Prepared for What?

Matching Our Rhetoric to Reality

By James E. Rosenbaum

Despite all the rhetoric, “prepared for college” says much less than it seems, since many colleges don’t require anything besides a high school diploma for admission, and many students attend only briefly and drop out with few or no college credits. “Prepared to pass placement tests” is more meaningful, and we need to do more to make that standard clear and visible in high school, preferably in time for students to devote more effort to meeting the standard. Aligning high school tests with college-placement tests would be a valuable reform.

But while it would be desirable to have all students meet the standards for college-placement tests, it’s not clear that the labor market demands that. The top 40 percent of jobs may require greater academic skills than schools are currently producing, especially in math and science. The standards movement has gotten that part right. Many other jobs require some academic skills, and that is truer now than it was 30 years ago, when many well-paid jobs required no academic skills.

Research by the economists Richard J. Murnane and Frank Levy, however, suggests that while academic skills are required for many jobs, such jobs require communication, problem-solving, and 9th grade academic skills, not college skills. I found the same thing in interviews conducted with employers as part of a study of workforce readiness in Illinois. Many students don’t get these skills now, but that requires better high school...