A seventeen-year-old is deciding what to do next. They have received a detailed account of one route — a four-year degree, in another town, at considerable cost — from school, from counsellors, and from the general assumption around them.
They have received almost no account of the alternatives that exist within twenty miles of where they are sitting.
This is not a claim about which path is better
Worth stating clearly, because the argument is frequently made as a criticism of higher education and that is not what is at issue.
The point is narrower. One option is described in detail, with a process attached and adults who help students navigate it. The others are described in general terms if at all, and no equivalent process exists.
A student choosing the well-described path has chosen. A student who might have preferred an alternative has not declined it — they were never given enough information to consider it.
That asymmetry is a decision the community has made without deciding it, and it is correctable at low cost.
What students are missing specifically
Not encouragement about the dignity of skilled work, which they have heard and which persuades nobody.
Concrete information: what the work actually involves on an ordinary Tuesday, what the path is from here to doing it, what it pays at entry and at ten years, what the training costs and who pays, whether the credential travels if they want to work in another state, and who locally is hiring.
Almost none of that is available to a student in most Idaho districts, and all of it is held by employers twenty minutes away who have never been asked.
Why employers do it badly when they do it
An employer given twenty minutes in front of students generally uses it to describe their company and to say that they are hiring.
Students are not choosing an employer. They are choosing a direction for the next decade, and a recruitment pitch answers a question they are not yet asking.
What works is the specific and unglamorous version. Here is what I did on Tuesday. Here is what somebody starting earns and what they earn at thirty-five. Here is the part of this work that is genuinely difficult and the part people do not expect. Here is exactly what you would do after graduation to end up here.
Bringing somebody who is twenty-four and three years into the path does more than any senior person can, because students can locate themselves in that account.
The parent is the other audience
Frequently overlooked and frequently decisive.
A seventeen-year-old’s decision is made in conversation with parents who have their own picture of what constitutes a serious future, formed decades ago from conditions that have changed substantially.
Parents are not being unreasonable. They want their child to have security and options, and they are working from the information they have.
Which means the same concrete account — earnings, progression, whether the credential travels, what the work is actually like — needs to reach them, and an evening session for parents is the most under-used instrument in this whole area.
Nobody’s job
The reason this does not happen, and it is not resistance from anybody.
The employer has a business to run and does not know who to call. The counsellor has a caseload and no mechanism for arranging it. The principal has forty other things. The superintendent assumes somebody is handling it.
Every party would agree it is worth doing and none of them owns it, which is the pattern from the coalition entry and has the same resolution: somebody names it as their responsibility for a year.
The smallest version that works is one afternoon a year, four employers, honest accounts, parents invited. That is an evening of somebody’s organising and it is more than most districts currently have.
What the employer gets
Worth stating, because employers asked to do this treat it as community service and it is closer to recruitment with a ten-year horizon.
The students in that room are the local workforce in eight years. The ones who leave and return in their early thirties, per the pattern in the workforce chapter, will remember which industries were described to them as real options.
An employer whose sector is invisible to seventeen-year-olds today is competing for people who never considered it, at a wage premium, in a decade. The afternoon is cheap by comparison and the return is real if slow.
Edited by Patrick J. Wolf, PhD