Getting Hungry After High School

 I’ve been a little discouraged lately. Despite my best efforts, I’ve struggled to get many of my seniors to look past graduation. I have my share of students who have completed their college applications and are excited about the next stage of their journey, but I also have many students that just don’t seem interested in taking action to plan for the next step. I’ve tried to take different angles in talking to them about the importance of earning a skill and have put a plethora of opportunities in front of them to engage in creating a meaningful career. I could list everything I’ve tried, but I’d quickly run out of room here.

            For now, many of my seniors just seem content in their “high school” job and a long-held suspicion of mine is only strengthened. That is many high school students simply need to spend a little time in the real world and get hungry before they develop the spark that is required to drive them to something more. To be clear, I mean hungry in the figurative sense rather than the literal one, though a small dose of food insecurity can probably speed up the process a bit. 

            These young people just need to get out in the real world and experience some harsh realities. They need to understand that things like utility bills and insurance are all things that no one wants to pay but that most adults have to pay. They need to see with their own eyes that it’s just really hard to make it in the real world with their high school job and that they’re probably going to need to pursue something else to be comfortable.

            There’s a problem though. Once seniors graduate, their lives change significantly. They establish a new lifestyle and their parents and society have new “adult” expectations of them. The students get comfortable in their new lifestyle and they might start acquiring new things (kids, cars, apartments, etc.) that require additional hours at work to pay for. They become dependent on their “high school” job to cover the costs of these things, and they grow crippled in their ability to put their new lifestyle down–to walk away from it–and go back to school to develop a skill. A difficult cycle begins that is challenging to break out of.

            To combat this, parents and other influential adults have a perilously thin line to walk. These young people need to feel uncomfortable in their circumstances after graduation while simultaneously knowing they have the support network in place to do something more. For many students, that support network might have been most apparent while they were at school. Unfortunately, we’ve developed a system where that really washes away on graduation day, but maybe that’s a topic for another day.

            For those who do have such a network, we need to ensure these students know they’re allowed to take some time off from school following graduation, but it doesn’t mean they can’t go back later. They need to know that there are mechanisms in place that will enable them to pick their pursuit of a meaningful skill later and the sooner they start that process, the better they’ll be for it.