Many people would argue the opposite, the high school is already far too focused on college preparation and a lot of people are just not interested in college.

Many people would argue the opposite, the high school is already far too focused on college preparation and a lot of people are just not interested in college. A generation or two ago there were a lot of trade classes in high school, and it was possible to come out of high school with a “specialization” in some thing like pipe fitting or welding they were walking right into a local industrial career. Now that’s all gone for the sake of college prep, and kids who would be great pipe fitters end up as burger flippers. I once has a conversation with the (then) Mayor of Texas City, Texas who lamented this exact change and said the city had a big program to recruit and visa sponsor pipe fitters out of Vietnam to sustain the local industries because the local schools no longer taught the needed skills. These were apparently great middle class jobs with high wages and benefits (although I’m taking him at his word, I don’t know if it’s true). My personal take is that high school tries to be a one size fits all model, which actually just makes it a waste of time for everyone. It would be a big improvement if we could let people branch out a lot more starting around age 14 or so. Then perhaps it would make sense, if you knew you wanted to do computer science, you could go to a CS oriented high school and in two years do all the pre-requisite work for a CS bachelors degree and head off to college, or something like that. Mainly though, I think this doesn’t happen because most people need the high school to be in their neighborhood or close by. Kids can’t drive until they’re 16, And even then they are terrible drivers and probably shouldn’t be driving until they’re 18 or 21. But this is America and if you can’t drive you really can’t be an adult, so there’s no way that you can go to the specialty school 45 minutes away. And I don’t think very many parents want to send their young teenage children away to boarding school.