The work that you are doing to expand access to early college is hard, and it’s very important. On behalf of the Harold K.L. Castle Foundation, I want to thank you for doing it.
Here at the Foundation, our statewide education grants aim to ensure that all low-income students graduate high school with the college credits, work-based learning experience, and life skills necessary to secure well-paying jobs in Hawaii. This shift has us working with employers, the UH system, and nearly half of the state’s high schools to fund the design of high-quality career pathways for students and to transform teaching so that learning is more engaging for students and more relevant for employers.
To explain why this is so important, let me ask you to think about three of your freshman, and imagine their lives a decade from now, when they’re 25 or so. Imagine they’ve all married and have two children of preschool age. One lives in a household with $30,000 of income—basically working fulltime at a $15 per hour wage. Another earns $50,000. And a third earns $80,000. Only the last one makes enough to barely make ends meet. Aloha United Way has calculated that the average family of four with two preschool age children needs to earn $77,000 just to cover its five main costs: housing, food, health care, child care, and transportation. And only 52% of Hawaii’s citizens make that much money today.
Early college gives students preparation; work-based learning gives them purpose and the skills that employers want. And both give them confidence. When you combine college AND career at your high schools, you have a powerful force multiplier. I urge you to combine the two. This has never been more important, because with the exponential advances in artificial intelligence, jobs that do NOT require human interaction and the application of judgment will NOT be done by humans that much longer.
I also ask that you continue to focus on the underdogs, the kids who don’t think they’re college material, the ones whose families sometimes run out of money to buy food before the next paycheck comes in, the ones who are headed towards dead-end $30,000 jobs unless you help set them on a different trajectory. You and your fellow teachers and counselors have the opportunity to turn them away from becoming certified nursing assistants and instead steer them towards becoming oncology researchers, to turn them away from becoming carpet layers and instead steer them towards becoming underwater welders. This work that you are doing is not about college; it’s about post-college success.
So think back to those three 15-year-olds who are thinking about enrolling in an early college course next fall. Go find them, push them, love them, and make them believe in themselves enough to go out and get that $80,000 job 10 years from now. And when you do that, take time to quietly celebrate what a difference you are making in their lives. Thank you so much.
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