Dear future Mr./Mrs. President,

A problem for many students today is going to college not knowing what we want to do and having to pay a significant amount of money for it. There will be many graduates this upcoming spring, but most of the students will be leaving high school not knowing what they want to do. High school students should start working on their career path while they are in high school so they can gain more experiences and know what they want to do before getting to college.

Senior year is the year where you are expected to know what you want to do when you are done with school and know what you want to major. This question stumbles upon many students and will stress them out: what do you plan on doing after college? David Wheeler, principal of Southeastern Regional, states that, “... a student comes out of high school, not knowing what they want to do, goes to college, drops out. Now they’re in debt, without a job, and not knowing what they want to do.” Basically, this explains that students would have to waste a whole lot of money on college even when they don’t know they want to do in the future. Many students do not get the experience of working on things they enjoy doing as a job so it is hard for them to pick a major.

College does not help us choose a major since that was what we were suppose to do throughout our four years in high school. Workforce training in high school would be helpful for many since they can get help on picking a major throughout the years before heading to college, get work experiences and opportunities, and at the same time they are getting academic school work done. To add on to this, John Tulenko, of PBS Education Week, states that, “Many arrive at college unprepared, fall behind and drop out.” This means that majority of students drop out of college because they don’t know what they want to do but they are just spending money on college which is not even helping them. Not everyone can afford college tuition to begin with.

There is one problem to having workforce training in high schools. Stated by Tulenko, students that go to school with these kind of programs have lower SAT and ACT scores. However, a solution to this is that these test scores should not determine how intelligent a student is and where they would place in their class, but it should show how much work a student puts in when they are also working on college related work at the same time as their school works. A student’s academic intelligence should not determine if they are “college worthy”, or not if they are already working on college work. These standardized tests should not matter is students are working on both high school and college work. Tulenko says, “... SAT scores and scores on advanced placement tests lag significantly behind the state as a whole. But, for Dave Wheeler, those are not the numbers that matter most.” This means that Wheeler believes that standardized tests should not matter as much as they seem to be. This is arguably agreeable because since students are already getting college prep so they shouldn’t have to worry about college placement tests to determine whether or not they are “college ready”.

Having workforce training in high school will be helpful to the students because it helps them get prepared before college or even allows them to get started on working on jobs or careers. College does not help students choose their major since they were suppose to come to college knowing what they want to do ever since high school. In the future, education issues should be solved and it is up to the president to help with this.

Sincerely,

Kim D.

Bibliography

Wunderlich, Annelise. "Should More High Schools Offer Workforce Training?" KQED Learning. N.p., 28 Jan. 2016. Web. 03 Nov. 2016.

"Should More Kids Skip College for Workforce Training?" PBS. PBS, n.d. Web. 03 Nov. 2016.

Quinton, Sophie. "Should High Schools Offer More Job Training?" The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 22 Nov. 2013. Web. 03 Nov. 2016.