when they were told by guidance counselors to start choosing colleges and programs to send PSAT results to, it discourages others from exploring different fields and finding a career that will hopefully allow them a content and prosperous future.  It is those undergraduates, not yet able to make a responsible decision on this important matter, who are left behind and forced to make hasty and often regrettable judgments that, once enrolled in an institution, can be incredibly expensive to reverse or correct.

In C. M. Kornbluth's 1951 sci fi short, The Marching Morons, a modern day huckster takes a one way trip to the future and discovers that progress didn't quite go as expected.  The breeding rate of smart, educated people versus that of the not-so-bright underclass has left the world with an average IQ less than the temperature of Milwaukee in January, and only said conman can save the few smarties left from moronic domination.  The story is racist, classist, elitist, terribly dated, and really quite funny.

But of course, Kornbluth got everything wrong -- well, everything but the results   Because if some researchers are right, America is facing a huge shortage of a resource that can't be fixed no matter how many national parks we're willing to drill, or how many old growth trees we chop down.  We're running out of smart people.