Obviously, the counterargument here is the largely touted maxim that people with college degrees make more money than those without them, which is statistically true. But this idea is misleading: Crushing student-loan debt increases yearly and ethnicity, class, and gender factor into salary levels, regardless of education. And low-income kids can become “targets for diploma mills that load them up with debt, but not a lot of prospects.” Additionally, the average American worker will spend 90,000 to 125,000 hours working during the course of a lifetime, as Bill Burnett and Dave Evans write in Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, so the greatest portion of a person’s life is often spent at work. Although it is easy to proclaim to students coming of age that “you will make more money if you get a degree,” it is much more difficult to shed light on the intricacies of such a claim. I believe students should hear the whole story and more than one traditional path should be laid out before them.

While in high school in the late ‘70s, my dad took every shop class his school offered. He spent hours hanging out with the shop teacher (a man with whom he still visits occasionally), working on projects at home with his own carpenter dad, and losing himself in sawdust and splinters. Because it was the ‘70s and things were quite different then, a guidance counselor advised him to go ahead and drop out of school since he’d taken all the shop he could—“There’s nothing else we can do for you here,” the counselor had said, according to my dad. So that’s exactly what my dad did: He dropped out, joined the army, and, years of sweat and toil later, he continues to work as a carpenter today. And for the most part, he is happy doing it. But he will be the first to say that he wishes he had gone to college and that going to college would have made his life easier overall. Maybe it would have, but I wonder what would have happened if rather than telling my dad that there was nothing left for him in traditional education, his educators had recognized his passion and his individual needs as a learner, and offered him options beyond dropping out, the military, and college.

I see students who disengage from school because they believe that what they are learning doesn’t relate to who they are or what they want to be—or worse, they are tracked by the system into programs that appear to be for their benefit but actually perpetuate an unspoken bias, and are sometimes for the benefit of universities, businesses, and government agencies. In Kentucky and other states around the U.S., dual-credit programs and community-college initiatives receive quite a bit of attention, and although I am not suggesting that these programs are unnecessary, I do believe it is important to be intentional in the creation and execution of such initiatives to avoid perpetuating biases and tracking students onto paths that do not empower them to capitalize on their strengths. While many states and policymakers are increasingly promoting post-graduation alternatives to college, many of these efforts are half-baked or seemingly based on the premise that such alternatives are for students who aren't good enough to go to college. A blind acceptance of the same old story can unintentionally invalidate the experiences of truly exceptional young people. Why should students have to go to college to find ways to be good at what they love? And why should what they love not sync in authentic, empowering ways with what they do in high school?