The New York State Education Department said on Friday that the high school graduation rate hit a new high of 79.4 percent in 2016, an increase of 1.3 points from 2015 and more than 12 points from a decade ago. But changes to graduation requirements in 2016 made it hard to know whether schools were doing better or students were simply clearing a lower bar.
Politicians sure do seem to be eager to congratulate themselves whenever meaningless numbers move upward.
One question that no one seems to ask is why students are kept on in high school.
IIRC, up until the 1960s, most students in France and Britain graduated from high school at the age of 16, after their sophomore year, and entered the workforce. In Britain, the junior and senior years were called "college", and were reserved for only the best students. (One can imagine the kind of serious, sober climate a high school would have when only the equivalent of the honors students were kept on in the junior and senior years.) For everyone else, it's off to the factory for the rest of your life. Those factories don't exist anymore, but no one has ever quite figured out what to do with the students. The students could be channeled into vocational study, but politicians do not want to raise taxes for that, so they argue that it's cheaper to wait and send the students to community college once they graduate (even though keeping students on in high school also cost money). If the schools did graduate students after their sophomore year, the students might not be working, they might be breaking into your house so they can buy new cellphones and drugs. Society has changed.
So it's a bit like the Vietnam War, a situation that seemed to evolve out of nowhere, in which no one knew what to do. Just keeping teenagers in schools that are sometimes mildly prison-like (including the disturbing disruptiveness) has become the conventional wisdom, but it is all very recent. Here is a graph of educational attainment.
Anyway, I once read that in the 1980s or 1990s, educators in Britain dusted off some of the tests that were given to regular students in their senior year in the 1950s. These tests were then administered to contemporary honors students in their senior year. In general, they failed to shine on the tests. So the argument is that by keeping more students on in high school, the educational improvement of the average students does improve somewhat, but the educational development of the top students declines. We still call them public "schools", but education is not really their primary function. (And so people who are most committed to education send their kids to private schools, and this ceases to be a public issue.)
Skilled labor shortage?
From the perspective of employers in the US, there is no shortage of jobs, there is a shortage of skilled labor.
There’s a strange disconnect between two of the big narratives about the American blue-collar work force right now. In one story, there is a population of unemployed and underemployed working-class adults for whom well-paying work seems increasingly out of reach; their jobs have gone overseas or become automated, and they find themselves working retail, or not working at all. But an apparently conflicting story comes from American employers, which have been insisting for years that they have a hard time finding workers to fill many skilled blue-collar jobs. A 2015 report from the Manufacturing Institute, for example, found that seven in 10 manufacturing executives said they faced shortages of workers with adequate tech skills. A high proportion of existing skilled workers is also nearing retirement, which means a bigger gap is looming soon. By 2025, the report warned, two million jobs will be going unfilled. (Health care, also a big focus of retraining programs, is another rapidly expanding field.)
A similar situation existed during the Great Recession of 2008-2009. In some cities, there was a shortage of certain skilled labor (e.g., auto mechanics). But because so many working people had invested themselves in real estate, and home prices were falling, they could not sell without taking a loss, so they stayed put and suffered financially.
One of the elements of the article is the irrelevance of a college degree in the job market today. Employers want very specific advanced technical skills. In fact, possession of a college diploma seems to make some job hunters very reluctant to pursue further vocational education; having a college degree is a whole different identity, and engaging in vocational eduction not only involves learning something that is totally alien to a college education, but it involves some personal turmoil and adjustment. Of course, having a broad-based college education AND vocational skills might be the best of both worlds in practical terms for some workers; but psychologically, the experience or prospect of spending a large amount of time, effort and money (in fact, from childhood) studying the sciences and humanities and then working in a factory is somewhat traumatic.
On the other hand, how is that so different from going to law school and medical school, which are also vocational post-graduate degrees? In fact, law school is turning into an outright scam, so working in a factory as an advanced technician would be a step up from being an unemployed or underemployed shyster.
So maybe the real problem is that Americans need to change their attitudes toward the vocations. So the question to ask students is not "Where are you going to college?" or "What are you studying in college?", but "What vocational training will you pursue once you get out of high school or college?"
(Ironically, I read years ago that one of the major economic problems in Muslim countries is that people look down on vocations like carpentry and other trades. It's considered too worldly and corrupt. That is a strangely puritanical attitude from an American perspective. But perhaps there is a kind of snobbery even in the US toward the vocations, or at least the manual vocations.)
Higher Education hybrid? (US and Europe)
Perhaps a better system of higher education would be to create a hybrid of the US university system and the European system.
Two things that are generally considered 'good' about the higher education systems in the US and Europe:
1) The US system is much more open and 'democratic'. Even in Scandinavian countries that are supposedly 'liberal' or 'socialistic', very few people go to college.
2) The European system is more rigorous and also has lower tuition or no tuition.
In the US, there is a particular hierarchy of academic rigor.
1) engineering and math are the most difficult;
2) the natural sciences follow behind in difficulty;
3) the social sciences and humanities are less challenging than the natural sciences;
4) business school is often considered the least intellectually demanding.
It is not necessarily like this in Europe. In France, for instance, the humanities take pride of place in higher education, with philosophy as the jewel in the crown. But it's an extraordinarily elitist system in France, not in terms of serving the children of the wealthy, but in terms of academic rigor. The French system is more open in the sense that this is heavily subsidized by the government, and might be seen as more meritocratic (although French critics have their doubts about the meritocracy of their system).
The concept is that this would be implanted within US higher education in a limited, focused way.
For example, the humanities and the social sciences would become as rigorous as engineering, with fewer students being able to major exclusively in those fields; but for those students who were admitted into the undergraduate programs in the humanities or social sciences, tuition would be waived.
That few students would be allowed to major exclusively in one discipline in the social sciences and humanities does not mean that few would study the social sciences or the humanities, since it would be required in the general curriculum, and students could minor in these fields. But these would be elite disciplines, the way math and engineering are today in the US.
Here is an article on the role of history and philosophy in the training of diplomats. Whenever Henry Kissinger was asked for career advice from his students, he would tell them to study history and philosophy. Unfortunately, that was not a part of the training in the US of those who specialized in foreign relations (IIRC, American diplomats typically have a background in economics). This is finally being addressed at Harvard.
https://www.theatlantic.com/
To some extent, a humanities and social science major in the US is a default major for those who are not prepared for or capable of majoring in the natural sciences, or mathematics, or engineering. Making it a tuition-free major, and a major only for the top students would reverse this. It is also a crucial background for the best and brightest students who will be entering public service.
The (in)famous 'PPE' degree in Britain -- politics, philosophy, economics -- is considered an easy "slacker" interdisciplinary major at most universities, but at Oxford it is a selective, rigorous degree that opens the paths to political power.
First of all, making the humanities and social sciences a required background for elite students might be a step in the right direction for a different reason, aside from technical training. There was a BBC News editorial from a banker who had majored in math and philosophy at Oxford or Cambridge; he claimed that the problem today in finance is people trained in finance, without a strong background in critical thinking skills.
Second, this interdisciplinary model might be best for getting students into a discipline without dedicating them to that discipline. Students often have a difficult time selecting a major, and by letting a student minor in several fields as their 'major' rather than focus on one discipline, they would be able to use prior coursework toward their interdisciplinary degree. For departments, there would be no shortage of students taking their courses, although only the very best students would be focused on one discipline (those students could also take graduate courses). So a typical student would take three minors -- say, in business, political science and history -- as their interdisciplinary major.
