3. Graduates--What’s Next?

I watched the Lebron James-Barack Obama graduation ceremony. It was good, and the students themselves, from schools across the country, were impressive: the first generation valedictorian, the young man who spoke in his native Spanish, the singers….

And now these folks have to figure out what to do next—and how to do it. Some are admitted to college but don’t know whether it will be online, like the last half of their senior year was; some think they will defer admission, wait for things to settle, find a job if they can; others weren’t there, and are maybe stewing in their parent’s homes, wondering what the H is next!

I’ve read that students who enter the job market in a down time never catch up, that the 2008-09 high school and college graduates will, at least on the average, have less satisfying jobs and make less money than students who had the good fortune to be born at the right time and go to work when the economy was booming.

The federal government and some state governments are working hard right now to keep parents and families afloat. One can argue with how the money is being spent, but we can all agree that the sums are substantial.

So what if some of those substantial amounts went to hiring new graduates and keeping a bunch of the rest in school? If we need 300,000 contact tracers, why don’t we hire 20,000 or 30,000 new college grads to train and supervise 300,000 new high school grads to do the work? A CCC program for the time.

And why not make this the time to change k-12 education (which was once 1-8, and then 1-12 before it was k-12) to k-14 education and just make two years of community college free to all who qualify!

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