The end of “college for all”

Is college for everybody? According to Chelsea Waite, a senior researcher at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, the answer is no. And more students, parents, and educators are realizing it. Waite spent two years speaking to administrators, teachers, parents, and students at six high schools in New England to learn more about post-grad desires. The study, for the Center on Reinventing Public Education, specifically concerned New England high schools, but Waite says she’s heard from school leaders across the country that the findings resonate. “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,” Waite says. What does it mean to have a “good life” in this context? And what does a path that doesn’t include college look like? That’s what we tackle on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in show. Check out the conversation between Waite and host Jonquilyn Hill; it’s been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. (Listen ad-free when you become a Vox Member.) If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545. When I was a kid it felt like the purpose of high school was to prepare every single person to go off to a university. Has that changed now? Let’s go back to the beginning of high school, because I think that will help us answer where we are now. When high schools first started in the US, they were not universal and they were really designed for elites: largely white, male, middle- and upper-class students who would go to high school as a way to get them to higher education in order to then go into these leadership roles in society. Then from the 1910s to 1940s, there was a big high school movement that basically made high schools kind of like, mass education for everyone. The idea there is that we have a responsibility as a society to make sure that young people are prepared for the world. For some of them, that might mean college. For others, it might mean they’re better working with their hands and they should be in a different kind of job or career. As time went on, it became very clear that there was major inequality in who got access to what path. Yeah, I remember my dad telling me his school counselor said, “Maybe you should just join the military.” That phrasing feels weird for a number of reasons. (He eventually got his doctorate.) Take your dad’s experience and then compare it to sort of how you described your experience. I think that’s a great representation of what changed from the 1950s to ’70s all the way to the ’80s, ’90s and early 2000s, where there was really this recognition that we are not giving young people equal opportunities to get into college, which is associated with economic and social mobility and opportunity and higher earnings over your lifetime. There were lots of schools — including a number of charter schools — that opened with this “college for all” mission. 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 means that we have a lot of students who enroll in college and then never complete a degree, take on a ton of debt, and generally kind of struggle to make college really work for them as a path to the rest of their career. Now we’re in this place where it’s a little more holistic: If you want to go to college, you can. If you want to join the military, you can. If you want to do a trade or start working, you can. Is this shift coming from the students themselves or is it coming from somewhere else? 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 has financial risk. There’s social pressure and social dynamics that students are not sure that they really want to take on, especially coming out of the pandemic. Some students didn’t even get a real full high school experience. They described not necessarily feeling ready to just jump into the college experience. I think it’s really a testament to students knowing what they themselves need. Parents are saying they just want their kids to be happy. I think every generation of parents to some degree would say that. But are parents really okay if that means their kids aren’t going to college? It’s mixed. We’re in a moment right now where 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. Parents are also seeing the data. There still is clear evidence that more education over your lifetime does mean more lifetime earnings on average. But the average is key there. 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. Do you see any resistance from high schools? 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. So it is hard to kind of get out of your own experience and really recognize that taking an alternative pathway. Some parents and even teachers that we talked to said that they had some concerns about this shift to celebrating a bigger spectrum of post-secondary opportunities; that [it] means that the school is lowering expectations.That doesn’t have to be true. We are seeing schools where expectations remain really high. Every student graduates both prepared to go to college, if they choose it, and really knowledgeable about the kind of careers that they might want to pursue, including some that don’t involve a degree right away. However, I think the concern about lowering expectations is totally legitimate. There’s a big risk to guard against going backwards in time to that period where teachers and even some parents are saying, “some students are made for college and others are really better to go to the military or to go with their hands.” Are we still asking too much of students? Looking back, I was very fortunate that at 15 I wanted to become a journalist and I’m doing it as an adult. But that’s so rare. How are kids supposed to know what they wanna do with the rest of their lives? Are we asking too much of kids? I don’t think we are. I think the risk is that we create dead ends. If you at 15 said, “I want to be a journalist and that’s what is lighting me up right now.” And you went and got an internship with another journalist and you started to take some early college journalism classes, and then decided, “Actually, you know what? I want to be an engineer.” If you had shut off that opportunity to be an engineer, or more precisely if your school had shut off that opportunity by saying, “She’s in this track for journalism. We don’t really have to teach her science or math,” that is a dead-end. So we need schools that create no dead-ends for students, but encourage students to explore early on what kind of real world career they can imagine for themselves.

What really matters

The end of “college for all”