The Houston Chronicle reports that Georgia is considering “making its high schools more like college.” Students would choose what kind of career they wanted to pursue, and then take a cluster of courses that would prepare them to either enter a job or go to a two- or four-year college. Juniors and seniors would complete an internship in the field they chose, and all students would be able to switch clusters if they decided to change direction.

The proposal leaves me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, I applaud its focus on what high school graduates want to do: that the purpose is not just to get kids to graduate from high school, but to leave them prepared for whatever they want to pursue next. We encourage schools and school boards to track how well high school students are prepared for the real world in questions like this at Data First.

On the other hand, the stated assumption that this would replace the “that every student wanted to go to college” bothers me. While I don’t think every job needs college, so much of our research shows that whether a student enters a good job or a good college after high school, they need the same preparation. (You can watch this short video to get an overview. ) While the article states that all students will graduate eligible for college, is there a possibility of this degenerating into a tracking system?

Finally, the question of whether students could, or should, choose a career path that early remains. I agree with Mike Buck, chief academic officer at the Georgia Department of Education, about the strong draw of relevance. “The kids hanging in there until they turn 16 where school may not have always been a lot of fun for them, we get them on a job site where they see how they’re going to apply this,” says Buck. At the same time, Donnie Malone, a Georgia high school senior, pointed out that two years ago he would have picked pre-med but now wants to go into political science or international affairs. Changing majors in college can significantly delay a students’ graduation; would changing career clusters do the same thing?

How would you balance all of these concerns? How would you combine relevance with rigor? And, right now, how do you make sure your students are prepared for a real-world career? –Rebecca St. Andrie