Chelsea Waite
Appearances
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
Where we research how do education systems become better and sort of evolve and in some ways remake themselves to better serve every student in America.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
When high schools kind of first started in the U.S., they were not universal and they were really sort of designed for elites, largely white, male, middle and upper class students. Students who would go to high school as a way to kind of get them to higher education in order to then go into these leadership roles in society.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
Then in the 1910s to 1940s, there was a big high school movement that basically made high schools kind of like mass education for everyone. And the idea there is that we have a responsibility as a society to make sure that young people are prepared for the world that they move into as adults. And for some of them, that might mean college.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
For others, it might mean they're sort of better working with their hands and they should be in a different kind of job or career. And as time went on, it became very clear that who got sort of identified to go to college and who was getting sort of identified by let's like put you into a vocational program. It became very clear that there was major inequality in who got access to what path.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
Feels weird for a number of reasons. Totally. Take your dad's experience and then compare it to sort of how you described your experience, and I think that's a great representation of what changed from maybe the 1950s to 70s all the way to the 80s, 90s, and early 2000s, where there was really this recognition that we actually need to sort of push for college as the North Star for every student.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
Now, fast forward to sort of where we are now. There has been a lot of reckoning about how pushing every student to go to college and take on the cost of college without necessarily being really clear about what they want it to do for them
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
means that we have a lot of students across the board who enroll in college and then never complete a degree, take on a ton of debt, and generally kind of like struggle to make college really work for them as a jumping off path to the rest of their career.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
So where we are now, I led a study for the Center on Reinventing Public Education on high schools in New England specifically, but I've heard from many other high school leaders across the nation that our findings really resonate with them too. What we were trying to learn is in this post-pandemic landscape, has the purpose of high school shifted at all?
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
Like how do you define success for high school students? And we talked with administrators, teachers, parents, and students in six high schools over the course of two years. And what we found is that the vision that they painted was that they want every single student in that school to have a pathway to a good life. And what a good life means is defined on their own terms.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
Some of it's from students themselves. Students are genuinely questioning if college is worth it and if college is really the right thing for them, knowing what they know about themselves. What we're hearing from students is that choosing to go to college brings financial risk.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
There's an emotional toll that students describe where college is really high pressure or it can feel really high pressure. There's kind of social pressure and social dynamics that students are not sure that they really want to take on, especially, again, coming out of the pandemic. Some students didn't even get a real full high school experience.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
And they described to us not necessarily feeling ready to just sort of jump into the college experience. And I think it's really a testament to students knowing what they themselves need when they're able to kind of look at the thing that most people might see as like the best path and say, look, I don't know if that's my best path.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
It's mixed. And I think there's there's we're in a moment right now. A lot of people are kind of wrestling with this question. What we heard from many parents is that they really wanted their child to make the best choice for them.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
And some parents really were willing to say, look, if college, especially if college right after graduation is not the best choice for my kid, I want to support what's going to be best for my kid. And I think parents are also seeing the data. They're seeing the evidence that college is really expensive. It doesn't always pay off.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
There still is clear evidence that more education over your lifetime does mean more lifetime earnings on average. But the average is key there, where if you actually look at the spread from the lowest to the highest earners at different levels of educational attainment, there's a whole lot of overlap.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
So basically, some people with less education end up earning far more than people even with more education than they have.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
Yeah, we do. We hear some. And here's where I think it's coming from. Teachers all went to college. So everybody in a school, for the most part, has gone through a path that's included college at some point.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
So it is hard to kind of get out of your own experience and really recognize that taking an alternative pathway that at least doesn't look like getting a degree right now—maybe you get a degree later— You know, recognizing that that's actually a legitimate and sort of celebration-worthy choice for a student is hard when your school of experience says college is really valuable.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
We did hear concerns from parents that, you know, if their kid doesn't go on to college, does that mean that they might be less successful later on? And lastly, some parents and even teachers that we talked to said that they had some concerns sort of about this shift to celebrating a bigger spectrum of post-secondary opportunities.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
They had some concerns about maybe that means that the school is lowering expectations. If the school says, well, not everybody has to go to college, does that actually mean that we have lower expectations for students in our school? Yeah. And that doesn't have to be true. We are seeing schools where expectations remain really high.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
However, I think the concern about lowering expectations is totally legitimate because there's a big risk to guard against going backwards in time where teachers and even some parents are saying, well, some students are sort of made for college and others are really better to go to the military, like the counselor told your dad, or to go kind of work with their hands.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
What a good life means is defined on their own terms.
Today, Explained
What if college isn't for everyone?
And that kind of tracking and going back to that kind of tracking is a huge risk that we want to guard against. And I think that schools really are genuinely grappling right now with how do we make sure that everybody has equal chances at a good life with different pathways to get there.