Reach NC Voices is powering a survey for the myFutureNC Commission. The Commission is looking for help to bridge the gap between education and economic opportunity. (Fill out the survey, which takes seven minutes, and you could be one of five participants selected to receive a $100 Amazon gift card!)

When looking at the myFutureNC survey, we realized there are many educational paths to economic opportunity, including vocational, two-year, four-year, and graduate degrees. With this topic in mind, Reach NC Voices asked North Carolinians for their opinion in our April 19 Reach Roundup newsletter. We posed our Question of the Week: “Do you think it is necessary to continue your education after high school?” Response options included: necessary to get my ideal job, necessary to get a job, not necessary to get a job, or unsure.

Here’s the breakdown of how participants answered our question as well as some of the comments we received.

“The less effective our public schools become in preparing students for the world after high school, the more important post-high school education & training becomes.”
Christina from Wake Forest

“There are less entry level jobs in manufacturing, textiles or industry now than there were 20-30 years ago that someone with a high school diploma could work after high school. Most of the current day jobs are technical and skilled positions that require some post high school education to make a living wage.”
Linda from Raleigh

“Until a quality vocational/technical curriculum is reintroduced to K-12 education some post high school education is going to be required. You could learn the basic skills necessary to become an electricians helper or a brick masons helper and go on from that to a journeyman position with skills learned in a public school vocational education curriculum 40 years ago — not now.”
Keith from Goldsboro

“A study by Georgetown University reports that by 2020, 65% of all jobs in the US will require some post secondary education.”
Marci from Clemmons

“I teach my students that you will need further training but it can look a variety of ways — community college, university, graduate school, trade/technical school, job sponsored training or the military. No longer is a high school diploma enough to support a family.”
Shelley from Fayetteville

Interested in participating in Reach NC Voices? You can sign up to share your thoughts on our weekly questions. We’d love to hear from you!

Yasmin Bendaas

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Yasmin Bendaas is a Science writer.  A North Carolina native, she received her master’s degree in Science & Medical Journalism at UNC Chapel Hill, where she was a Park Fellow. She received her Bachelor of Arts in anthropology in 2013 from Wake Forest University, where she double-minored in journalism and Middle East and South Asia studies. As an undergraduate student, Bendaas gained insight into public health when she interned at the Kate B. Reynolds Charitable Trust, a statewide grantmaker focused on rural health, including access to primary care, diabetes, community-centered prevention, and mental health and substance abuse. 

As a journalist, Bendaas has been funded twice by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for fieldwork in Algeria — first to cover a disappearing indigenous tattoo tradition, and again to look at how climate change affects rural sheepherding practices.