Wanted: Soft skills for today’s jobs

Educating high school students for both college and career is difficult. Teaching trade skills seems alien to the academic culture. But new research indicates that soft skills are quite important to judgments of employability and that youth learn many soft skills in traditional academic subjects (e.g., literature). A focus on soft skills allows schools to reframe how they think about the relationship among education, academic curriculum, and employment. Such a reframing will help black youth get jobs and will be valuable whether students go to college or not.