Today, Explained - What if college isn't for everyone?

Episode Date: April 13, 2025

For decades, high schools and parents have prioritized college for all graduating seniors. Now, more students are asking if there's another way. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact-checked by Colleen Barrett, engineered by Matthew Billy and Patrick Boyd and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo by Michael Blackshire / Los Angeles Times via Getty Images.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Jon Glenn Hill. This is Explain It To Me, the show where you call in. I guess I'm calling because I want to know how do people choose what they do after like college or high school or when they're going to join the workforce. This feels like such a different landscape now than it was for my parents. And we get you answers. The landscape really is different right now. Other people are wondering what to do after graduation too. I had no idea until this year

what the heck I was doing after high school. That's Erica. She called us from Dallas, Texas. She's going to UT Austin this fall. Longhorn Nation, hook them BW. And she did have a little bit of an idea of what she might do after graduation. I knew I wanted to go to college

because like 99% of the kids at my high school go to a four-year college after. Like junior year, we have an assembly and they say, look, this is how you apply to college. They don't even mention trade school or anything like that. Like, it's not an option, but at my school they don't advertise it. I relate to Erika's experience. It represents what the last few decades of American high school education policy have

looked like, preparing every single student for college no matter what. And it can be hard to resist that pull. Yeah, there definitely is a stigma around it. I don't know a single person that's not going to some type of university. I only know one person that's going to a two-year. But remember that landscape the first caller was talking about? It's different in 2025. Gen Z and Gen Alpha have seen the toll of student debt and often say they don't want to take that on. They're not certain college will be the right fit for them. Having more options to choose from requires some evolution from the way we've always

done things. At least that's what Chelsea Waite says. She studies education policy at the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State. 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. To understand what to change, Chelsea says we have to understand where this college for all policy came from in the first place. When

high schools kind of first started in the US, they were not universal and they were really sort of designed for elites, largely white, male, middle and upper class students who would go to high school as a way to kind of get them to a higher education in order to then go into these leadership roles in society. 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.

For others, it might mean they're sort of better working with their hands and they should be in, you know, 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. Yeah, I remember my dad telling me this story of, he was getting ready to go off to college

and his school counselor was like, maybe you should just join the military and like phrased it like that, which is, 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. Well I think that this is a time though for you to realize that as a young college graduate you are among the most fortunate people on earth. 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 wanted to do for them 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. 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? 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. Does this shift come 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 brings like financial risk. 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, 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. Parents are saying they want their kids to have a good life. They just want their kids to be happy.

And 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. And I think 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 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. 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. So basically some people with less education end up earning far more than people, even with more education than they have. Do you see any resistance from high schools, whether it's from teachers or guidance counselors, to telling a high school kid, no, you don't have to go to college?

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. 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. 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 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. 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? And that doesn't have to be true. We are seeing schools where expectations remain really high. 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. 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. This is advertiser content brought to you by the all new Nissan Murano. Okay, that email is done.

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And I didn't know whether to laugh or to be scared because, you know, you see in the movies, robberies are not like that. I'm Phoebe Judge. Listen to part one of The Roof Man right now on Criminal and listen to part two early by becoming a member of Criminal Plus. We're back. It's explained it to me. With attitudes about college evolving, High schools are starting to expose their students to more things so they can make a more informed decision about what to do after graduation Well, my name is dr. Megan Drummond I'm the assistant director of Northland Career Center in the Platte County School District in Platte City, Missouri So for high schools in the Kansas City area, Megan's Career Center is getting pretty popular. We are a career and technical center for juniors and seniors in high school.

We have what we call like our human services programs and our skilled trades programs. We kind of have two different like umbrellas that a lot of our classes fall under. Your human services are going to be things like health sciences, culinary arts, law enforcement, teaching professions, things like that. Skilled trades are going to be kind of what you traditionally think are welding, diesel technology, construction, HVAC, things like that that are your more traditional skilled trades. Yeah, how does the program work exactly? Like, okay, a student is like, I want to try this, I want to do this.

