Career paths for all: Work experience is valuable, but hard to provide

Delaware students who choose a career pathway usually end up doing something else, writes Jill Barshay on the Hechinger Report. Workforce experience is the most valuable to students, and the hardest for schools to provide.

Photo: Delaware Pathways

Seventy percent of the state's high school students are enrolled in a pathway, such as health care, construction or education, according to a new research report. Two years after graduation, three-quarters were in college or job training, higher than the national average of 63 percent. "But fewer than half were still studying or working in the field they had chosen in high school," Barshay writes.  

At Niagara Falls High School in upstate New York, every 11th-grader must choose a career pathway that may lead to a job, trade school or college, reports Hechinger's Ariel Gilreath.

One-third of seniors plan to go straight to the workforce in a town that's lost manufacturing jobs and seen a decline in tourism, she writes. Nationwide, enrollment in higher education is "down more than 1.5 million students since 2010 as the cost of tuition has risen and more families question the value of a college degree."

Classes are tailored to career paths, such as "Writing for the Workforce, Gilreath writes. "Street Law," a new elective, is designed for students interested in law school or law enforcement.

Construction students are rehabbing the former cafeteria kitchen in the old high school, which will become an arts center. They're in the design, engineering and construction pathway.

Other options are human services (everything from teaching to law enforcement), to visual and performing arts; business, finance and entrepreneurship; computer science and information technology, and human services.

Michigan is spending more on community college for people over 25, while underfunding career-tech programs for high school students, writes Morgan Miller on the Martin Center blog. Michigan Reconnect hasn't shown much success: Only 8.2% of Reconnect students have completed a degree or certificate.

Meanwhile, she writes, participation and completion rates at Michigan's career-tech centers have reached record levels. "These high-demand programs often operate on a shoestring budget," which makes it hard to buy and update equipment.