Nothing in my life has really come from school. I'm only indebted to three teachers, my English teacher who encouraged me into writing, my science teacher who taught me to watch and question everything and my woodwork teacher who encouraged me to hit nails into things all class. For 11 years of education, little in retrospective appears to have been useful. My greatest lessons were of casual knowledge, not of information or education by any institutional standard. Persistence and intrigue.
You're an unlicensed doctor too!
Ironically, my mother was a nurse and I just picked up on how to patch minor injuries up. Nothing sutures better than sterilized royal blue thread in a hurry.
It's quite possible to do it in less, if things go right, though in the areas of CS I'm familiar with doing it in under 5 is a stretch (maybe if you're doing a pure theory thesis). But often things don't go right. Lots of people end up writing their PhD on their 2nd or 3rd project, not their first, either because it turned out not to interest them or turned out to be fatally flawed. Or they end up having to switch advisors for reasons ranging from personality clashes to the advisor leaving their university.
Things can also go faster or slower depending on how funding goes. The ideal is to be funded on a grant or fellowship to do your own research full-time. Less ideal is being funded on a grant to do something other than your research, often code-monkey implementation for some big DARPA project or something, which means you basically have a separate part-time job; or if you're supported by TAing, that's a different kind of part-time job.
Edit: Actually, it just occurred to me you might be in Europe, where the norm is a three-year PhD thesis, in a pretty time-defined program. The PhD program norms are pretty different between Europe and the U.S. overall (I'm in the U.S.). Is that an accurate guess? If so, that'd explain the confusion. =] The U.S. program is fairly ad-hoc: you enter grad school and then there's various things that you can do in various orders, for various durations, depending on the school. Often you don't have to get a masters first either, so you sort of get that along the way, and you might be doing PhD research at the same time as that too.
Note that this merely measures the time from start to finish, including breaks.
For example, 6 AP courses or start your own business after school? Which one are kids choosing?
Business is just one thing you could do in the time not spent on advanced courses. It's nice to have the option but it also pressures students towards more curricular learning as opposed to self-motivated learning. For example you could spend 3 hours a day making iPhone apps, or spend that 3 hours studying. Chances are unless you become famous for your iPhone apps, those 3 hours acing your courses will seem more advantageous if you're college-oriented.
You'd be lucky if you're so well as off academically as to have free time and still ace courses.
6 AP courses, start your own business after school, or drop out and start your own business.
I like option C.
It's doable if you're motivated enough.
I'm taking 3 APs and a few past-AP classes (classes for which APs don't exist), and in my free time working at making iPhone apps/mobile contractor work with a few of my similarly motivated friends. It's not exactly what people around here consider a "business" (i.e. startup), but it does show that it's possible.
I think it's a good idea to focus less on standardized curriculum. For those laissez-faire lovers, standardized curriculum are the equivalent of tight-controlling governments. Some students may need the control, but to those who are self-motivated, a strong regiment just hurts learning.
I think at $35k/degree the public university route is probably the most bang for your buck. I wonder how these schools compare to similar state run schools in Europe/Asia.
If I could do it all over again I would have gotten a two year degree in nursing and been in the workforce at 20. I ended up going to graduate school in mathematics and was in school until 29. I lost 9 years of earnings and my pay as a community college instructor is less than what my nursing friends make. There are other factors to take into consideration but here I'm only considering things from a money point of view.
In other words, we’d turn into teenagers.
I am reminded of growing up in suburbia.
We're spending huge amounts and losing big time. As usual, the nanny state is a fail.
Instinctively, we knew this was true when we got that first job. We felt a sense of real work getting done and hopefully a lot less bored out our skull than in the classroom.
The real world is always more of a challenge than the documented world. You can read music all you want, but won't know a damn thing about making it til you strum a guitar. And you can sit in a classroom 5 days a week for 4 years and not know German as well as would fully immersed in it for 2 months.