When do they come in and what do they do? So students that might be interested in shadowing would shadow their sophomore or junior year of high school to then be admitted for the following school year. What do you all do to prepare students for that work environment? Each of our programs, they have industry certifications that are tied to those programs. Sometimes age can be a factor, but to prepare for those different exams,

what they're doing is practicing their skills out in the shop. For our teaching professions program, they actually go out into surrounding elementary schools in our area and they're interning and they're acting as a student teacher in a way. But we try and give students as much real world experience as possible through the coursework they're doing in class,

as well as through internship opportunities, actually in the industry, whatever industry they've decided on, give them those real world experiences. Are they still doing like, I guess what we think of the typical high school classes? Like, is it like, well, gotta go to calculus or gotta get to, you know, English.

Is that, are those classes happening in tandem? For our students specifically, they spend half of our day with us and then they still spend half of their day at their sending high school. So oftentimes at their sending high school. So oftentimes at their sending high school they're getting those traditional classes that you think of. They're getting calculus, they're getting P.E., they're getting their health class, they're getting English, things like that.

Two households, both alike in dignity, in Verona, where we lay our scene. When they are with us for two and a half hours out of their school day, they are of course getting their technical education, whatever that looks like in their program. But then we also offer a embedded math and English. And what's kind of unique about what we do is that our math and English is specifically tailored for whatever program they're in.

So if you are in our health sciences program, your math may look like, you know, converting CCs to milliliters. In construction, their math may be very geometry heavy. In health sciences, you may have to be typing up and writing about patient care and what happened to the patient this morning, and they're practicing those skills that they're gonna need to have in industry. Are the high schools that the students are coming from, are they on board with this? They are very, very on board.

They are constantly making sure that students are coming in and shadowing, and if we have offense, making sure that those are promoted at our sending high schools. So just that students know and that there's awareness. What are the most popular programs at the school? You know, what do students tend to lean towards? Oh, so I would say probably hands down this this may or may not surprise you, but our welding program,

every single year we have a gigantic wait list of students. And I think that that's just due to the allure of the industry itself and also just the ability to have a really high paying job straight out of high school with no college debt is I think very appealing to a lot of our students. I would also say our health sciences program, and that probably comes as no surprise because we need health care professionals. Nicole Soule What do you hear from students when they talk about what they want out of life after they graduate? Jennifer Soule The main thing that we're hearing is that, like skilled trades especially, those are a lot of kids that maybe they don't want to go to college and that's totally fine.

They want to be able to have that flexibility though and use their two-year training that they've had with Northland Career Center to go out somewhere, work hard, be successful and make a really good living and support their family. Growing up, these conversations about alternatives never happened. I even went to a college preparatory middle school, which is a lot for a middle schooler. But a generation ago, were there programs like the ones

you have that were appealing to mainstream kids around the country or, you know, is this idea of post-graduation can look a lot of different ways. Is that a new idea? I mean, career and technical schools have been around for a hot minute. That necessarily isn't a new or revolutionary idea. But I think when I was in high school, it was you need to go to college or you're not gonna be successful. And that's just not true.

I mean, some of our students that leave Northland Career Center, they have zero student debt and they're making more money than I do, straight out of high school because skilled trades jobs are never gonna go away. Like our healthcare and health sciences students, they're always going to be needed in the industry. Police officers, they're always going to be needed.

So all of these programs are very relevant to things that we directly need in our community. And I think that's what our school at the core is doing, is trying to prepare our students to be productive members of our community and of our society. And I think that that's why we're successful as we are, is because of that additional preparation that we offer for our kids. When we come back, we're going to look at a different idea. A civil service year. That's after this break. It really seems like tariffs are about to make just about everything more expensive. And so this week on the Vergecast, we're trying to figure out not only which gadgets do you need to buy right now before they get more expensive,

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Kristin Bennett with the Service Year Alliance represents a different path. We're an organization that is promoting a year of paid full-time service as an option for individuals, whether you want to do it after high school, you want to do it after college, like we do just want to see it become much more of the menu that is put in front of young people as they're growing up in our country

and thinking about what they want to do next in life. I think we ask a lot in the just grow up and go to college narrative for a 17 or 18 year old to make a pretty big decision. And a year of service can be an opportunity for someone to gain professional skills, mature and learn more about themselves, learn about some real issues in their communities while being paid, getting health insurance, and at the end getting an education award that will help them if they want to go on to a four-year university, a community college, a trade school, something else, but it gives them a leg up in that way.

