BUTLER TWP — Are high schools too focused on funneling kids into four-year colleges?

That’s the question school administrators and educators from around the region asked during a meeting at Butler County Vocational-Technical School on Thursday.

Regardless of how they answered that question, most of them agreed on one thing: High schools, trade schools and colleges need to do a better job of helping students figure out what their strengths are, and how to parlay their strengths into professional success.

Part of the battle is simply getting children to understand that learning and training won’t stop once they cease being called students.

“Training is going to be a constant part of any student’s journey,” said Tony Miller, the assistant director of Mercer County Career Center, a vocational and technical training school that serves students from 12 school districts.

Miller said he’d like to see school districts explore different ways of awarding high school students academic credit for their achievements. He sees Career Center students performing complex math and other high-level operations every day. But that kind of proficiency is often overlooked and goes unrewarded because it isn’t easily quantifiable in test form.

“I don’t think we can look at academics as a separate pathway,” he said. “It’s all one. Tech-ed now is not your mom and dad’s Vo-Tech. It’s intense, and these kids rise to the occasion.”

Tyler Vargo, the principal of Knoch Middle School, said standardized testing and other structural issues within public education have given rise to complex problems that are hamstringing districts’ ability to adequately prepare students for what comes after K-12 education.

Grade inflation — the tendency to award higher grades for work that in the past wouldn’t have received such marks — and a focus on high graduation rates rather than student preparedness and proficiency are doing students a disservice in the long run, he said.

“That diploma’s supposed to stand for college and career-ready skills,” he said. “There’s a lot of moving parts and we’re trying to take steps. But in education it’s like trying to maneuver an aircraft carrier.”

Many educators in attendance Thursday said state-mandated metrics for student achievement, like the Keystone exams, are part of the problem. They tighten already-challenging time constraints for teachers and enforce a teach-to-the-test mentality that discourages exploration and experimentation among students.

The tension between rural and urban school districts in Pennsylvania is a well-worn battleground in debates over school funding and whether the state’s complement of 500 districts is sustainable. But Michael Milanovich, the principal of Lawrence County Career and Technical Center, said it’s also an underappreciated factor that influences how students envision their lives progressing after school.

“These regional factors have an influence on what your needs and desires are,” said Milanovich. “If you grow up around doctors and lawyers, you might want to be a doctor or lawyer. If you grow up driving by tractors every day, your ideas may be different.”

But the disconnect between those nuances and a broadly-painted national narrative that equates college education with professional and financial success can muddy the waters for many students.

That has led to a spike in college enrollment during the past four decades that many observers, including John Rindy, the director of Slippery Rock University’s Office of Career Education, believe is unsustainable and leaves many students saddled with unnecessary debt and, ultimately, underemployed. Part of the onus for changing that falls on high school counselors, Rindy said, who need to do more to help students realize there are many paths to professional success.

“The goal they (students) ought to be setting is to understand themselves and realize that plans change,” Rindy said. “Students aren’t unprepared. They’re uninspired.”

Rindy believes one of the most powerful tools available to schools is the community that surrounds them.

Because home life can be such a big factor in how decisions about students’ education and career paths get made, he said, it’s up to the institutions — from public school districts and technical schools to colleges and universities — to encourage partnerships with businesses and professionals in their communities. That can help give young people access to career education programs and start exploring what they want to do with their lives before taking what amounts to an expensive leap of faith and enrolling in college.

“Because we are badly understaffed in education and badly underfunded overall, we need to harness the power of home,” Rindy said.

That’s been a portion of the vo-tech’s focus with a series of meetings that started in May, said Regina Hiller, the school’s principal.

They’ve used meetings about the school’s 339 Plan — a state mandate requiring districts to have a “comprehensive and integrated” K-12 guidance plan — to bring together business leaders, school administrators and post-secondary institutions from across Butler County.

Those meetings are expected to continue at least through May of this year, and she hopes to build the kind of community partnerships Rindy calls essential to improving students’ decision-making when it comes to college, technical training and their careers.

“More opportunities for students — that’s what everybody wants,” Hiller said.