In a nation where only about half of high school students go on to 4-year postsecondary institutions, vocational-technical education plays a critical role in preparing thousands of people for their first work experience and in retraining thousands more to take full advantage of new job opportunities. As part of the educational reform movement of…

The U.S. work force is unready for the new jobs, unready for the new realities, unready for the new challenges of the 1990s. Across the board, jobs are demanding better reading, writing, and reasoning skills and more math and science. Statistics define the scope of the problem: 25 percent of young people drop out of high school; 70 percent of all…