Let’s say a prototypical U.S. graduating class has one hundred students.

Of that hundred, sixty-seven enroll directly into a two- or four-year college. (Source: National Center for Education Statistics)

Of the sixty-seven who do enroll, only forty-eight will make it into their second year of college (whether at the same institution or a different one)… the rest drop out. (Source: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center via NPR; computation mine)

Of those forty-eight who make it into year two, only twenty-eight will have earned a degree even six years after enrolling in college. (Source: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center Persistence and Retention; computation mine)

That’s worth repeating:

Of the one hundred graduating seniors in that prototypical class, only twenty-eight will statistically have earned a college degree within six years of leaving high school.

There are a multiple ways to interpret this.

On one hand, we could indict the K-12 school system for not preparing kids to persevere in the post-secondary education system.

On the other hand, we might consider that the personal and economic costs of college eventually prove too great to justify staying in a pay-to-participate post-secondary ed program. Maybe the promised benefits don’t seem to outweigh the experienced costs.

I suppose there are other hands, too. Maybe the job market is just so fantastic that people are being drawn out of college directly into lucrative careers (maybe but probably not). Maybe these people were abducted by aliens or married into rich family or achieved twitch.tv prosperity.

It continues to be true that data for people in the 25-34 year old demographic clearly shows that more education…even some college without an earned degree…statistically results in higher rates of employment. (Data: 86% employment for those with a B.A. or higher, 79% for those with some college but no B.A., and 72% for those with only a diploma; the employment rate for high school dropouts in this age range was 59%; Source.)

And we know that education nowadays is all about being data driven. Yes, a degree is related to a higher likelihood of employment; that is logical. The employment rate is higher and the salaries are higher, but so is the debt and its increasingly disastrous impacts on all of us, in case you haven’t heard.

But there is also more and more data about our country’s growing need for employees in skilled trades. With a swelling bubble of retirements from skilled professions, there is rapidly increasing demand for plumbers, electricians, welders, and the kind of hands-on intelligence that literally builds our world but is considered “the fall back option” by our K-12 system.

What if we look at the data telling us of those rapidly growing opportunities?

What if we prioritize the data telling us that 72 of our 100 graduates will not have a college degree within six years of leaving high school? What are we morally obligated to do to prepare those 72 for their future with as much effort as we do paving a college path for the other 28?

Public schools are immense systems that change direction neither on nor without a dime. Moving from our often vocationally-focused high schools of the mid-20th century (think metal shop, family and consumer science, etc.) to our soft-skills-centric college-focused school model of the late 20th-century was a relatively easy shift for an economic reason: a school set of textbooks (or even chromebooks in the 2010s) is less expensive than equipping and operating a variety of vocational lab-based skills shops and specialized facilities. We thought we were thinking ahead by teaching coding on iPads in the 2010s, and surely we were. Bigger than that though, the cheap price tag required when you spend all your class time teaching kids to sit in rows, take notes, and passively rehearse “what they’ll expect you to do in a college class” is well suited to the factory model of low-cost college-prep public education. Funding a lecture is cheaper than funding a materials lab.

And sure, we can quote all the standards adopted in the last decade or so that touted “college and career ready.” A list of standards doesn’t pay for industrial kitchens for teaching food science or vehicle lifts for teaching automotive repair. Where we’ve invested our money makes pretty clear which “careers” we’re not concerned about preparing kids for, even if we’ve adopted standards with that word in boldface font.

If schools are thinking ahead in the 2020s, we need to augment our “college track” with a real and significant investment into infrastructure, materials, and training that gets kids ready for the path the data suggests they’ll actually walk.

Our system is designed from top to bottom for the 28 out of our 100 who eventually end up with a four-year degree. What are we doing for the other 72?