Is every teenager cut out for college?
Is it blasphemy to ask?
These days, we no longer teach kids, we produce highly skilled employees who can meet the demands of the 21st century. Our kids aren’t learning, they’re competing with India and China.
Or so I’ve heard.
Frankly, if you’re thinking about Chinese economic development when you send your Shrek-lunchbox-lugging third-grader to school, you really must seek help.
Clearly, recent CSAP results illustrate stagnation among some kids in the basic skills of reading, writing and math. It’s inexcusable. But so is sifting all Colorado kids into the same educational pipeline from preschool to “grade 20.”
Gov. Bill Ritter has convened something called the P-20 Education Council (if only Colorado were as good at teaching children as it is at naming blue-ribbon commissions) to help place students on Colorado’s “educational highway.”
An individual teen may want to jump off at an early exit. For some Colorado kids, college doesn’t match up with their skill sets or desires. And there’s nothing dishonorable about pointing it out.
Les Lindauer, executive director of the Emily Griffith Opportunity School in Denver, is the ideal person to advocate for the vocational schools. He signed up as an ironworker apprentice in 1971 rather than going to college because he felt “no real direction.” By 1974 he had become a skilled craftsman.
During the next 20 years, Lindauer bought a house, raised a family and made a heck of a lot more money than his brother, who had earned a doctorate and taught for years in the Denver schools system.
In his later 30s, Lindauer decided to go back to school – as many vocational graduates do – and finished a degree in teaching and later got his masters. He is now a dissertation away from his own doctorate.
“I do believe there is a stigma attached to vocational programs,” Lindauer explains. “It’s one of the things we all have to overcome. We have to look at things a little differently. What’s more important? College or a vocation? Well, neither is more important than the other. The most important thing is that kids become productive citizens. It’s wrong for us to think that the answer is always in a ‘conventional’ college degree. For some kids, it’s not.”
The trend over the past 10 years, according to numerous people I spoke with, has been to cut high-school woodshop and auto-mechanics courses, which has discouraged kids from working with their hands.
That is a shame. Colorado vocational-school administrators claim that 90 percent of students who graduate their programs find jobs. Often, making awfully good dough.
“A plumber or an electrician – once they are of a level of mastery – can earn from $30-50 an hour sometimes,” Marla Rodriguez, a spokesperson for the Emily Griffith Opportunity School, tells me. “Historically, things like tradesmen and nurses are high-paying fields. It’s also true that the baby boomers have left many of those positions and are retiring and not a lot of young people are taking their places. So the pay has increased.”
Lindauer contends that certificate-program graduates will often exceed college graduates in pay because the training is more rigorous. An electrician, for instance, goes through five years of preparation.
“We need doctors but we’re going to need plenty of auto mechanics, pipe fitters, plumbers, graphic artists, electricians. … Those jobs will stay in the United States forever,” he explains. “Those types of jobs can never be outsourced.”
The latest numbers show that enrollment in technical and vocational schools jumped from 9.6 million in 1999 to 15.1 million in 2004, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Lindauer hopes that these sorts of trends help allay misconceptions among educators and parents.
“I’ve met a lot of highly educated people the past 20 years, and I can tell you one thing that’s true: The most intelligent people I’ve ever been around I met on a construction site,” Lindauer explains.
And who are we to say kids wouldn’t be happier working on a construction site than in a cubicle in a glass office building?
One is no more worthy than the other.
David Harsanyi’s column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 303-954-1255 or dharsanyi@denverpost.com.
