Media Talking Points

The Problem: Students lack traction for college and careers

  • Today, our young people are experiencing the worst job market in decades. Millions of young adults are languishing in dead-end jobs or enter higher education only to drop out, accumulating debt but gaining little traction toward careers or postsecondary degrees. These students need better skills—for work and college—but we’ve paid more attention to college readiness than to career education.
  • Most young people from all backgrounds have only the vaguest of notions about how to choose a career or the skills and knowledge required to succeed in them.
  • We are also seeing a severe disconnect between the skills students have and what is required at work, resulting in many good jobs having to go begging for talent. The economy will continue to generate high-tech jobs as well as “middle-skills" jobs in many field ranging from data security and advanced manufacturing to jobs in nursing and trades that pay middle-class wages (and better).
  • We need to ensure that young people graduate with a strong academic foundation and a solid core of technical skills that can enable them to get started in these high-demand fields.

The Solution: Career pathways for student success

  • For the past few years, Georgia has been working to establish new career pathways in grades 9-14. We are modernizing career and technical education programs and expanding innovations such as early college high schools and career academies.
  • These programs lead to technical degrees or industry-specific certificates and credentials in areas of high demand. We are particularly focused on industries—such as information technology and computer science, health care, advanced manufacturing and pre-engineering, and other STEM fields—that research says are rapidly growing in regions across the United States.
  • The new pathways make learning relevant by helping young people learn through hands-on experiences where they can apply academic concepts to real-life problems. Students learn to work collaboratively with people of different ages and gain maturity as they test themselves in apprenticeships and paid internships.
  • The pathways are flexible to take into account the fact that the path for youth after high school is often not straight. Young people can enter and exit postsecondary education or switch career interests while accumulating credit and gaining real traction toward career goals.

The Ask

  • Our efforts still need to be scaled up to serve massive demand. We need policymakers to help us coordinate use of resources across state agencies to provide funding for scale up. We need states to help establish new incentives for industry partners to provide learning opportunities in their facilities and to ensure that apprenticeship programs are eligible to receive state funds.
  • We need to provide educators with opportunities to learn about changes in the labor market (such as externships), online tools to provide career information and advising, and the support to begin career preparation in middle school.
  • We need the public to recognize the importance of these programs and to understand that career and technical programs are the wave of the future. These are no longer the academic dumping grounds of yesteryear but have become some of the shining lights of our education system.

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