BY FROSTY TROY

In a recent opinion piece in U.S. News & World Report, reporter Richard Whitmire recounts a pleasant exchange with a college-educated employee at a car rental office, underscoring the new reality in American education.

It’s not news that a bachelor’s degree has supplanted a high school diploma as a requirement for good jobs, but Whitmire contends it’s not that jobs are more complex. High schools no longer supply the skills to multitask and communicate with customers.

Whether your bank teller has a high school degree or a PhD says much about international competitiveness and our economic survival, which is what high school students should care about.

Politicians have been slow to grasp the need to push education beyond high school – far beyond the somewhat esoteric “international competitiveness” issue that think-tankers extol.

All the best solutions focus on dangling bankable job skills before high school graduates who don’t see themselves as college material.

This demographic is overwhelmingly male, and remains “oblivious” to the “college-is-the-new-high-school” reality.

In Oklahoma we’re still short of college graduates but CareerTech is doing a marvelous job when it comes to high paying jobs not requiring a college degree.

– Frosty Troy is Founding Editor of The Oklahoma Observer