Career TRUTHS: After High School —: An Honest Look at College, Careers and Life Graduation

The decision after high school is the biggest one most families make together. The advice is everywhere. The facts are not.Follow your passion. Get the degree. The trades are what you do if college doesn't work out. Your son or daughter hears all of it, usually from people who mean well.Career TRUTHS: After High School is an honest, research-backed guide to the years between eighth grade and the first real decision. It takes college seriously, because a bachelor's degree still pays on average. It takes the trades just as seriously, because for some students that is the better answer. It does not tell you which one is yours. It gives you what you need to work that out together.What's inside: - The Passion Trap. Why "follow your passion" is a difficult place to start, and what Stanford's research on how interests really form found instead. - The College Default. College still pays on average. But more than a quarter of bachelor's programs leave graduates no better off, and that average hides an enormous range. - The Four-Year Track. What colleges really weigh, drawn from a survey of 185 admissions offices. The return of the SAT and ACT. Why the published cost is not what families pay. - The Trade Track. What the work really pays, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The four ways in, and six questions to ask any program before you pay it a dollar. - A chapter for parents. There are two ways to get this wrong, and most of us only worry about one of them. - A guest chapter from Stephen J. Henning, Managing Partner of Wood Smith Henning & Berman LLP, on how a college essay is written years before anyone sits down to type it. - Year-by-year checklists from eighth grade through senior year, plus a parent's progress checklist that marks who owns what. The numbers stay current. QR codes throughout link to a free companion site where the wage tables, testing policies and cost figures are updated as new federal data is released. A printed table goes stale. This one does not.Straight talk, real exercises, no hype. Written by James E. Willett, who spent more than three decades hiring, mentoring and promoting people, and who raised two sons through this same decision.For students in grades 8 through 12, for the parents walking beside them, and for the counselors who have this conversation all year.