I don't know why so many people think everyone should be "college ready". Why is the College Board so upset that only 43% are college ready? (I question if a 1550 is college ready, as that means when DD16 was in 7th grade, she was ready.) Try looking back about 50 years and see how many folks had college degrees - about 10%. College is supposed to be for higher learning, not to get a useless degree in something that ends in "Studies".
I think the everyone-must-go-to-college mania is a symptom of a larger problem, which the loss of good jobs for skilled people not holding degrees. We have a gap in this country, with a large pool of low-wage unskilled jobs on one end and high-wage highly-skilled jobs on the other. The middle section has been shrinking for a long time.
Even the unskilled jobs aren't what they used to be. A very large seller of clothing had a factory in a town where my family lived for a long time. For many years, the regular factory-floor employees did
very well there. The company had a profit-sharing/retirement plan that put money into retirement accounts every month. The employees all earned living wages and retired well. None of that is true these days, and that same factory nickel and dimes its employees (but not the executives). The same is true for other factories in that town (the ones that are still there, anyway).
I think that a lot of people are just stuck. They can't get the jobs their parents or grandparents got 30 or 40 years ago, because those jobs either don't exist anymore or they pay lousy wages. The high schools are teaching less vocational ed., and employers expect people to come to work pre-trained. So they're really forced into college. It's awful.
