George Will asks some good questions about the Obama Admnistration’s proposal to link $14.5 billion in federal funding to whether a state certifies their education standards as “college- and career-ready” in this New York Post op-ed. He writes:

But how does one fulfill — or know when one has fulfilled — Obama’s goal of “college and career readiness” for every child by 2020?

That gauzy goal resembles the 1994 goal that by 2000 (when, Congress dreamily decreed, every school “will be free of drugs and violence”) every child would start school “ready to learn.” Is “college and career readiness” one goal or two? Should everybody go to college? Is a college degree equivalent to career — any career? — readiness?

Typically the latter half of the “college- and career-ready” slogan is mumbled and forgotten. Partly this is because it’s easier to measure college-readiness than it is career-readiness. If a student goes directly from high school to college but it slotted into remedial coursework, is unable to attain passing grades, and flunks out, we could not honestly say that student was “ready” for college-level work. But if they go into a career, how do we tell if they were “ready” or not?

In my paper looking at this very topic, I propose some solutions to these thorny questions. To begin with, every state has an Unemployment Insurance (UI) system that collects employment and wage information on every single employee in the state. Several states have paired their dataset of community college graduates with UI data to find the student and state return on investment. These studies have been able to say, with real observed outcomes, that students completing an associate’s degree have higher employment rates and earn more money than those completing only a certificate and especially those who drop out altogether.

A few states have seen the value in making this exact same analysis for their high school graduates, and all states could feasibly do so. This would allow every state to know the employment and wage data for their high school graduates. This is not a perfect measure–it would be better to know if a person was employed in a professional career with a path for growth, benefits, and stability, as opposed to just a temporary job–but it would be better than what we have now. It could also be supplemented with professional certifications, licensures, or other ways of showing the student was on a true career path.

As states start to think about balancing college-readiness versus career-readiness, they must be careful not to encourage high schools to track students into less rigorous, easier routes to completion. When I was creating a new index for Florida, for example, I weighted the college-readiness portion about two and a half times more than the career-readiness portion. I did this for three reasons. One, I think college is important and a viable way for young adults to improve their life prospects. Two, research has shown that employers consider career-ready skills to be strikingly similar to college-readiness.

Three, I chose this particular weighting because it reflected reality. Florida high school graduates are about two and a half times as likely to start college full-time as they are to begin full-time employment. Nearly two-thirds go directly into some form of postsecondary education (public four-year, private four-year, public two-year, etc.) while only about a quarter choose to enter the workforce directly. If a high school sent all their graduates into the workforce, those students would already be well behind their peers. High schools must have accountability incentives to at least match the current reality and, as more students enter college directly from high school (or if a state wants to accelerate this trend), a state should gradually increase the importance of the college-readiness measures in relation to the career-ready ones.

As states continue to adopt “college- and career-ready” standards, they must begin to think through some of the issues in applying those same standards to their accountability systems.