How One Chicago High School Built a Pipeline That Sends Graduates Directly to Six-Figure Trade Jobs

On Chicago’s South Side, the area around Sarah E. Goode STEM Academy doesn’t immediately seem to be changing. Check-cashing windows and bail-bond stores are located on the same block. At seven in the morning, a fast-food restaurant on the corner is booming. However, something feels genuinely different when you enter this shiny, relatively new building; it is quietly purposeful rather than performatively hopeful like school reform announcements frequently do.

This group of children is not referred to as students. We refer to them as innovators. And they’re not holding a diploma and an ambiguous promise when they leave six years later. They are entering a workplace.

The starting salary for that IBM-backed position is up to $40,000. That figure is significant to an adolescent from a community where economic mobility is more of a myth than a reality. It goes beyond a salary. This life is different.

The school uses a model known as P-TECH, or Pathways in Technology Early College High School, which was first created by IBM, the City University of New York, and the New York City Department of Education. Its structure—students spend six years rather than four and graduate with both an associate’s degree and a high school diploma—makes it unusual, even radical by American educational standards. It turns out that extra time makes all the difference.

It’s difficult to ignore the fact that this school’s entire architecture is based on the straightforward question, “What does a kid actually need to get a good job?” and then built backward from there.

When the school first opened, Stanley Litow, IBM’s vice president of corporate citizenship, delivered orientation speeches to incoming ninth graders that sound more like business pitches than pep talks. He expresses gratitude to the children for selecting the school. He informs them that IBM genuinely cares about their success.

When he says, “We need people who look like you, sound like you, live like you,” the room, which is primarily made up of Black teenagers who have never been informed that corporate America is waiting for them, usually erupts in cheers. It’s still unclear if that moment will live up to expectations. However, it appears that the intention is genuine.

The model’s link to City Colleges of Chicago, which has established what it refers to as “discipline-specific pathways” for students to earn college credits while still in high school, lends it structural credibility. The design is specifically described by Shavon Taylor-Booker, associate vice chancellor of Early College Programming at CCC: Model pathways prepare students for careers in IT, construction, advanced manufacturing, and health sciences, while Jump Start pathways offer 15-credit-hour certificates. These are not electives. They are intentional sequences that are constructed with a real job as their ultimate goal in mind.

It’s easy to underestimate the larger context of all of this. A four-year degree is not necessary for about 30 million jobs nationwide that pay an average of $55,000 per year. While their college-enrolled peers are still choosing their majors, ironworkers in Seattle are earning over $60,000. Across the country, 70% of construction firms struggle to find enough skilled labor.

Nearly two-thirds of all job openings in the United States in recent years, according to the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, require some postsecondary education, though not necessarily a bachelor’s. One of the more significant structural issues in American life is the discrepancy between what the economy requires and what high schools are teaching students.

However, for many years, the advice was essentially the same: attend college and earn a four-year degree. That advice carried a great deal of cultural weight. When someone suggested alternatives, parents who recalled the stigma associated with traditional vocational education—shop class as a slow track, a subtle indication that a child wasn’t college material—strongly objected.

Trade education has a long-standing branding issue. “They remember ‘voc-ed,'” a CTE advocate said. A generation of students have lost out on opportunities and real money because of that memory.

Theoretically, Sarah E. Goode is an intentional attempt to break that pattern without substituting one inflexible track for another. There is no entrance exam required by the school. There is no ability screening for students.

Many will be the first in their family to complete high school, much less obtain a college degree. They won’t receive a consolation prize from the program for failing to get into a four-year institution. It’s providing them with something perhaps more valuable: a well-defined, encouraged route to financial security prior to turning 20.

The model might not scale well. Harvard scholars, Chinese officials, and a sitting US president all paid visits to the Brooklyn school that invented P-TECH, but even that degree of attention doesn’t guarantee a national movement that can be replicated. There are legitimate concerns about funding. Additionally, there is a real conflict that is difficult to resolve between increasing access to trades education and the concern that minority and low-income students will be forced into blue-collar jobs while their more affluent peers will be encouraged to pursue four-year degrees.

Dual enrollment is moving “from an equity barrier to an equity builder,” according to Amy Williams of the National Alliance of Concurrent Enrollment Partnerships. However, this change necessitates careful consideration of who ends up in which room.

Even so, it’s hard to disagree with the fundamental reasoning after seeing what’s been constructed at Sarah E. Goode. With an associate’s degree, a credential, and a job offer, a graduate has choices. actual ones. That’s more than the typical model has consistently produced.

This school’s pipeline, which runs through City Colleges of Chicago and connects a South Side neighborhood to IBM’s workforce needs while being strengthened by federal and local education partnerships, isn’t a perfect solution. However, getting a child from ninth grade to a six-figure trade career without drowning them in debt seems much more like common sense than an experiment in a city where less than two-thirds of high school students graduate in some districts.