Washington Monthly - September/October 2022 - 31

He also saved up to buy himself a car-a blue 2004 Honda
Civic EX. He bought his stepdad a heat press machine for their
fledgling custom T-shirt business. And he bought his mom a
manicure nail table so instead of shelling out money to local nail
salons, she could do her nails at home, as well as those of her
family and friends.
At 32 hours a week, the IBM internship essentially made
Illias a breadwinner for his family overnight, even if only for
that summer.
" I never expected this early in my life to be paid that
much, " Gomez told me during an interview in a second-floor
conference room at Emmett J. Conrad High School, located in
the city's Vickery Meadow neighborhood, a densely populated
area that is home to many immigrants and refugees from
around the world.
" That money really helped out, " he said. When his mother,
a building code officer for the city of Dallas, heard how much
his salary was, " she was surprised, because she was like, 'You're
close to making as much as I'm making.' "
Gomez landed his lucrative IBM internship through a program
called P-TECH, which stands for Pathways in Technology
Early College High School. Not only does P-TECH connect
high school students to employment opportunities in promising
fields, it also offers them the chance to take college courses
while in high school and to earn credits toward both-a concept
called dual enrollment. For Gomez it meant that, when he
graduated this past May from Conrad High at the age of 18, he
also had an associate's degree in applied science in interactive
simulation and game technology. He didn't have to pay a dime.
His mother was so inspired by Illias's example that she decided
to go back to college herself.
Dual enrollment is one of the most encouraging trends
in higher education. Such programs have been shown to boost
college attendance and reduce the time it takes for students to
earn postsecondary degrees and vocational certificates. One of
the abiding problems, however, is that students of color and
from lower-income families tend to be underrepresented. Historically,
dual enrollees have typically been whiter, wealthier,
and already high achievers academically.
What makes P-TECH different is that, as a nonselective
program, it serves lower-income minority students, many of
whom weren't doing well in school-like Gomez. The program
does that in various innovative ways: by giving the high school
students a new identity as college students capable of doing college
work, by providing them with jobs in a field they're passionate
about, and by connecting them with businesses in
search of an educated workforce.
The success P-TECH has shown with students like Gomez
has helped it spread rapidly-from a single school in Brooklyn,
where it was launched in 2011, to 210 today throughout the
United States (and many others in several countries, from Morocco
to Singapore to Australia).
But that growth pales in comparison to the potential interest.
There are more than 21,000 public high schools in the
United States, meaning that only about 1 percent of America's
high schools have the program. Even in Dallas, where 18 high
schools participate in P-TECH, demand far outstrips supply. At
Conrad High, for instance, there were twice as many applicants
as there are spots at the school in the fall of 2022.
One limiting factor, not surprisingly, is cost. High schools
and colleges foot the bill for administering the program, and
employers have to be persuaded to see the value in student interns'
work enough to come up with the money for their salaries.
For the program to become available to all students, a
national-level investment would help tremendously.
T
he program's first school, known simply as P-TECH
High School, launched in 2011 in Brooklyn as a collaboration
between IBM, the New York City Department
of Education, and the City University of New York (CUNY).
It was the brainchild of Stanley Litow, then an executive
at IBM, who designed P-TECH as a special education project
for the company. Litow says he wanted to help improve
students' lifetime earnings and to address the " skills gap " -
There are more than 21,000
public high schools in the
United States, and only
about 1 percent of them
offer the P-TECH program.
A national-level investment
could help spread it.
that is, the gulf between available jobs that require certain
skills and the people who have the education necessary to
fill those jobs.
" Those who go into the workforce with a postsecondary
degree will earn $1 million more over their lives than those with
only a high school diploma, " Litow says, using an oft-cited statistic
about the value of a college degree.
From the beginning, Litow aimed to create a model that
could be broadly replicated everywhere. Seeing that some similar
programs had limited their own growth by restricting admissions
to high-achieving students, Litow decided to avoid
that pitfall with P-TECH. " For that reason we resisted suggestions
to restrict admissions to only the highest-achieving students
and made admissions open to all, " Litow told me recently.
" Had that not been done, its success would have been marginalized
because it only worked for high achievers. "
In fall 2011, 104 students dual enrolled at P-TECH High in
Brooklyn and the New York City College of Technology, better
known as City Tech, which is part of CUNY. Among those students,
16 became the first to take a college course in summer
2012. They took math and computer science classes and worked
Washington Monthly 31
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