A growing proportion of high school students think they need to continue their education after they earn their diploma, and the jobs that offer them the best chance at living a comfortable life increasingly require training after high school.
But that postsecondary education is less likely to involve enrolling at a four-year college and earning a bachelor’s degree. So how have K-12 schools been changing in response?
Attitudes toward college, among young people and adults, have been shifting
For decades, “college for all” has been the guiding principle for K-12 education, the nation’s education policies, and a multitude of school improvement efforts. To be sure, the four-year college is still the dominant path students pursue after high school, with 61.4 percent of recent graduates ages 16 to 24 enrolling in college in 2023, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Preparing Students for What’s Next
The pathways to college, internships, and work have changed. What does that mean for secondary education? Explore the series.
However, today’s middle and high school students—and even their parents—are less convinced that the traditional, four-year degree is the best path for them and that it offers them the best return on an expensive and time-consuming investment.
Americans today have less confidence in institutions of higher education than they did even less than a decade ago, according to regular tracking by the polling firm Gallup. Another Gallup survey in 2021 found that, even if there were no obstacles, only a slim majority of parents, 54 percent, preferred that their children pursue a four-year college education. And even as more high school students last year said that education after high school was necessary than before the pandemic, a smaller proportion said they were considering a four-year degree, according to the ECMC Group’s “Question the Quo” survey of Gen Z teens released in June 2023.
The shift in attitudes away from pursuing a four-year degree is starting before high school. Sixty-three percent of middle school students in a 2022 survey by YPulse, which researches the attitudes of members of Gen Z and millennials, agreed that “I don’t need a college degree to be successful.”
Indeed, as Education Week reports in a new series, The High School Handoff, the percentage of recent high school graduates enrolling in college has generally been declining for the past decade. At the same time, the number of students enrolling in undergraduate certificate programs, which train students in industry-specific skills, is on the rise.
Schools recognize that students are more interested in exposure to careers
High school as an institution has been slow to change. The traditional structure of the American high school looks the same today as it has for several decades: Students sit in rows before a teacher, they attend content area-specific courses, they switch classes at regular intervals, and they remain in high school for four years.
That experience needs to change, say educators and policymakers alike who see the value in greater exposure to potential careers for students. As a result, according to new survey data from the EdWeek Research Center, educators say their schools are incorporating more of this focus.
The vast majority of school and district leaders say they’re taking steps to introduce students to potential careers, according to a nationally representative EdWeek Research Center survey.
Clear majorities of school and district leaders say their schools and districts are holding career-exploration days, hosting guest speakers from industry, offering students the opportunity to take career and technical education courses, and providing opportunities for work-based learning or internships.
The survey, conducted May 29 to June 19, included responses from 868 educators—a mix of teachers, school leaders, and district leaders.
What’s notable is what educators say has changed in their districts in the past 10 years when it comes to emphasizing career-related training opportunities.
- 62 percent say their district offers more career and technical education courses now than 10 years ago.
- 50 percent say more on-the-job learning experiences are available to students in their district now than a decade ago.
- 59 percent of educators say their districts’ emphasis on encouraging students to attend career and technical education programs after high school has grown in the past 10 years.
- Only 30 percent said their district’s emphasis on encouraging students to earn a bachelor’s degree had grown in that time.
Students want learning to be more directly connected to potential careers
Career preparation has been a rare area of bipartisan agreement among policymakers. This year, governors from both parties mentioned the issue as a priority in their state-of-the-state addresses, and President Joe Biden did the same during his State of the Union address. The U.S. Department of Education has also put some resources behind efforts to expand work-based learning opportunities.
So, what do students think?
By and large, they want more learning tied to potential careers. They say such learning exposes them to different postsecondary possibilities they hadn’t known about previously and informs their post-high school plans.
Ninety percent of New Hampshire middle and high school students in a recently released Gallup survey said they had participated in at least one activity aimed at raising their awareness of potential careers. Fifty-nine percent wanted to take part in more.
In the past year at school, more than 40 percent of the 8,500 New Hampshire students said they had learned about a job or career they hadn’t known about previously. And more than a third of the students said such exposure had informed their plans for after high school.
Students tended to agree that career learning experiences that got them outside the classroom—such as internships, apprenticeships, volunteer opportunities, and job shadowing—had the greatest impact and were more likely to influence their post-high school plans.
But those were also the career-connected activities in which students were least likely to participate—probably because they’re more complex to arrange and schedule.
While 58 percent of the New Hampshire students reported learning about jobs or careers through classroom activities this year, just 17 percent reported going on a job shadow, 13 percent reported having an internship, and 11 percent reported participating in a registered apprenticeship.
