By Jay Mathews
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 19, 2007 10:12 AM

We are in the midst of a heated national debate over whether or not high schools should try to prepare all students for college. I say yes, but I acknowledge that the no side has a good argument: Since at least a third of high schoolers don't want to go to college, why not train them for the job market instead?

The suggestion makes sense, until you look carefully at what it takes to get a good job after high school these days. Those of us who support the college-for-all approach are marking up the latest "Diplomas Count" report from Education Week -- "Ready for What? Preparing Students for College, Careers, and Life After High School" available at edweek.org -- and waving it in front of our friends on the college-not-for-all side. It shows that the latest data are running in our favor.

The Ed Week team, led by Editorial Projects in Education Research Center director Christopher B. Swanson and managing editor for special projects Lynn Olson, sum up their conclusion in one sentence: "Today's high school graduates are entering a world in which they'll need at least some college to gain access to decent-paying careers."

Ed Week combined two national data bases to show the educations and salaries of workers in five different job zones, defined by education, training and experience requirements. In Job Zone 3, where the median annual income is $35,672 nationally, 63 percent of job holders -- such as electricians, funeral directors and legal secretaries -- have some college education, including 26 percent who have a bachelor's degree. The next step up, Job Zone 4 (such as teachers, accountants and detectives) with a median annual income of $50,552, has 89 percent of job holders with some college, including 68 percent with a bachelor's degree. Job Zone 5, including lawyers, engineers and school psychologists, has a median income of $59,113 and only 7 percent without some college or a bachelor's degree.

In zone 2, median income $24,461, which includes retail sales clerks, sheet metal works and customer service representatives, 46 percent of job holders have some college, including 12 percent with bachelor's degrees. In zone 1, median income $12,638, including waiters, cashiers and taxi drivers, 31 percent have some college including 7 percent with bachelor's degrees.

Career and technical education programs in high school "can reduce high school dropout rates and increase short- and medium-term earnings for students," the report says. But if high schools are going to have any chance of preparing students for decent jobs in a market where college-level skills are increasingly necessary, they have to increase academic rigor, forge stronger links to local labor markets and high-demand, high-skill jobs and make better connections to postsecondary education "so that students have the option of going directly into the workplace or continuing with their formal education," the report says.

In other words, a high school that does not do everything it can to prepare for college those students who do not want to go to college is putting them at risk of spending the rest of their lives unable to support themselves and their families adequately and depriving them of the tools they need to go on to college if, as often happens with maturing adolescents, they change their minds.

Much of this debate is distorted, I think, by the century-old notion that readying a student for college means they must take calculus, Shakespeare, physics, European history and French 5. The vast majority of college graduates today never had a high school schedule like that. The Ed Week reports lists qualities that employers seek in high school graduates they might hire that are, not surprisingly, exactly the same traits that will guarantee your admission to college and strengthen your chances of graduating: "Able to work comfortably with people from other cultures, solve problems creatively, write and speak well, think in a multidisciplinary way, and evaluate information critically," as well as "be punctual, dependable, and industrious."

Wouldn't it be wonderful if our high schools focused on building all those habits and skills in every student? One of the reasons I harp so regularly on the importance of encouraging even average and below-average students to take at least one college-level course in high school is that those courses -- with long final exams that demand critical thinking -- are the best tools high schools have for encouraging good writing, creative problem solving and dependable work habits. They work for both the students who are going to college and the students who are not. If high schools gave everyone that kind of education, we would not have to demand, as many members of the college-not-for-all crowd want to do, that 15-year-old sophomores make the life-changing decision to be on the college track, or not.

One of the great things about Ed Week (bias alert: I am on its board of directors) is that every issue not only has lots of interesting information, but something that makes readers like me mad, and forces us to think. In this report, the role of agent provocateur is played by James E. Rosenbaum, professor of sociology, education and social policy and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University.

