By Jon Mettus
Editor-in-Chief

In the United States the value of a college diploma has been declining, though the cost of a collegiate education is skyrocketing. While it’s great that everyone can pursue their education and go to college, the college diploma now has become equivalent to what a high school diploma was worth in the past.

College degrees don’t guarantee employment anymore and those who decide to stop their educations are pretty much on their own.

In many countries in Europe the schooling system works like this: in their last year of high school, students take a rigorous test which they have to score well on to be allowed to attend a university. The other students spend two years in vocational schools, training schools, or enter the workforce to get practical experience in the fields they want to enter.

All across the United States, students should be allowed to graduate in tenth grade. America should have a system modeled after the European countries, which outperform it on international tests.

In a February 2010 article in The Times Magazine, Walter Kirn, who graduated high school a year early, wrote that “if senior year were to vanish from our high schools…what might happen is that the education process, if it was shortened and compressed some, might help kids think more clearly about their paths in life and set out on them on the right foot instead of waiting to shape up later on.”

Letting students graduate in tenth grade would allow them to immerse themselves in the occupational field they would like to see themselves in the future. They would get training and hands-on experience rather than just reading about it in a classroom.

The result of this would be a more trained workforce. With two less years of schooling the high school dropout rate would be reduced as well.

According to a November 2008 Time Magazine article by Kathleen Kingsbury, New Hampshire’s plan to give students tests to see if they can graduate in tenth grade “is expected to guarantee higher competency in core school subjects, lower dropout rates and free up millions of education dollars. Students may take the exams — which are modeled on existing AP or International Baccalaureate tests — as many times as they need to pass. Or those who want to go to a prestigious university may stay and finish the final two years, taking a second, more difficult set of exams senior year.”

Two years of community college would benefit students more than the last two years of high school because their teachers would be more specified in the subject they are teaching.

Those who graduate after four years of high school should be able to go to esteemed universities and earn law degrees, doctorates, etc. This would put value back into the American college diploma and increase its stature.