This is a desk, not a blog.

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The argument I keep making: a kid gets sorted into a lane somewhere around 14 years old — often by a single test score, sometimes by whichever parent showed up to the scheduling meeting — and that lane quietly decides which doors are still open at 18.

Nobody designed it that way. It’s just what happens when the schedule has to be built in March and nobody has time to ask the kid what they want.

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I’m not anti-college. I’m against college being presented as the only respectable exit from high school, which is roughly how it was presented to me and is still how it gets presented to most kids I talk to.

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Every version of this conversation goes better once there’s a real list on the table: employer, role, what it pays, what it takes to get in. This note is where that list goes.

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Two numbers, honestly sourced, sitting next to each other. This is the note that has to be right — it’s the one people will screenshot.

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Profile slot for a program, employer, or teacher around here who is already doing something creative. Name them, link them, say what makes it work.

Placeholder note. Replace this body before launch.

The cheapest intervention I can think of: two paid weeks inside a real business, at 16, before anyone has to commit to anything. You learn more about whether you want a trade in ten days on a job than in four years of being told about it.