The recently adopted curriculum for Georgia high schools is, in effect, a college preparatory liberal arts program requiring advanced mathematics, science, history, English literature and, if the student plans to attend a four-year college, foreign languages. It is a curriculum that requires a distribution of courses covering a wide spectrum of subjects and knowledge that is more rigorous than the distribution requirements of some Ivy League universities. The required curriculum for teenagers who are not interested in or able to go to college is essentially the same (the basic difference is that they don't have to take two years of foreign languages).

Other states have made similar changes in their graduation requirements and it is believed that the result has been an increase in the percentage of high school students earning a diploma. Even if true, these increases have not been significant, and the graduation rates still leave much to be desired.

Of course, the amount of post-secondary education that will be required for high school graduates to compete effectively in the job market is significantly affected by the quality of the secondary education they receive and absorb. If secondary education is improved and students take advantage of it, then the need for post-secondary education will be reduced.

However, going to college has acquired an important social significance that exceeds its educational significance. Not having gone to college (even if you don't graduate) classifies young people as “failures” in the eyes of many of their families, of many of their peers and of the community at large. As a result there is enormous pressure on the schools, the teachers and the students to get the students into college (preferably with a HOPE Scholarship in Georgia) rather than preparing them for useful employment. The two goals overlap in some cases, but they are not the same thing.

One of the results of these attitudes in Georgia is tremendous pressure on high school teachers to inflate the grades of their students. As a result, many students get high school diploma, who have not absorbed a high school education, including many who graduate with a B average. The result is that about 75 percent of the high school graduates awarded HOPE Scholarships lose them because they cannot maintain a B average in the college of their choice, and only 60 percent of the former HOPE scholars earn degrees. Ninety-six percent of the money for HOPE scholarships has gone to upper-income families who would have sent their children to college without a subsidy from the state.

Unfortunately, I think that these societal attitudes and the constant echoing of the “most everyone to college” refrain by so-called experts (and some real experts) are pushing our educational system in the wrong direction. We have chosen to make the failure to graduate from college a near insurmountable barrier to higher level employment opportunities. Fifty years ago it was possible for a man with only a high school diploma to become a senior executive in a major corporation. Not so today.

There are several reasons why it is a mistake to design our public high school education around the goal of sending almost everyone to junior or senior colleges.

• There are not nearly enough jobs now that require post-secondary job skills to employ almost everyone in a job appropriate for their education and investment of time and money, and it is very unlikely that there will be a sufficient supply of such jobs in the foreseeable future.

• There are many excellent jobs going unfilled that require skills that can be obtained in high school and that are different from those normally taught in college.

• Many students are not interested in attending college.

• Many students cannot afford college.

• Many students are unwilling to master, or are not able to master, all of the skills required to earn a high school diploma (that is a prerequisite to college admission).

• Many students who would be happier taking career and technical courses are being pushed into colleges where a shockingly large percentage drop out.

• Students who drop out of college are worse off than if they had never enrolled. Many students incur substantial debt to pay for their college expenses, and there is a significant stigma that attaches to failing-out of college, or merely dropping-out.

• The costs to the Georgia and national taxpayers of providing every high school graduate with a post-secondary education would be substantial, and can be justified only if the post-secondary program equips students to do something that they could not have accomplished with a good high school education.

There is an opportunity cost to students pursuing post-secondary education that requires both time and money from them or their families. Time spent in post-secondary work could be spent learning on the job and earning money rather than spending it in an effort to get a degree (which is often a failed effort).

There has been a good deal of recent publicity about college, technical school and professional school graduates (many of whom attended for-profit trade schools) who are hopelessly mired in debt as a result of having borrowed more money to pay for their post-secondary education than they can repay given their available employment opportunities. The Feb. 2 Forbes magazine contains an article, “Crushed by College,” that is worth reading by anyone concerned with this issue. College and professional school costs have escalated way beyond the effects of inflation and have become a serious barrier to higher education. The cost of post-secondary education both in years of one's life and dollars out of one's pocket is an important issue, and a good reason why we should provide a more useful high school education for many more of our young people.

There is no stronger indictment of our public schools than the large number of for-profit trade schools that purport to provide, at considerable cost to young and old alike, the education/training most should have received from their public high school or a technical college at a lower cost. Attendance at these trade schools more often than not is financed with government loans or loans guaranteed by the government, many of which are not repaid. The 2005 bankruptcy law prohibits the discharge of student loans in a bankruptcy proceeding.

The education/training that youngsters will need to get a good job is often misrepresented and misunderstood. At a Metro Atlanta Chamber of Commerce meeting two years ago, a so-called expert on education stated that in the year 2010 every job will require some post-secondary education. Not a single person out of the approximately 150 business executives in attendance challenged the assertion. However, to the contrary, for the foreseeable future there will be millions of jobs available in the U.S. that will not require post-secondary education (assuming that our secondary education does an adequate job of educating/training our students in the first place), and many such jobs still will not require even a high school diploma.

The U.S. Department of Labor tells us that a majority of new jobs over the next 10 years will not require a college degree.

It's ironic that the call for increased college preparation from the educational establishment comes at a time when many Georgia public schools are showing a growing interest in vocational education and are establishing career academies focused on job preparation and certification.

We need to adopt realistic goals for our schools, which should be increased over time as sustainable improvements are achieved. We need to drop the throw-away lines about having “world class” education systems everywhere and of sending “almost everyone” to college. We need high school programs that will prepare our young people for useful employment or college, and we need to make it clear that it is not necessary to go to college to get a good job or to be respected in your community.

Mike Trotter, Special to the Daily Report