College-Career Ready Or Not?

Here’s an analysis of the “Top 10 Blue-Collar Jobs of the Future.” At first blush, it’s tempting to say that growth in fields like this, and service jobs, means that this current push to improve high school rigor is misplaced. Except, because of technology and demands for greater productivity, those jobs look to be pretty challenging, too. They may not require college, but most will require complicated post-secondary training and further education. And the prep for that and the prep for “college really” are not all that different in practice. So here is an easy initiative for a state policymaker: Make the “college-prep” curriculum the default one for all students and let parents opt-out of it, with informed consent about the potential consequences. This is happening in some schools now, and the rise of college-prep high schools obviously speaks to it as well.