A shift in the way the United States prepares students for life after high school is long overdue. The U.S. education system currently fails to prepare many young Americans to lead successful adult lives because our preparation strategy is narrow, focused on readying students to attend four-year colleges and universities. As a result, many youth leave high school no more fit to succeed in college than to thrive in the world of work.
Prepared Neither for College …
There is overwhelming evidence of our failure to prepare students to succeed in college. Indeed, approximately one million students in the United States still drop out of high school every year. Even most of those who earn a diploma aren't prepared to do college-level work (ACT, 2011). Little wonder that most U.S. students who enroll in college never earn a degree: Only 40 percent of Americans earn an associate's or bachelor's degree by the age of 27, meaning that most fail to earn a college degree within a decade of leaving high school (Symonds, Schwartz, & Ferguson, 2011).
For decades, the United States led the world in most measures of education achievement, but it's now increasingly falling behind other nations. Considering the growing diversity of the school-age population and persistent racial achievement gaps, for the first time in the country's history, U.S. education attainment is in danger of declining from its current levels. This is clearly a threat to the future of the U.S. economy.
Nor Career
At the same time, many students aren't prepared to succeed as workers. The nation's employers have sounded the alarm about this. A 2006 report, Are They Really Ready to Work?, based on a survey of several hundred employers, concluded that "far too many young people are inadequately prepared to be successful" (The Conference Board, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Corporate Voices for Working Families, & Society for Human Resource Management, 2006, p. 7). The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, whose members include such companies as Apple and Microsoft, has been critical of outmoded approaches to education that don't give youth the skills employers most need.
High unemployment in the United States—and the fact that adults under age 25 have been hit even harder by unemployment and underemployment than those over 25—has created an urgent sense that education is not preparing young people for work. The percentage of young people who are working is at the lowest level since the Great Depression. Unemployment among people ages 16 to 24 has doubled since 2000 (Fogg & Harrington, 2011). This age range is a crucial period for developing work-related skills, yet people of this age aren't getting enough opportunity to develop the abilities they'll need to prosper.
Concerns like these led to the 2008 launch of the Pathways to Prosperity Project. The project's recent report, Pathways to Prosperity: Meeting the Challenge of Preparing Young Americans for the 21st Century (Symonds, Schwartz, & Ferguson, 2011), concluded that the key reason the U.S. education system fails to prepare young people sufficiently is the system's narrow focus on college-going.
The underlying assumption has been that an education focused on the academic requirements needed to enter four-year colleges will prepare nearly all adolescents for success. Although this approach has produced marginal gains, it's clear that it's not working for everyone. We are leaving millions of young adults behind. If we don't alter our approach, these young adults are in danger of becoming a wasted generation.
Three Actions—and Three Challenges
The Pathways to Prosperity report and similar documents contend that a more promising strategy would include more emphasis on high-quality career counseling and career education. Many of the most successful nations in northern and central Europe—including Germany, Switzerland, and Denmark—have adopted such an approach, and are surpassing the United States in both education attainment and youth employment.
Although we cannot simply import these systems, we can build a more effective American system by (1) offering young people in high school and beyond multiple pathways to success, instead of putting so much emphasis on attending a four-year college; (2) engaging employers in the crucial work of preparing young people for success, such as by providing career counseling and offering opportunities for work-based learning and actual employment; and (3) creating a new social compact with youth, in which key stakeholders in a state or region—educators, employers, and government officials—pledge to collaboratively improve pathways for those who are now being left behind.
There is strong interest throughout the United States in moving in this direction. Within a year of the release of the Pathways to Prosperity report, leaders in nearly half of the U.S. states had expressed interest in working together to realize this vision. This interest has come from an impressive range of groups and leaders—including teachers, school board members, business groups, community organizations, and elected officials.
But even as interest mushrooms, we must overcome significant challenges to build more vibrant pathways. Three actions—each with an accompanying challenge—are pertinent to educators working with youth in high school. First, for the individual student, we must provide meaningful career counseling so that all students can explore their options and chart a pathway that works best. Second, at the district, state, and even national level, we must deemphasize the four-year college route and celebrate multiple pathways. Third, at the programmatic level, we must offer excellent career and technical education—to all students, not just those lucky enough to live in certain districts.
Career Counseling
The case for improving career counseling is overwhelming. As I've traveled around the United States, I've found almost universal support for improving career counseling for secondary students. Yet when I ask audiences how many of them received meaningful career counseling in high school, typically no more than a handful raise their hands. One reason is that the average ratio of students to counselors in our middle and high schools is nearly 500 to 1. Many counselors are more concerned with addressing students' pressing personal, psychological, and social problems than with career counseling. As a result, students are not well-informed about career options, let alone the best pathways for pursuing them.
The cost of this neglect is staggering. Far too many students leave high school without a clear direction. Many end up dropping out of college or choose jobs that aren't a good fit for their interests and abilities—a key reason many Americans are unhappy at work. Even those who graduate from college increasingly find that their degree hasn't equipped them with the skills needed to get a good job. In Wisconsin, for example, more than 4,000 bachelor's degree holders are now attending Milwaukee Area Technical College to acquire technical skills that will make them more employable. There's also a growing skills gap; 52 percent of U.S. employers report that they're having difficulty finding candidates with the right skills and experience to fill jobs (Manpower Group, 2011).
High-quality career counseling should become a central component of students' experience in middle and high school. We should expose students to a wide range of options and then help them explore those that most excite them. Students should have ready access to a clearly delineated set of pathways to major occupations, so that both students and their families can know which classes and experiences would help a youth interested in a career field gain access to it. This is hardly a call for "tracking." Students would make their own decisions about which pathway to pursue and would have freedom to change direction as their interests evolved.
