Jobs and Schooling

Abstract

YOU have to give those middling students--the ones who just get by academically--some credit for doggedly finishing high school and going to work. You might even give them an A in economics because they appear to have a better grasp of reality than the experts who tell them their only option is college. These kids aren't reading tea leaves. But they probably are reading the media reports about job prospects, soaring college costs, diminishing incomes, and conflicting explanations for what's going on in the economy. Many recent high school graduates who enroll in community colleges do so just to please their parents, according to a recent study by MDRC. They really don't have any other motivation to be there until they are several years older. Then they may well come to realize that more education might help them escape low-wage work. Why, these young people might ask, should I go into debt for an uncertain future? Half of college students now borrow money to attend college, up from 35% in 1993. Today, those who graduate have an average debt load of $19,000, and this sum is modest when compared to those who enroll at prestigious campuses. If they do graduate from college, these young people will be making less than college graduates of a few years ago, and only two-thirds of them will have jobs with health-care benefits, down from 71% five years ago. Meanwhile, a young person who focuses on career and technical education courses and enters the labor force immediately after graduating from high school can earn a decent salary. If that young person has good work skills, shows up on time, and exhibits initiative--professionalism on the job, as one study describes it--employers are more likely to invest in his or her training. According to a recent column in the New York Times, more college education is no guarantee of success in a globalized economy. Princeton University economist Alan Blinder, a former vice president of the Federal Reserve, was quoted as challenging those who blithely assume that the labor market will be divided between those with more education and those with less. In the future, Blinder said, children are educated may prove to be more important than how much ... but education specialists have not begun to think about that problem. Nevertheless, public policies these days hold out postsecondary enrollment as the ultimate goal for everyone. And when all the advantages are at last sorted out, postsecondary may indeed be the factor that eventually protects members of the work force from leading low-income lives. Like many other analyses of this sort, it's not simple. High school students who concentrate on career and technical courses are less likely than the college-prep students to enroll in college or to persist in earning any kind of degree. However, 65% of the class of 1992 who focused on career and technical curricula in high school had enrolled in college by 2000, according to a longitudinal study by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). And though these students entered high school with lower grades on average, their postsecondary enrollment is on a par with that of students who enrolled in a general education plan in high school. Moreover, almost 20% of career and technical concentrators scored in the top quartile on eighth-grade reading and math tests, and one-fourth of the high school class of 1992 completed both a career and technical education and a college-preparatory curriculum. If the job market and job security seem to be in chaos right now, at least policy makers are seeing value in kids' interest in career training. Several state legislatures this year mandated that secondary school students choose a career path, both to hold their interest in school and to encourage them to mix academic and career-related courses. …