Rosenbaum knows his stuff and has many good ideas. He wants high school vocational courses to put more emphasis on soft skills, such as punctuality and politeness, handling conflicts, communicating key information to colleagues and supervisors, analyzing work tasks and problem solving. He suggests employers make regular visits to schools so they can motivate students and critique the vocational courses. But he seems to have a blind spot about the power of big dreams when talking to teenagers.

He cites an Educational Testing Service study suggesting that only about 40 percent of society's jobs require what he calls "college skills," even if, as the Ed Week job zone data show, many people in those jobs have been to college. I think Rosenbaum's summary distorts the complex June 2006 ETS report, "High School Reform and Work: Facing Labor Market Realities," by Paul E. Barton. But I will leave that argument for another time and get to the parts of Rosenbaum's piece that vexed me.

Here are some of his more irksome sentences, inspired by his reading of the ETS study: "Aiming to prepare 100 percent of students for the 40 percent of society's jobs that require college skills makes good politics, but bad economics, and it will create a lot of disappointment." Or: "Simply offering [low-achieving students] 'college for all' dreams and delusions--especially given their 80 percent likelihood of dropping out of college with few or no credits--may be the wrong way to go. They may need something that differs from raised standards and traditional approaches to instruction."

The many high school educators I know who have been successful in preparing low-achieving students for college and good jobs would say two things about Rosenbaum's widely accepted but deeply wrong-headed pessimism:

First, he is ignoring the power of the college myth in American society, particularly in low-income communities. Of course not all students are going to go to college and succeed there, but the dream of college has led many students struggling in school to work hard on the soft skills and study habits Rosenbaum so smartly promotes, and eventually get their degrees. The new book "Passing the Torch," by Paul Attewell and David E. Lavin, reviewed in my June 5 column, shows that many of these students take many years to fulfill that dream, but it keeps them going. Their college degrees, even if they take 10 years to earn, help those students get jobs that not only change their lives, but the lives of their children.

Second, if we are not going to try to sell the college dream to all students, how and when do we decide which ones to keep on the college track and which ones to shift into something less ambitious? (Rosenbaum raises my ire even higher by suggesting this is the humane approach, saving those low-achieving students "a lot of disappointment." I would like to see some research on these allegedly disappointed students, since the ones I have interviewed who tried and failed to get a degree still realize that they have many more opportunities in the job market than their high school friends who never tried college at all.)

I shared my concerns with Rosenbaum, and he got right back to me. "You distort my position," he said. "Do you really feel happy leaving large numbers of students with no back-up options if they fail at college? All students can attend college, and they know it. Eighty percent of high school graduates already do. Is that sufficient? . . . I think we all should worry about ONLY pointing these students toward college, without giving them the social skills, work habits, and job skills that would give them other options, in case they need them. . . . All students can benefit from these soft skills, so you don't have to decide people's fate."

So he and I actually agree. He doesn't say these soft skills are the most important college skills, but they sure sound like that to me. And he wants all high school students get them, which puts him on the prepare-everyone-for-college, right beside me.

I suspect I misread him because he did not have enough space to make the depth and sophistication of his views clear. I know the feeling. But I fear that some people may misuse what he has written to back up the still entrenched view that some kids will benefit from the college track, and others won't.

We already know what would happen if we decided to talk college to just our high-achieving students. The designated non-college students would understand rather quickly that they were rejects, not entitled to the great teachers and challenging projects offered to their college-bound friends. We know this is how it would work because this is precisely what most high schools have been doing for nearly a century. Even today, only a relatively few schools attempt to sell the college dream to every student and open up college level courses to anyone who wants to a chance to work hard for a better future.

I can give you the names of several successful adults who were told in high school they were just not college material. The bile still rises in their throats when they talk about it. The great truth is that, although most inner-city kids will not get college degrees, educators lack the soothsaying skills to predict accurately which of those students would do well in college and which would not.

We can, of course, do what we have always done: Let their test scores be our guide. But would you want to be the person who tells a future general or cabinet officer or CEO that he should give up on college because he got a low score on the state English test in eighth grade? I wouldn't, and I am happy to discover, neither would Professor Rosenbaum. Score one for our side.