Education policy in the United States is currently in a moment of flux, captured in the shift in postsecondary policy prescriptions from preparing students for an academic future (i.e. “college for all”) to preparing them for a vocational one (e.g. the “skills economy”). This paper builds on recent efforts to challenge this dichotomy (e.g. Groeger 2021; Shelton 2023), replacing the traditional academic/vocational dichotomy with a portrait of career education drawn by the US Office of Career Education in the 1970s. For American policymakers, the seventies was a decade shaped by uncertainty as the US economy faltered, inflation rates surged, and unemployment rose in spite of years of growing investment in education. While some called for a “back to basics” approach to academics and others demanded deeper investment in what was then termed Vocational Education to prepare students for the trades, the newly founded Office of Career Education (OCE) advocated for a third way that resisted easy categorization into academic or vocational frameworks. Theirs was an approach inspired by the era’s burgeoning Career Education Movement, which endeavored to foster a deeper relationship between youth and work (Clark 1992). Under the tenure of its director, Kenneth Hoyt, from 1974 to 1981 the OCE offered an alternative vision of education and development rooted less in the work of economists like Gary Becker, which conceived of young people as vessels for human capital, and more influenced by psychologist Paul Baltes’s work on life-span developmental psychology, which saw youth as navigating a series of life stages through which work would be one of many motifs. As this paper explores, the publications produced by OCE addressed the insecurities of the 1970s by advocating for a holistic approach to career education that asked not only how the individual fit into the workforce, but how work fit into the life of the individual. This vision is relevant today as US policymakers once again call for a “back to basics” approach to education on the one hand and a redoubling of investment in workforce development on the other in search of greater social efficiency. Reclaiming this alternative vision of schooling provides not only a more nuanced definition of a career distinct from current American Career and Technical Education (CTE), but helps point the way out—for both historians and policymakers – of our current rigid binaries about the aims of schooling.

Baltes, P. B., Reese, H., & Lipsitt, L. 1980. Life-span developmental psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 31, 65–110. Becker, G. S. 1983. Human capital: A theoretical and empirical analysis, with special reference to education (2nd ed., Midway reprint). University of Chicago Press. Clark, D. 1992. Improving workforce preparation: Lessons from the career education movement. NAIEC Newsletter. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED349437.pdf Groeger, C. V. 2021. The education trap: Schools and the remaking of inequality in Boston. Harvard University Press. Labaree, D. 1997. Public goods, private goods: The American struggle over educational goals. American Educational Research Journal, 34(1), 39–81. Malkus, N. 2019. The evolution of career and technical education: 1982–2013. American Enterprise Institute. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED596295.pdf