Don't wait for college: High schools can put students on track for high-demand jobs
- Joanne Jacobs
- Jun 26
- 2 min read
High schools need to be redesigned to prepare students for high-demand jobs in specific industries, argues Keri D. Ingraham, a Discovery Institute fellow and director of the American Center for Transforming Education.
These new high schools could focus on trades resistant to automation, such as electrical work, plumbing, and construction management, as well as "future-focused fields such as engineering, computer science and data analytics, medical technology, digital marketing, food production, energy, advanced manufacturing, and artificial intelligence," she writes.
Students will be engaged and motivate if they see they're working toward a real future.
One example is the West Michigan Aviation Academy, a Grand Rapids charter school located next to the airport. In the Build a Plane course, students work together to assemble a FAA-certificate "full-size airplane with approximately 8,000 parts" which is sold to pay for parts for the next plane. Some students earn a private pilot’s license. Others study "aerospace design, unmanned aerial systems (i.e., drones), engineering, robotics, and biomedical fields — all of which are in growing demand."
Graduates may enter the workforce immediately or go on to flight school, military service or college.
Non-degree credentials could be a way for job-seekers to prove their skills, write Matt Sigelman of Burning Glass Institute, AEI's Mark Schneider and colleagues. But the value of these credentials varies wildly. There are more than a million credentials available for people seeking to move up or switch careers, but only 12 percent lead to "significant wage gains."
Expanding federal Pell Grants to short-term adult training courses has significant potential, they write, but risks wasting learners' time and taxpayers' money on training that won't pay off.
There are a lot of issues here. To raise the likelihood that investments in vocational & professional education & training will pay off, it is important for states to have professional organizations take the lead in designing, and funding, their regional systems.
The issue is a high demand job in 9th grade could be a dead field in 10 years later.
So now it is time to swing back. When I entered high school in 1976, that was the year they were not longer teaching the shop classes. Sure, they had a vo-tech up the road but you had go half a day and there was no way to take a vo-tech class and still take the college-prep academic classes.
Now they want to swing back. To undo the damage of the "educators" of the 1970s. Of course, they are loath to go back to the origination of Mind and Hand education brought about in the late 19th century. That is teaching no only the academics but also how to do something useful. Modern schooling is organized to keep the chil…