Help Wanted:Postsecondary Education and Training Required

These are the major trends: the rise of the global knowledge economy; the slow and painful demise of the American blue-collar economy in which workers, mostly white males,earned good wages with a high school education or less: welfare reform and the emergence of "work first" as and  the guiding principle in social policy: and a society where men,women,andyouth are fully mobilized at work.

The notion that some kind of postsecondary education and training has become the threshold requirement for middle-class earnings and status has not been lost on the American public. More than two- thirds of Americans go on to postsecondary education or training after high school, although only 34 percent of students in eighth grade will later go on to get a degree from a two-year or four-year school. Access to college has become the essential goal for k-12 education. Middle-class employability is now the penultimate standard for k -16 educational adequacy (authors' calculations using data from National Center for Education Statistics, 1988, and CPS Utilities,2007).