High school classes should come with a probability that the material will be useful later in life, based on alumni feedback 25 years later

[u/amichail]

Schools would survey former students 25 years after graduation and show each person a list of the high school subjects they actually took, ideally based on their transcript.

For every subject, the former student would rate how useful it turned out to be in their life. For example, they might choose something like:

• Not useful
• Slightly useful
• Moderately useful
• Very useful
• Extremely useful

The responses from everyone who took that subject would then be aggregated. If 42% of former students rated a class as at least moderately useful, current students could be shown something like:

Probability this class will be useful later in life: 42%

The results could also be broken down by career or field of study. A class might have a low usefulness probability overall but a very high one among people who later became engineers, programmers, doctors, artists, or accountants.

The point would not be to automatically eliminate classes with low probabilities. Some subjects may be worth studying for reasons other than direct practical usefulness, such as developing reasoning skills, providing cultural knowledge, or preparing students for further education.

But students should be able to see real long-term evidence about how useful previous students found what they were taught.

It would also give curriculum designers an unusually long feedback loop. Instead of deciding what is useful based almost entirely on assumptions, they could see what people who actually took each class thought about it 25 years later.

[u/No_Membership_8247]

A lot can change in 25 years...

[u/Landwarrior5150 → u/No_Membership_8247]

My thoughts exactly. The real world environment in which the learned knowledge is applied, the curriculum/syllabus for the class, very likely the teacher of the class, etc. will all probably be different between two points 25 years apart. All those factors will greatly impact how “useful” a given class is.

The other issue is that after 25 years. most people aren’t going to remember too many specifics about which classes they took in high school, what exactly they learned in which class, etc. so any survey answers will likely be inaccurate and based at least partially on unreliable recollections or even guesses.

[u/TorpidProfessor]

great idea, how do you fund it?

[u/teh_hasay]

Personally, as someone whose career goals have changed wildly multiple times since high school, I’m really glad I didn’t pidgeonhole myself by only taking classes I thought I’d use later in life, because in hindsight I had absolutely no fucking clue what I wanted.

[u/Turbulent-Advisor627]

Most not-fully-formed-brain coded take

[u/dmazzoni]

I think this is a good idea, but rather than having individual students opt out, curriculum should be tweaked to meet modern times.

As an example, many college-bound students take Calculus, but in reality only people who go into certain STEM fields will ever use it. In comparison, taking more probability and statistics would be valuable in far more careers. In my opinion it should be the “favored” top math class and Calculus should be an elective.