I hear so often about how one organization or another wants to make it easier to go to college, because that's how you make the economy better... ok, valid point, sending people to college makes things better for everyone -- the government gets more tax dollars, they get a less soul-crushing job with better pay, and the economy gets a more productive citizen. Everyone wins!
Everyone, that is, except the people who graduated high school but, for whatever reason, didn't go to college -- financial concerns, not wanting to, et cetera. There are perfectly legitimate reasons to not attend college, seriously.
The problem comes from the fact that a job that, 25 years ago, was doable with a diploma, now requires a college degree. It's not because anything about the job has changed, really, it's because the education system here has fallen apart so far that a certificate that used to mean you could be assured of knowing how to multiply numbers and how to construct a sentence now means "can graduate high school". Thing is, graduating high school is a pretty useless accomplishment any more; it's been dumbed down so much by parents who demand Little Johnny Johnson get to graduate even though he failed every class, people who figure "Aw hell I ain't never gonna need no English teacher" and then pass that sort of mentality down, and by administrators who just want to get the numbers up, that it's effectively worthless as a means of improving one's life.
It wouldn't cost much to actually fix our secondary education system. Most of the issues are issues of priority, not of having what's needed.
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