I took my degree in CS while I was working (lots of sleepless nights and ill prepared exams) and just because I didn't want to preclude myself from the opportunity of working for some big company with antiquated requirements.
Meanwhile Running Start gets you your 2 year degree by the time you graduate, so 2 years less debt, and 2 years ahead of everybody else. The trade school had game programming classes, automotive, electronics classes... which were things I was actually interested in learning at the time and were not remotely available at the HS itself.
But if you do either of those two things, the high school loses and FTE count, and the money gets diverted to the other school. So the HS tends to hardly tell anybody about them. Not to mention, they made the trade school seem like a place where delinquents go who can't handle high school and get into college. Looking back, I wish I had known more about the trade school, because there were so many more interesting classes there!
https://www.forbes.com/sites/prestoncooper2/2017/01/17/obama...
People have been saying this for decades, but is it still really a thing? Perhaps on the coasts? If you're in a small or mid-sized city in the midwest or the south, it's almost exactly the opposite...
More than anything that’s why students go to college (source: college students).
While you don't have to have a degree to get into tech, having one certainly makes things easier
For most people this routing when they are 10 (or so) decides what routes are open to them later in life. There are exceptions to this (my host sister went to Realschule, and later took the Abiture, the the test that got her into college), but they are pretty rare.
I have always been a bit leery of choices made so early in life, but it works pretty well in Germany.
There is also the Gesamtschule, which combines the three tracks (Hauptschule, Realschule, Gymnasium) into a single school.
This is in North Rhine-Westphalia.
If for whatever reason the demographics at each track are not the same as those of the nation it will get called racist and shut down quick.
It's only the pseudo-social scientists who can't do proper data analysis (finding out the real confounding variable) that push the college propaganda
