Long answer: I had an ACT in the 30s and a GPA of 3.9 upon graduation from highschool, and I took a few AP courses (my school only offered 3, and in addition I took AP Physics over the internet (terrible idea)), got a 5 in the AP Calc test, etc. but past that I hadn't taken the SAT subject tests or anything, so I wasn't really competitive. My family and I don't have a lot of excess money just lying around, and basically my options were thus: get admitted to a couple upper-tier-but-not-Ivy-League schools and pay with money I didn't have, or go to a crappy state school with scholarships.
I've had a job since 7th grade (but there are not a lot of tech companies in my area, so they haven't really been 'tech' jobs), but all of that was saved for buying my own vehicle, insurance, 'spare' money for college, etc. I remember getting excited when I received a ~$20K a year scholarship to a "Blah Blah Institute of Technology", only to find that it cost $50K a year to attend.
Overall, I'm burnt on the education system. My goal now is to get out with a stupid degree before I completely crash, but I'm already coming dangerously close...
EDIT: I was also in Duke's TIP program, which got me mail from Columbia and the like, but once again I couldn't really afford to go through with any of that.
EDIT 2: Before this sounds like just a bunch of whining, a huge chunk of this was my fault. I could have had higher scores and grades and whatnot, but I really just didn't give a shit. I hated school, and wanted to do as little as possible. I've always loved learning though.
I had a 4.7 GPA in high school. (Yay honors classes and my school being more interested in making themselves look good than math.) By my sophomore year of college, I was completely burned out. If I love learning so much, why did I hate college? It was supposed to be different...
I ended up not finishing my degree to get into the startup game. I feel much, much better now. I don't think I'm going back, even though I only need one or two classes to be done. Yeah, a piece of paper might be nice in the general sense... but I don't want to give those bastards another dime. I had to take out loans to pay for all of school, so I'm a solid 70k in the hole. Fun times.
Funny story: my school wouldn't allow you to score over a 4.0 on anything. This meant that if, for example, you blew off a stupid humanities class and got a 'B', you could never have a 4.0. This is great in theory, as most schools should ask for a "GPA out of a 4.0" number, and all would be grand. In practice, they didn't, so my official transcript from the school would always read '3.9', without giving any clue that the GPA's were capped!
Craaazy. My school gave you + .125 for honors, and + .25 for AP courses. This would be added after the division... a 4.0 for an A and a 3.0 for a B, both AP, ends up as ((4 + 3) / 2) + (.25 + .25) = 4.0.
Oh, and everyone over a 4.0 gets reported as valedictorian.
Oh, mine was pretty neat too. We didn't have a 4.0 scale. It wasn't a 5.0 scale either.. it was just kind of arbitrary. The AP and honors courses had a higher "weight" (1.1 or 1.2 instead of the normal 1.0). So it was possible to get i.e. 4.8 if you took four AP courses. But here's the kicker: if you took other 1-weighted courses, they'd bring your GPA _down_. So it was possible to take 12 courses, ace them all, and get a LOWER GPA than someone who took the bare minimum number of courses. This happened to me.
No big deal. It _is_ incredibly ridiculous. Also, see the post by jfbillingsley above. he's a friend of mine. At least I got good things because of my school's terrible grading...
Speaking of high school grade systems, my school had grades out of 100. Talk about unnecessary competitiveness (both with yourself and others). I obsessed over getting 97s and 98s rather than 94s and 95s. While we weren't officially ranked, it was well known that out of 700-800 students in your class, a 98 average put you in the top 5, and a 94 put you somewhere in the top 100-200. Because the school released college admissions statistics (in the format of GPA | SAT | accepted/rejected/waitlist), you could see that you have empirically little chance of getting into Harvard with that 94, but a very very good chance with that 98.
That said, most people were generally very smart, passionate and inspiring people to be around. They actually cared about at least some subset of what they were learning. But a lot of the work was pure grind, and to impose that on a bunch of smart creative people is a shame.
Long answer: I had an ACT in the 30s and a GPA of 3.9 upon graduation from highschool, and I took a few AP courses (my school only offered 3, and in addition I took AP Physics over the internet (terrible idea)), got a 5 in the AP Calc test, etc. but past that I hadn't taken the SAT subject tests or anything, so I wasn't really competitive. My family and I don't have a lot of excess money just lying around, and basically my options were thus: get admitted to a couple upper-tier-but-not-Ivy-League schools and pay with money I didn't have, or go to a crappy state school with scholarships.
I've had a job since 7th grade (but there are not a lot of tech companies in my area, so they haven't really been 'tech' jobs), but all of that was saved for buying my own vehicle, insurance, 'spare' money for college, etc. I remember getting excited when I received a ~$20K a year scholarship to a "Blah Blah Institute of Technology", only to find that it cost $50K a year to attend.
Overall, I'm burnt on the education system. My goal now is to get out with a stupid degree before I completely crash, but I'm already coming dangerously close...
EDIT: I was also in Duke's TIP program, which got me mail from Columbia and the like, but once again I couldn't really afford to go through with any of that.
EDIT 2: Before this sounds like just a bunch of whining, a huge chunk of this was my fault. I could have had higher scores and grades and whatnot, but I really just didn't give a shit. I hated school, and wanted to do as little as possible. I've always loved learning though.