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Writer's pictureJoanne Jacobs

What do you want to do when you grow up?

Working-class Americans voted to send Donald Trump back into the White House: He ran strongly with people without college degrees, especially men, while Kamala Harris did best with the college degreed, especially women.


Big Picture Learning introduces students to a variety of possible careers.

It's unlikely the Trump-Vance administration will be writing off college loans for low-earning Puppetry and Social Justice majors. But what will they do to expand opportunity for their voters' kids? Will they shift funding from higher education to workplace or community college-based job training?


Americans are losing confidence in college as the path to the middle class, write Michael B. Horn, co-author of Job Moves, and Daniel Curtis of the Connecticut Office of Workplace Strategy, in Education Next. They worry about "spiraling college costs and $1.6 trillion in student loan debt."


Career and Technical Education (CTE) for All could offer more opportunity to more young people than "college for all," Horn and Curtis argue. The new CTE "should help students learn what energizes them, how different kinds of work are valued, and how they can contribute so they can carve out a pathway after high school that fits their unique goals," whether that means college or job training.


Career exploration and discovery should start in middle school, they write. The purpose "isn’t so that students can pick a job and follow a narrow pathway to it," but to help them start making informed choices.


I wonder if students would work harder in high school if they knew that just barely passing the easiest classes is not the path to a high-paying career.


There are programs that introduce students to the world of work, write Horn and Curtis. They recommend Big Picture Learning, the World of Work and the Center for Advanced Professional Studies (CAPS) network.


Both Kamala Harris and Donald Trump favor eliminating degree requirements for federal jobs, writes David Deming, a Harvard professor, in The Atlantic. But non-degreed job hunters need "ways t prove their qualifications."


Apprenticeships are great, but costly, he writes. A more scalable model is Virginia's FastForward Program, which lets people earn career credentials at community colleges. "Students who received an industry-recognized credential saw increased earnings of about $4,000 a year," Deming writes.


Congress could create and fund "a federal certification program for career pathways in fields with high job demand and good prospects for upward mobility, such as advanced manufacturing and cardiovascular technology."


Employers -- not taxpayers -- should pay to train new workers, writes New America's Mary Alice McCarthy. That would make expanding apprenticeships affordable.


Short-term programs like FastForward rarely lead to middle-class careers, she writes. "High-quality CTE puts students into structured, sequenced courses and multi-year “programs of study” that lead to rewarding careers." Connecting CTE to apprenticeships is even better.

5 Comments


Bruce Smith
Bruce Smith
Nov 10

As I have written before, Switzerland has already solved this problem of scalability, at a state-sized level, and is gaining new followers here in the States, especially in Indiana: this means professional career counselling provision in the ninth grade, after which basic education ends (therefore no more comprehensive high schools, except perhaps in rural communities lacking better options), and most youth transition into cooperative education & training, through which the upper secondary years are spent in host company apprenticeships (likeliest to start in the 11th grade), secondary schools (usually graduating youth at the end of 11th grade, with the possibility of thereafter continuing in free, public vocational colleges of higher education), and branch courses designed by the employer groups themselve…

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m_t_anderson
Nov 09

Ooh! Ooh! I know the answer!


Gainfully employed, debt free, flush with cash, and out from under my parents' thumb. Eyes on the prize, kids, eyes on the prize.

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Peter Lorenzi
Peter Lorenzi
Nov 08

I believe that it is time to stop describing as "educated" those having received a college degree. And we might want to re-examine viewing the "working class" as seprated from the "educated." The data on the relationship between college degrees and lifetime income are based on graduates from decades ago, not including recent grads working as baristas at Starbucks or living in their parents' basement, with $100k in debt that mitigates almost any chance to create wealth from savings and investments, or to secure a mortgage.


The same "higher ed" institutions that fill young heads with progressive rhetoric while profiting from the trillion-plus dollars of college student debt, who hosted and often encouraged anti-semitic protests, have lost much of their…

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JK Brown
JK Brown
Nov 07

Teach kids, starting in middle school, or perhaps earlier, how to read a tape measure, use a hammer, screwdriver, socket set, etc. Teach them the basic machines, you know physics of levers, gears, torque, spring pressure. These are things that would be useful if in later years the student seek work in the trades, or if they become a surgeon. Or they become an English professor who might want to fix something around the house when a tradesperson is not available.

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m_t_anderson
Nov 07

Mike Rowe for Secretary of Labor.

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