Jones: NYC is putting students on a promising path to careers

As I was riding the subway the other day, I looked up and saw an ad for a proprietary technical college. The ad was plainly targeting young New Yorkers who have finished high school without any concrete job skills.

According to the ad, their only hope of starting a career anytime soon was to enroll in this expensive program.

We are already starting to reflect on how New York City has changed in the 12 years of Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration. One development that may receive little notice is the progress the city has made in improving and expanding career and technical education, or CTE, programs in public high schools.

Not long ago, these programs and schools were part of a second-class system of vocational education, populated by students for whom we had the lowest of expectations. Such an environment hid the value that career-oriented programming can have on students, both in providing them with hands-on skills to obtain jobs directly after graduating, and in inspiring them with tangible understanding of how attending college can help them build the skills for a specific career.

In 2008, Bloomberg convened a commission to reform CTE programs and schools, and I took part. After some slow initial progress, reform and expansion have begun in earnest. Twenty new CTE schools have opened since 2009, including seven this year. They are earning accolades and being used as models elsewhere in New York and in other states. P-Tech, a technology-oriented school in Brooklyn, was even mentioned in President Barack Obama's most recent State of the Union address.

It's my hope that this progress will help disabuse some policy-makers of their fears that supporting career-oriented programs could be interpreted as not having high expectations for all students.

There is, in fact, widespread public support for career and technical programs: 94 percent of respondents support expanding them at the high school level, according to a survey of New Yorkers by the Community Service Society. The next mayor should continue these efforts so that our students have more options to develop their interests and start on the paths to exciting careers that pay decent wages.

David R. Jones is the president and chief executive of the Community Service Society, a nonprofit that fights poverty in NYC.