So we're wanting to put this out there as one of the many options that we are hoping that as individuals come to the end of high school, they are given and that they can consider. What does a service year look like? The majority of them are offered through AmeriCorps, which we kind of often refer to as kind of like the domestic Peace Corps. But whether you're interested in being in a school setting, like tutoring children or mentoring youth, or if you want to be out in the wilderness helping to blaze trails and reduce wildfire challenges, you know, like in brush, like there's so many different ways you can do it.

You commit a year, you go address a need by delivering service while being trained and gaining skills and getting a living stipend along the way so that you can support yourself. What are some of the skills that, you know, grads are gathering as they're doing this service year? So, usually, there's the specific skills that you'll obtain that are tied to the service here. So usually there's the specific skills that you'll obtain that are tied to the service

itself, right? So you might leave with some very hard skills, say if you were focused on energy efficiency and part of what you learned to do was weatherize homes or install solar panels. So there's those types of opportunities. There's skills that you might learn if you want to pursue a career in education, being in a school, learning how to work with children, learning how to deliver interventions in that sense. So there's very specifics depending on the service you choose and what you take on. And then there's more universal things.

what you take on. And then there's more universal things. We have learned that people who do a year of service are more likely to say civically engaged afterwards. So they're more likely to vote, they're more likely to volunteer ongoing, and even potentially more interesting. We've learned that they're also more inclined and interested in having conversations and working with people who they disagree with. How do you go about making sure that something like this is equitable? You know, there's only like a certain group of young people who don't actually need to work and can kind of hit that pause button. Who's paying people to do this work? This is a really important part of it.

Most of these opportunities are public-private partnerships. So there's federal dollars from AmeriCorps that fund a lot of these. And then there's more than one-to-one match of funds that are coming from philanthropy or from, you know, school systems or other local sources that do go into paying each person. One of the reasons why we think it's important that there be really solid wraparound benefits and supports for someone in service is so that it can be something that regardless of your socioeconomic background

or what kind of like financial safety net you might have that you can do this. Okay, Kristin, we got a call from a listener asking about mandatory public service. My name is Gabriel Connors. I'm calling from Chicago, Illinois. And my question is about mandatory civic service. So solving problems, at least trying to solve problems together for the nation, specific

communities, bringing folk together from across whatever class lines, demographic lines, to just work on cool stuff. Would that not help our division in this country? I think that John has great, great points and is thinking about this in, in a way that I can really relate to. There has not been a lot of political support in our country for mandatory service, like compulsory service, but at the same time, I don't think it needs to be mandatory for more people to be able to do it and for these types of experiences to exist at scale and to play a much bigger role in bringing people together.

So one of the benefits, I think, to a year of service is the fact that someone chooses to do it and That allows people to be Motivated by so many different things to come to the table Like we've heard this a lot from veterans right in the military space that when you're out in the trenches together it does not matter who you voted for, where you came from, or which God you may or may not pray to. At the end of the day, we're on a mission together and that's like what we have to solve. And they leave those experiences with such strong connections to those people because of that common mission and common

experience. That happens in service years as well. I'm curious, what got you so passionate about this? Like kind of what sparked it for you? Amongst the 2008 recession, I did a year of AmeriCorps helping connect low-income families with resources that already existed. Tax credits, food stamps, job supports,

different things like that, in my hometown, and was exposed to more need, both from services needing to be delivered in communities, to also peers around me that were trying to figure out what to do with their lives. So it's that vision that brings me to this every day, with their lives. So it's that vision that brings me to this every day and the hope that I can help other people have the experience that I was fortunate enough to have. That was Kristin Bennett, the Executive Director of Service Year Alliance.

Before we let you go, we're working on an episode about the economy and how it's affecting people who are retired or about to retire. Is that you or your parents? Maybe your grandparents? Do you have questions about the future of your 401Ks and Social Security? Maybe you're wondering, what's up with Medicare? Give us a call at 1-800-618-8545. Or you can send us an email to askvox at vox.com. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlain. It was edited by our executive producer Miranda

Kennedy, calling Barrett, check the facts, Matthew Billy engineered, and thanks to Patrick Boyd too. Carla Javier runs our show. And I'm your host, John Flynn Hill. Thanks for listening. Talk to you soon. Bye. I've lived here my entire life. I'm ready to like meet a lot of new people, but I am really nervous. I'm going to miss my mom.