Giving Compass' Take:

• Michael Horn and Bob Moesta discuss their new book, Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life, and how in the world we live in - college isn't always the smartest option. 

• A key takeaway from their research is that K­–12 schools are not doing nearly enough to help students build passions and discover who they are. How can leaders in education and administrators help career readiness?

• States vary in defining college and career readiness metrics. Click here to read more. 

To students for whom going to college would be something they are doing primarily to satisfy someone else’s expectations for them or to get away from a bad circumstance, a four-year college is often not the right next step.

That’s the daunting conclusion for many in the education world that we reach in our new book, Choosing College: How to Make Better Learning Decisions Throughout Your Life.

Students who enrolled in college because they felt it was expected of them ended up dropping out or transferring 74 percent of the time, our research revealed. More than half of the students we interviewed who chose college to get away from something else in their lives had left the institution they were attending without a degree at the time we interviewed them.

In a world of low college tuition and low opportunity cost, that might be acceptable, but that is not today’s world.

Students who take out loans but don’t complete college are often worse off than if they had never enrolled in the first place. Americans in this camp have a tiny bump in wages over those with only a high school diploma, but both groups have the same unemployment rates. And the debt they assume — even if it sounds modest — is likely to require a significant chunk of their earnings to pay off.

Read the full article about when college isn't the next step by Michael Horn and Bob Moesta at The Hechinger Report.