THIS EPISODE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY GREENAGERS Greenagers runs employment and education programs designed to support youth, environment, and community all at once. Conservation, Agriculture, and Trades training programs pay youth ages 14-24 to build trails, grow food, and build and repair local infrastructure. All programs are educational, by paying youth for this work we ensure young people have summer work options that feel meaningful and can lead to future opportunities. And the work done by Greenagers youth crew members is high quality - improved trails, nutritious food, fine building techniques. Greenagers is hiring now for this summers Trails, Farm, and Build Crews. Apply here! PLEASE RATE AND REVIEW US ON APPLE PODCASTS SHOWNOTES: May 19th story in the New York Times on how deportations have impacted the construction industry, and how no Americans are applying to take the available jobs. SHEELA’S PAST WRITINGS ON THE SUBJECT OF VOCATIONAL EDUCATION AND SUCCESS Link to Sheela’s FAQs piece on The Berkshire Edge, in 2023. Link to Sheela’s June, 2025 piece on the Center for Educational Progress Sheela’s letter to the Atlantic editor from 2025. Sheela’s letter to the New Yorker from 2016 A college degree cannot be the only option that we, as a nation, value. Atul Gawande notes that the seventy per cent of Americans who lack a college degree have been forsaken. That’s because we’ve created a college-for-all culture, where alternatives to “professional” work are not respected or encouraged, instead of supporting programs that would give high schoolers vocational paths strategically aligned with both evolving and steady workforce needs. College for all has resulted in an inadequate education for most. We’ve boosted high-school-graduation rates at the expense of rigor, resulting in sixty-eight per cent of community-college students requiring remedial classes, and most of them dropping out. Meanwhile, all over the country we have aging plumbers earning a good living, with few prepared to take their places. The path to the American dream needs to be rerouted. Sheela’s letter to the editor of the New York Times, April 6, 2019 To the Editor: I read the story on the early days of affirmative action at Columbia mindful of the recent cheating scandal that laid bare the myth of merit as the primary factor in admission to elite higher education. I’m left thinking that the street musician and Columbia dropout Les Goodson does not deserve to be held up as the exemplar of what went wrong with affirmative action, while his classmates the corporate lawyer, neurologist and financial officer are understood to be the successes. We should not use earning power and professional badges to judge a life. Mr. Goodson’s neat apartment is adorned with his own artwork. Hegets to play music weekly with his own band and daily on his own terms. I know a fair number of “successful” professionals who dream of that sort of freedom. While we’re smashing the sacred cow of elite higher education, let’s also revisit our cruelly limiting ideas about who gets to be called a success. Sheela Clary Sheela’s letter to the New York Times on March 10, 2018 To the Editor: Nakesha’s story was written compellingly and with great compassion. I was especially touched by all the kind people who befriended and brought her gifts over the years. But something disconcerted me. What if, rather than Williams College, she’d attended Berkshire Community College, an excellent but unfamous and less selective school, whose campus is about half an hour south of Williams? Was she a “bright light” by virtue of her humanity, or by virtue of her association with Williams, which accepts about one out of five applicants? If so, what does that say about us, the tiny minority of elite-educated Americans, that you need to scratch our competitive itch in order to get us to pay attention to the story of a homeless New Yorker? SHEELA CLARYHOUSATONIC, MASS. Get full access to The Village Green News at thevillagegreennews.substack.com/subscribe
