Vocational training is on the rise as firms pair with high schools

 Businesses are searching hidden corners of the population to find people with skills they need, especially as the jobless rate, at 3.9%, is near lows rarely seen in the past half-century.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, for some companies that means looking beyond college graduates toward high-school students who might grow into jobs in plants, fisheries and elsewhere.
For example, Coventry High School in Rhode Island established its welding program after Electric Boat, one of the state’s largest employers, declared it was looking to hire 14,000 new employees in the next decade.

The company wasn’t finding enough recruits coming out of college. So it turned to high schools—where students can be discovered early, and the training is free.
Such direct ties between big companies and local high schools are multiplying. Such programs, especially with area chemical plants, have been in place with high schools across the Baton Rouge metro area for years.
Volkswagen is helping schools in Tennessee modernize their engineering programs; Tesla is partnering with Nevada schools on an advanced manufacturing curriculum; and fisheries in Louisiana have created courses for students to train for jobs in “sustainability.”
The renewed popularity of so-called career education programs marks a shift away from the idea that all students should get a liberal-arts education designed to prepare them for college, a pattern that traces back to 1983, when President Ronald Reagan created a commission to study why American schools were failing to fill so many Cold War-era technical jobs. Its report, titled “A Nation at Risk,” concluded that not enough students were being prepared for college and urged high schools to raise their academic standards, eliminating many vocational programs in the process.

But schools are once more deciding it is worth intervening in the lives of students who might not have the academic prowess, or the financial footing, to pursue bachelor’s degrees, and instead equip them with skills for steady employment.
Nationally, the number of high-school students concentrating in career education has risen 22% over the past decade, to 3.6 million.
Read the full story.