The only people I know in highschool who are pursuing the arts are viewed by everyone else as deadbeats. One of them even got into an incredibly prestigious school in boston and they are still viewed like that. There's something wrong with that.
Before I say this, I perform once a week and practice three times a week- I like the arts and humanities quite a bit. But to be frank, in a world which is increasingly digitized, where the most important media is the bit, there's something wrong with the arts, too. When the majority of artists are luddites there's a problem. Because it should be so simple to leverage the most powerful tools in human history to make real art, but every attempt I've seen has either been a commercialization of how cool the internet is without much understanding of it, or trying to drag people away from the medium by using the medium. So far the sciences have made art more widely available and readily consumed in the last 30 years than the arts ever have. And the arts still spite the sciences way more then vice-versa. (How is that spelled!?)