Newsletter: Giving high school students options besides college

Good morning. It is Wednesday, Aug. 28, and we’re in the last week before the unofficial end of summer. Here’s what’s happening in Opinion.

Editorial Writer Karin Klein has covered education for years and watching the Democratic National Convention last week, she picked up on a new theme from party leaders. They were talking a lot more about the need to create well-paid careers for people who don’t obtain a bachelor’s degree. She wrote about this in the recent editorial The idea that success does not require a college degree gets space on DNC stage, and I asked her to share more insight with newsletter readers. Below are her answers.

What’s changed in the rhetoric on college?

For a long time, Democratic leadership was pushing the “college for everyone” movement. In 2009, former President Obama vowed that “by 2020, this nation will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” The idea at the time, part of a push by former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates, was that the country would lose some kind of global jobs war with other countries. Gates said we would be short 11 million skilled workers if vast numbers of students weren’t added to the college rolls.

Consider, close to 40% of Cal State students don’t get a bachelor’s degree within six years More than 40% of four-year college grads are underemployed — working in jobs that really don’t need a degree. Americans were seeing this and rightly questioning whether so many people needed a degree, especially given the unsolved student debt question. They were ignored for too long and now they are being heard. It was remarkable to hear Obama say during the DNC, “College shouldn’t be the only ticket to the middle class.”

You recently wrote a book about this called “Rethinking College: A Guide to Thriving Without a Degree.” Why did you decide to write about this?

No one is helping students who don’t want or aren’t ready to go to college figure out their next step. I wanted to help young people (or older people) who are thinking, “I don’t really want to go for a bachelor’s degree, but I don’t know what I can do without one or what kinds of work are available and how I would go about getting them.” I’m filling what I call the “guidance gap” at high schools.

My goal is to inspire this group of students to know that they don’t have to take the conventional high-school-straight-to-college route and that following the path that’s right for them as individuals is as admirable as going to college. And to give them helpful, specific information about the many career possibilities open to them.

School counselors are pressured to get students into college — not to mention that most of them have too heavy a load to tailor their advice to individual needs. Beyond college, they mostly have two things to suggest: the skilled trades such as welding, or joining the military. Both of those are valid options and are in my book, but counselors aren’t aware of how much more there is or how students can link up to the job world. Just to name a few, there are the creative fields, entrepreneurialism, travel and outdoor work, white-collar apprenticeships, plus companies and governments that have dropped degree requirements for many professional jobs.

Why is this an important conversation now, and what else should we be talking about in terms of jobs and college?

Obviously, student debt is a big one. Our current model of on-campus, finish-in-four-years college isn’t working well for too many people. This doesn’t call for tweaking but for some wholesale changes. Most people are surprised to learn that nearly 30% of community college grads out-earn the average holder of a bachelor’s degree, and that 59% of people who went to college because they were pressured into it or didn’t know what else to do end up saying college was a waste.

In truth, our way of education is too narrowly focused, too irrelevant to student lives and their diverse talents. And, strangely, it is too performative and not focused enough on the love of learning that should be a lifelong pursuit and pleasure whether someone goes to college or not.

The ideas in Project 2025? Reagan tried them, and the nation suffered. The Heritage Foundation’s 1981 publication “The Mandate for Leadership” helped shape President Reagan’s policy framework, writes Joel Edward Goza, a professor of ethics at Simmons College of Kentucky. “If today’s economic inequality, racial unrest and environmental degradation represent some of our greatest political challenges, we would do well to remember that Reagan and the Heritage Foundation were the preeminent engineers of these catastrophes.”

Ignore my brother Bobby, Max Kennedy says. “Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine I would be motivated to write something of this nature,” Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s brother writes after the independent candidate ended his presidential campaign and endorsed Donald Trump. “Trump was exactly the kind of arrogant, entitled bully my father used to prosecute.”

Parole consideration for those sentenced to life behind bars 35 years ago? It’s the right thing to do. Senate Bill 94 is a reasonable proposal to allow sentence review for several hundred aging California prisoners who were sent to prison for life without parole before 1990. “Pragmatism and a measured sense of justice, rather than sympathy, are the rationales for this bill,” The Times’ editorial board writes. “There is diminishing value in continuing to imprison people for violent crimes they committed long ago when they were young and stupid.”

Trump keeps flip-flopping on abortion. American women are so over it. Columnist LZ Granderson looks at how Donald Trump’s position on abortion changes for political expediency. “In 2022, he crowed about what his Supreme Court had done. Now it’s 2024, and he’s struggling to meet younger women at the polls, so he’s back to making empty promises.”

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