Unprepared

High schools in the United States don’t provide enough real-life skills to help students post-graduation. A Gallup poll conducted in August 2024 revealed that 49% of Gen Z students (500 kids surveyed) don’t feel high school prepares them enough for the future. 

The question comes down to why these kids are unprepared, but when you look at the classes high schools offer, there’s a clear answer. Only 6,000 of the 26,727 high schools (public and private) provide access to at least one home economics course. 

Home economics classes provide insight into family finances, budgeting, maintenance, infant care, cooking, and many other life lessons necessary for one’s future. Without schools providing access to these classes, many students graduate high school unprepared for the “real world” causing students' understanding of basic, everyday things to constantly decline. 

While things like cooking and budgeting may seem small, these skills help shape one’s life. For example, if someone doesn’t know how to cook, they eat out often. At the same time, as they lack culinary skills, they’re compromising their health by not understanding the lack of nutrition when eating out. They’re failing to budget their money with the constant spending on high-sodium, low-nutritious value food. 

This year alone, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released data showing that 143,789 teenagers (aged 15-19) had given birth to a child. This shows the importance of developing care for infants while still in school. 

Basic home maintenance is taught in some home economics classes. These skills include basic plumbing and electrical work, including understanding valves, breakers, outlets, light switches, piping, water leaks, etc. The skill set many people once held is beginning to shift to calling plumbers and electricians for simple maintenance. This also directly affects one’s budgeting skills because maintenance is very unplanned, and they end up paying a certified worker to come out and fix basic things around their house. Paying someone for home repair quickly becomes super expensive. 

These real-life skills not only help students take care of their own lives but can also help them develop ideas about what they may want to do after they graduate. Exposure to nutrition/food preparation, interior design, clothing design, consumer issues, woodworking, drywall, etc can help inspire careers for students who are unsure of what they want to do.

There needs to be a shift back in time; pulling home economics back and reshaping learning in the everyday classroom.