More high school grads should go to work, not to college 

The corridors of power may or may not be paved with good intentions, but they are definitely paved with unintended consequences. 

The grand-daddy of all boneheaded policies was the decision made decades ago that all kids should go to college — and that Uncle Sam should lend unlimited funds to every high school graduate seeking an advanced degree. That lending was more or less indiscriminate, not governed by students’ abilities or by whether investing taxpayer funds in a given field of study would prove economically worthwhile.

Today, U.S. taxpayers are on the hook for $1.7 trillion in student loans owed by nearly 43 million borrowers, many of whom have pursued studies that in no way prepared them to earn a living. At the end of last year, nearly 11 percent of outstanding federal student loan debt was in default — that’s almost 9 million borrowers. According to the Education Data Initiative, 42 percent of students with loans “have had to choose between making student loan payments and paying for basic needs.”

Can anyone judge this a success?

The staggering amount of student debt, which has crippled an entire generation, is only one symptom of our education establishment’s folly. Another is that we have not been training kids to fend for themselves, resulting in a dire shortage of skilled workers. 

Beginning in the late 1800s and continuing through much of the past century, public high schools taught useful skills, offering vocational training or “shop” classes for boys. Funding (and encouragement) for these studies was provided in part by the federal government though the Smith-Hughes Vocational Education Act, passed in 1917. Legislators doubled down on that support in 1963. President Lyndon B. Johnson celebrated the 50-year anniversary of those programs, noting that during that........

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