Many European countries as well as New Zealand and Japan have already embraced such an approach. Some U.S. states have also put increased emphasis on career counseling. South Carolina, for instance, adopted an ambitious approach known as Personal Pathways to Success in 2005 (although the recession has since limited funding). The career clusters initiative, which divides career opportunities into 16 different clusters, has also created useful scaffolding for introducing students to careers. This initiative outlines pathways that lead from overview courses in secondary school to more specialized coursework or training in postsecondary schools.
Meeting this challenge will clearly require innovation. Given the constraints on state spending, it won't be possible to hire enough school counselors to meet the need. Rather, schools will need to adopt more comprehensive approaches to career counseling, such as encouraging all teachers to help students identify their interests and talents.
Schools must also work with outside partners. Fortunately, a growing number of easy-to-use web-based tools help students explore careers and develop pathways. Career Cruising, for instance, was launched in 1997 and is now used in more than 18,000 schools, colleges and libraries. Massachusetts, Texas, Hawaii, and other states are using ConnectEDU, which helps students manage their educations and launch their careers by connecting them with postsecondary institutions and employers.
Employers should also play a major role. Employers can encourage current employees and retirees to share their expertise about careers with students and act as mentors. Many companies already provide speakers at career days and offer job shadowing; what's needed is a national effort to transform these informal arrangements into a system that helps each young adult develop a personal pathway to a specific career.
Changing the Culture
The second challenge is in some respects even more daunting: how to shift the culture of the U.S. education system away from its fixation with four-year colleges toward an approach that promotes multiple pathways to success. There's no question that four-year colleges serve as gateways to many prestigious careers. But it's equally obvious that this pathway doesn't always work; only 30 percent of young people earn a bachelor's degree by age 27. Moreover, only about one-third of today's job openings require a four-year degree or higher (Carnevale, Smith, & Strohl, 2010). By continuing to overemphasize college-going, we often obscure and even demean alternate paths that would provide better preparation for the majority of jobs, including well-paid "middle-skill" jobs that require no more than an associate's degree or other postsecondary credential, such as electrician or dental hygienist.
The U.S. approach to career and technical education illustrates the problem. In many European countries, what's called vocational education and training is the mainstream system that serves most high school students. In 2010, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published a sweeping study of vocational education and training that concluded this kind of training is the best way to prepare most young people for the world of work.
In the United States, there's equally impressive evidence that high-quality career and technical education is effective. In Massachusetts, for instance, more than 24 regional vocational technical high schools have become beacons of excellence. Students in these schools spend half their time in career education. The schools boast a far lower dropout rate than the state average and have some of Massachusetts' highest graduation rates. Yet despite such evidence, many in the United States still demean technical education as a second-best alternative to purely academic preparation.
Because these biases are deep-seated, changing them won't be easy. The most effective strategy might be to organize local conversations about whether an area's school system is truly preparing all students to lead successful lives as adults. The Pathways to Prosperity project has helped convene such summits around the United States. We typically invite leading representatives from education, business, government, and philanthropy. We begin by examining what we call the "pathways challenge" in the state or region: Who are the young people being left behind? We then look at programs that offer the most promise for addressing this challenge and end with a call to action. Although this is just a beginning, these summits have already helped drive the burgeoning national pathways movement.
Career and Technical Education
To offer each youth a suitable pathway, we must give far more students access to multiple options, including high-quality career education. Fortunately, there are exemplars of such programs across the country. Oklahoma, for example, has a network of technology centers that offer high school students training for technically demanding fields such as aircraft maintenance, surgical technology, and heavy-duty truck service. Many of these jobs offer higher-than-average starting salaries.
The National Academy Foundation has a network of 500 career academies that introduce students to career opportunities in finance, engineering, information technology, and hospitality and tourism. Ninety percent of students who attend these academies graduate from high school, more than 80 percent go on to college, and a long-term study shows that graduates go on to earn more than students who did not attend career academies (Kemple & Willmer, 2008). Project Lead the Way has developed a rigorous curriculum that exposes more than 300,000 high school students to engineering.
But programs like these are still the exception. Most high school students don't have access to such options. This problem is becoming more acute as the federal government and many states cut funding for career and technical education, in addition to funding for K–12 education generally. Similarly, many community colleges are facing cutbacks, even as demand for their courses is at record levels.
Meeting this challenge will require us to reorder our priorities. We're still spending billions of dollars on programs or schools that don't work for most students, such as remedial programs at many community colleges. Cutting back or eliminating ineffective programs will free up money for more promising approaches.
We must also encourage innovation. Consider Illinois, which is now developing an approach called Illinois Pathways, which will make high-quality career education more available to students throughout the state. Illinois is working with business and industry to develop programs of study connected to career clusters that will be important to the state's economic future, including health science, agriculture, and finance.
In early February 2012, the state formally announced this initiative and made curriculum and related materials available at www.illinoisworknet.com/ilpathways. Much of the curriculum for these programs of study will be available online. Systems called learning exchanges will connect a network of employers, labor organizations, workforce development systems, and higher education partners to offer students and teachers opportunities for career awareness and training, such as internships and professional development.
The Tipping Point?
Taken together, these recommendations are a call for true systemic reform. The associated challenges—of which those discussed here are only a few—are daunting, which explains why our system has resisted such reform. But the increasing shortcomings of our current system of youth development—from the loss of the United States' position as an international leader in education to record youth unemployment—may have brought us to the tipping point. Through my work with the Pathways Project, I've seen that all across the country, people believe the time has come to forge a more vibrant system for preparing our next generation of adults.
