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The post-secondary gamble

Last week in Las Vegas, I was confronted with a difficult reality —that your path in life may depend solely on where you live, how much your family makes, the outcome of a lottery, and even which teachers are willing to commit to your district.

If you haven’t seen “Waiting for Superman,”Guggenheim’s documentary would be a good start to understanding the problems facing the American public education system. Many academic settings in the United States are adulterated by a multitude of these structural and social determinants of education.

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Perhaps the problem lies in racial and socio-economic achievement gaps, organizational structure or skewed teacher incentives. After traveling down to Las Vegas, however, for a peek at the fifth largest school district in the nation, I’d like to entertain a different idea.

Our education system is too narrow, focused on readying students to attend a four-year college or university.

As denoted by William Synmonds’ 2011 paper, the emphasis on college-going relies on an implicit assumption. It assumes that an education tailored to the academic requirements established by four-year colleges will prepare adolescents for future success. Perhaps this isn’t true anymore —perhaps a four-year college education isn’t for everyone.

Take a city like Las Vegas, for example, the focus of the breakout trip I participated in over spring break. Many blue-collar customer-servicing jobs, whether working hospitality at a high-end hotel or dealing cards at a Vegas casino, generate far more cash than entry-level positions requiring a college degree. I would be remiss to label any of the individuals in these positions as failures —many have bachelor’s degrees, are accredited with professional licenses and are exceptionally talented artists.

Brittany Bronson, an English instructor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, is one of these figures. Despite having a Masters, she holds a second job serving at a chain restaurant off the Strip for economic security. Brittany risks the image she presents to her students as a university mentor for her true love of learning.

Like her, many of her students hold similar part-time jobs, and 60 percent of her freshman will forego their college degrees to retain them. But unlike her, their decision to enroll in college may have stemmed from a lack of alternative pathways to success.

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Erica Mosca, another educator in east Las Vegas, founded a nonprofit which contributes to giving these students equitable post-secondary opportunities. She aims to make her students both college-ready and career-ready through a Leader-In-Training program, giving them the opportunity to make their own post-secondary choices.

Our curricula have not always been geared towards college. At the start of the twentieth century, our nation underwent a feat that most other western nations would achieve some 30 to 50 years later. Newly afforded a system of education that was open to all —unhindered by universal standards and decentralized —American youth entered high school at a rapid rate to learn skills “for life” rather than “for college.”

With a mere 9 percent of 18-year-olds holding diplomas in 1910, the United States oversaw measures to increase that number to around 40 percent by 1940. By the mid-1930s, graduation rates were as high as policymakers had forecasted for 1960. At a time when no European nation had a full-time schooling rate for older youths exceeding 25 percent, the United States secondary school enrollment rate was just below 80 percent.

For decades, the United States remained at the forefront of educational achievement. Yet today, for the first time in our nation’s history, United States educational attainment is in danger of receding from current levels.

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Today, we’re ranked 14th in education worldwide. Today, we’re 17th in educational performance and 54th in educational expenditures. Today, our spectacular educational transformation has been reduced to 66 percent of all fourth graders lacking proficiency in reading.

Can’t we catch up?

It turns out that early reading proficiency is one of the most important predictors of high school graduation and career success. At the end of the third grade, students transition between learning to read and reading to learn. Student who fall behind that critical milestone rarely catch up, remaining four times more likely to drop out of high school. And because they have fallen behind in elementary school, these students are hindered from being able to make a post-secondary choice.

Perhaps college isn’t for everyone. Many of the most successful nations in northern and central Europe emphasize high-quality career counseling and career education. That is not to say Europe is perfect – the story gets a bit muddled, since students there are tracked from a very young age, and separated onto either a college-bound or vocational track. But these nations recognize that multiple pathways to prosperity exist, instead of positing college as the holy grail of post-secondary decisions.

Perhaps college isn’t for everyone. Nevada might be ranked last among the states in education, but Las Vegas’ abundance of magnet and vocational, trade and technical schools offer a new hope. Its dedicated employers are partnering with high schools to provide career-counseling and work-based learning. Its key stakeholders have pledged to collaboratively improve pathways for those left behind.

Perhaps college isn’t for everyone. But the choice of a post-secondary path is.

YoniBenyamini is an ORFE major from Roslyn, New York. He can be reached atyb@princeton.edu.