Beyond College for All: Policies and Practices to Improve Transitions into College and Jobs. (Special Issues: Career Development and the Changing Workplace)

In the past two decades, changes in the U.S. economy have altered the requirements for both college and work, with important implications for school counselors whose job it is to provide information and guidance to students with regard to personal, academic, and career options. The unfortunate tendency has been for educators to assume that the changing economy simply requires more education, resulting in the misguided belief that all students should attend college. At the same time, the dramatic increase in open admissions policies, especially among 2-year colleges, has made a college education much more accessible. The result has been a well-meaning but misguided college-for-all attitude among educators and students. Educators have often encouraged college-for-all policies which inadvertently prevent students from (a) getting crucial information about how they are doing; (b) seeing the full range of desirable options for school and work; (c) assessing the appropriateness of these options and their likely outcomes; and (d) seeing what actions they can take to improve their educational and career outcomes. Given the potential harmfulness of the college-for-all mentality, we recommend procedures to give students and educators better information on academic and career options, allowing students to plan and act more effectively for success in school and beyond. Likewise, these recommendations will help school counselors to think about their role as academic and career advisors in a way that takes the new reality of higher education and labor markets into consideration. BACKGROUND: REVOLUTIONS IN EDUCATION AND THE ECONOMY Youths have always had difficulty entering adult society, but the process has become more difficult in recent decades. Over the past 40 years, three revolutionary changes have had dramatic impact on the way students become adults. First, the labor market has dramatically increased its skill demands, augmenting the earnings advantages for college graduates, but reducing the real earnings for those with less education (Grubb, 1996). Second, college became much more accessible, and community colleges--a minor factor in the prior generation--radically increased enrollments. In the past four decades, while enrollments at 4-year colleges doubled, they increased five-fold at community colleges (Digest of Educational Statistics 1999, 1999). The third transformation was perhaps the most remarkable. Community colleges adopted a revolutionary policy of open admissions. Unlike most 4-year colleges, community colleges opened their doors to admit all interested students, regardless of their prior academic achievement. Any high school graduate can now attend, even with barely passing grades. Sometimes students do not even have to be high school graduates or have GEDs to enroll. These three revolutions have radically transformed the rules of college and the labor market. They give students remarkable new opportunities. As with all revolutions, however, such dramatic changes may be difficult to understand, and they have led to misconceptions and unintended consequences for students. THE COLLEGE-FOR-ALL POLICY: MISCONCEPTIONS ABOUT THE NEW RULES OF COLLEGE AND THE LABOR MARKET Amid such dramatic change, educators have formed mistaken beliefs and pursued misguided practices. Without any public decision, American high schools have quietly adopted a new informal approach, the college-for-all policy (Rosenbaum, 2001). This new policy is based on misconceptions about the new reality of college and the labor market. To better understand the problems associated with the college-for-all mentality, and to pave the way for our proposed solutions, we first consider the misconceptions that have led to the current policy. First, six misconceptions about the desirability of college-for-everyone are addressed; then, we discuss six more about the undesirability of jobs for high school graduates. …