Asking About College Plans Is The Wrong Question
This week’s Courier Herald column:
There’s a question we really have to stop asking our high school students. “Where are you going to college?” isn’t a good way to start a conversation with someone a generation or three younger than you.
Seniors that just graduated are mostly glad that the question has an answer, even if the answer isn’t college. Rising seniors and juniors by now know that every random conversation with an adult will usually involve this question.
It’s small talk for us. For them, it sets presumptive expectations and, perhaps even worse, signals a level of importance on a single life decision that causes unnecessary stress.
Sure, post high-school plans are important ones. No single decision, however, will chart the course of any individual’s life. When every adult that a high school student meets asks the same question, the answer is perceived to be of the utmost consequence. The reality is that students frequently transfer colleges, start and stop study, and/or pursue graduate study or other job training that will ultimately determine career trajectory.
In today’s job climate where an individual is expected to have multiple careers during their lifetime, the thought that a single decision made during high school will determine success or failure in life is folly. It’s also becoming less clear that college is the best path to success for many students.
To take advantage of some of those opportunities, the questions need to be asked (preferably by the parents of the student) a bit earlier. Georgia is quite generous in both funding and quantity of options for high school students to sample both college and technical paths during high school.
High school students can participate in joint enrollment programs to sample college courses and even complete associate degrees while still in high school. Because the college courses are funded by HOPE, it allows completion of college credits at a significant cost reduction than most students will face once enrolled in college full time.
There are also options for students who want to pursue technical and trade paths. Unlike many college majors, these paths often lead directly to employment with career-level wages right out of high school.
One of the more intriguing alternatives to traditional college is through the Georgia Consortium for Advanced Technical Training, or GA CATT. The program was launched in Coweta County with high school students sponsored by employers for apprenticeship programs and course work at West Georgia Technical College. Four Georgia Technical Colleges are now participating.
The first students began classes three years ago, and completed their high school diplomas this year. They were paid $8.00 per hour as sophomores for their time working as apprentices, rising to $12.00 per hour their senior year. A couple of them are spending the summer in Germany with their employers, getting paid to study abroad. As someone who recently sat through a presentation of a Georgia university’s study abroad programs (and related costs), the fact that a student can get paid to spend a summer in Europe is quite an attractive inducement.
Those that completed all of the program requirements will sit for a German Manufacturers’ Certificate exam in August. This certificate by the German Chamber of Commerce is a credential that can be used across manufacturing industries worldwide. Georgia’s is the only program where the German Chamber participates at the high school level.
These students get paid in high school for real career experience while earning their certificate. That credential makes them immediately employable and desired by employers at a time when most of their peers will just be enrolling in college.
So let’s quit asking high school students where they’re going to college. They don’t want to talk about it, but they also need to be thinking more broadly about their future and the various paths they can take to get there.
About Author
Charlie
Founder of GeorgiaPol.com; Now weekly columnist Very interested in Georgia and Georginas. Interest in politics is waning daily.
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I know of one illustrative example of how things have gone awry. The tuition, room & board, and related fees for my small liberal arts college senior year in 1971 was $3,900.00. Adjusted for inflation, that works out to be $24,479.38 in today’s dollars. Yet, the actual tuition, room & board, and fees are currently $58,236.00. Is it really that much better an education from 1971?
I don’t ask where my cousins kids are going to college. Mainly because college is rare in my family unless you count seminary or the convent. My mom was the first person and only one to go to college out of her 62 first cousins and siblings (5 went to seminary, 2 to a convent). My father had 1 first cousin out of 21 cousins and siblings who went to college. Both were women and became school teachers. Looking at the off spring of the 85 people listed above (over 200 2nd cousins ages 64-26), 9 of us went to college – 7 girls, 2 boys. 4 tech school -all boys. Their offspring – about 120 and counting, ages 42 years – 6 weeks, are up to 7 college, – all of them girls, and 4 tech – 2 girls, 2 boys; that I know of currently. Frankly, get all of them to finish high school is the current step. My first cousins’ kids who are 18 and over graduated high school. Four of my first cousins didn’t, the youngest being 34 now.
All of my 1st & 2nd cousins work or are/were stay at home moms. They worked or are working jobs that are dying out or having less workers because of automation. They didn’t/don’t go to college because they can’t afford it and most still have old school German values of ‘if you can’t afford it, don’t buy or do it’. My brother was shocked I had 3 credit cards. I had to explain to my first cousin and her husband 8 years ago that a basic mortgage (15 years fixed w/ over 20% down), with a payment less then their rent and a 809 credit score may not be as evil as they think or my uncle told them.
I frankly want folks to ask my cousins what they want to do in the next 10 or 20 years, and how they are going to achieve that goal. This includes the ones in high school and the ones not in modern technical jobs or careers. I don’t care if it’s college, or tech, or a journeyman program. Their parents and grandparents way of life is dying. Our farms are getting smaller or being foreclosed. The surviving local factories are hiring for now, but their work forces are 1/3 of what they hired in the 1970’s. In the last 35 years ago, the Reagan tax cuts lead to M&A that shut down half of the industrial business/headquarters in the county. The industries that are there have factory buildings over 50 years old now and some cof these companies have lucrative patents – they are ripe for the current round of M&A buyouts funded by corporate tax cuts. Three convents with their near 1000 retired/nursing patient nuns needing hundreds of caregivers died out with the congregations in the last decade – only one remains because it is the motherhouse and they closed down the 3 retire homes they had in other states. We have more caregivers then retirement centers at the moment.
My folks need to be gentled pressured to learn skills beyond high school. They need to get out of the old thought pattern of going off to Kolher, Sargento, Oshkosh Truck, International Paper, Mercury Marine, or Quad/Graphics when they get out of high school and go work the production lines for $12 hour starting, and maybe $22 if you have 32 years in, which is what my cousin 4 months younger then I am makes at Quad binding magazines.