“We need 16 years of public education guaranteed in this country from preschool for three- and four-year-olds at the early end, to two years of community college after high school,” President Biden said yesterday in remarks on the April jobs report.
In many European countries, students began apprenticeships in high school. Photo: Andrea Piacquadio
A few days earlier, he said, “Twelve years [of school] is no longer enough today to compete with the rest of the world in the twenty-first century.”
Yet Biden also said last week that “nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree” and “75 percent don’t require an associate degree.”
He’s not the only one who’s conflicted, writes Fordham’s Michael Petrilli. Do all young people need at least some college to have a shot at the middle class?
Education reformers have talked about building non-college pathways to skilled jobs, such as earning a job credential valued by employers in high school. But it’s mostly talk, writes Petrilli. Anything but college is seen as “a failure, especially for poor kids and kids of color. ”
Indeed, many states’ accountability systems under the Every Student Succeeds Act include some sort of “college and career ready” index that marks high schools down for sending graduates straight into the labor market. That’s because of overwhelming evidence that it’s really hard to make a decent wage with nothing but a high school diploma.
Petrilli wonders if federal leadership can create high-paying jobs that require only a high school diploma, as the jobs bill promises.
Or, perhaps, a higher minimum wage, coupled by an expanded earned income tax credit, child tax credit, free preschool and other “safety-net and welfare-state benefits” could “make it possible to live a decent life in America without much, if any, higher education,” he writes.
Raising the minimum wage will speed the move to automate entry-level jobs. For those who want to work, two years of community college will help only if they’re prepared to learn. If it’s just remedial high school — or remedial middle school — it won’t.
Today’s K–12 system is preparing less than half of students to succeed in postsecondary education, Petrilli writes.
In fact, that’s the most problematic part, among many, of Biden’s call to make community college free: It misdiagnoses the reason why so few young Americans complete programs at those institutions. . . . the major reason by far that so many teenagers don’t matriculate at community college, or enroll but then drop out, is that they lack the reading, writing, and mathematics skills to succeed. College, community or otherwise, just isn’t a good option for young people whose academic skills are at a middle school level.
Neither is an apprenticeship in a skilled trade.