WATERLOO - A new push is under way to get students thinking about and preparing for careers from their first day of high school.

Waterloo Community Schools and Hawkeye Community College last month signed sharing agreements to create "career pathways" in the fields of teaching and information technology.

This fall, students beginning in ninth grade at Waterloo's high schools will be able to take exploratory classes in those areas.

The pathways outline recommended high school courses for those interested in the career fields. By junior and senior year, students will be able to take some pertinent first-year HCC classes to receive dual high school and college credit. Students who choose a pathway are not locked into that career field if they change their mind later because the specific classes also will generally prepare them for college.

"The concept here is to give students success while they're in high school that they can do college work," said Russ Clark, the school district's career and technical education coordinator.

Sixty-eight percent of Waterloo's 2005 graduates told the district they planned to attend college. But Clark believes many students who talk about going to college never enroll.

Of those who do, a significant portion drop out - especially at community colleges. Nationally, the two-year college retention rate was 55 percent as of 2002, according to statistics complied by the Education Commission of the States.

Many of those students may not have been adequately prepared for college during high school.

The National Center for Education Statistics found that 61 percent of high school seniors who graduated in 1992 and first attended a two-year college over the next eight years completed at least one remedial course.

"We need to make high school so that (it is) helping the students point toward the future," said Clark. "It's not a matter of helping students march across the stage for graduation. …. Our goal is to prepare them for where they're going next."

"We've already been doing this with the career academies," said Linda Allen, HCC's vice president of academic affairs. "But what we really want to do is partner with the schools and reach back to ninth grade."

The region's high school juniors and seniors have been enrolling in HCC's career academies for manufacturing since 2000 and nursing since 2003. The academies include paid internships and college credit courses that give students an early start on an associate's degree in those fields.

Allen said those academies will become part of manufacturing and medical careers pathways in future years.

"They're focusing on the junior or senior," she said. "But the reality is kids need to start planning earlier, so they're academically prepared to go to college."

Students who follow a particular pathway also would have the technical preparation to go right into the work force if they choose not to get a college education after high school.

National effort started

The pathways approach is being developed nationally by the College and Career Technical Initiative consortium, which HCC joined this spring. Project director Larry Warford said the federally funded initiative was started more than three years ago by the League for Innovation in the Community College to create "a coherent, articulated sequence of both rigorous academic and career courses beginning in ninth grade" that lead to an occupational area. A total of 150 community colleges in 40 states and two provinces of Canada are now involved, including five in Iowa.

Organizers are "looking to improve student success and looking to improve transitions from high school to college to jobs," added Warford. The initiative focuses on 16 career clusters, some of which include doctors and lawyers.

Clark said Waterloo's high schools had more than 600 requests for dual-enrollment classes related to the information technology and teaching pathways for next year, although there was not room for all of the students.

"That was double what I was expecting," he said.

Clark is satisfied that the dual-credit classes will be as rigorous as their counterparts taught at HCC. He cited comparative studies of dual-credit courses done by North Iowa Area Community College in Mason City.

President Mike Morrison said NIACC has done 13 studies in recent years that compared dual-credit and regular college courses that had the same textbooks and requirements. In 12 of the studies, the high schoolers' performances were "at least comparable" to the college students.

"They tend to be highly motivated, higher ACT scores, academically gifted students," Morrison said. "So it's not surprising that they do very well on the college level courses."

Allen said only certain high school students will be allowed to take the dual-credit courses.

"The high schools need to certify to us - guarantee to us - that these students are competent, are qualified to take a college course," she said. "You won't put your D students in there."

Officials hailed the pathways approach as a major educational shift from previous decades.

"This is huge," said Clark. "This is taking us out of the paradigm that we were in in education through the last 30, 40 years."

He said the effect will be increased rigor of class work and a better understanding by students of its relevance.

"We are really calling this the start of the next major community college movement," said Warford. He noted there was a time when community colleges wanted to distance themselves from high schools, but this initiative is changing that.

"We've all come to realize we've been writing and talking about high school reform for years and we've been writing and talking about college success for years," said Warford.

"High school reform and college success go hand-in-hand."

Contact Andrew Wind at (319) 291-1507 or andrew.wind@wcfcourier.com.