Home schooling programs are cheap compared to school systems, which of course makes one wonder why they don't just use them in public schools as well, since they're much cheaper, except for the high school level labs and that sort of equipment. And besides, the Feds are paying an increasingly small percentage of local school districts' funding anyway, ours gets around 10%, low enough to tell them to take their ridiculous demands elsewhere and shove them.
If you think about it, school used to prepare you for the world, college was a separate, optional thing some people went to for additional specialized training for particular advanced fields. Now school only prepares you for college and it is assumed that college will prepare you for the world. Yet even these grads are often still only poorly educated in many basic things.
When you really look at it, the average 4 year college grad of today is still rather an idiot about most things with only a narrowly functional understanding about a few things specifically pertaining to their field. In effect, a close examination of education shows that at one time, grade school produced a very well rounded individual capable of going in many directions that is equivalent to the 4 year college grad of today. In contrast, the high school grad of today is more akin to the 8th grader of yesteryear.
So when an employer says "4-year degree" required, they are really speaking of the grad of today. What we have created in the USA is a self-serving system whereby first the taxpayer is ransacked of money for 12 years then forced into a bloated educational system one of the most expensive in the world yet providing an education about 20th on the list that keeps the taxpayer in debt almost their entire lives in order to get educated enough to open a door into a very narrow, limited field which is increasing paying less and less to where not only isn't healthcare no longer included, but it requires BOTH parents to work to afford to get by!
And of course, since both parents are working, neither can be home educating their children themselves, must pay for daycare, thereby further making them dependent on the system.