Today’s guest post is from Mike Havis from Educatetocareer.org, a non-profit organization with the goal of providing free, online college and career planning tools for high school students and their parents.

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There is a huge problem affecting our young people today – those very people who wish to go out and start making a life for themselves – and do great things for our society.

The problem is evidenced by the massive amount of college graduate unemployment and underemployment – coupled with the absolute crisis of $1.1 trillion in non-performing college student loan debt.  It is hard to find a family in the U.S. that has not been touched by these problems.  I learned all about this myself when my son Ben graduated from Rancho Buena Vista HS (in Vista, CA) in 2008.

My wife and I, along with our son, asked ourselves questions such as:

• Should Ben go for a college degree in the subjects that he likes and is good in?
• Do all college degrees lead to an actual job in that field?
• How much does a college education cost?
• In actuality, which degrees lead to obtaining a real job?

The answers to these questions were not readily at hand, or even easy to find.  The crisis that I referred to stems from poor choices made due to lack of good information + an abundance of misinformation.

This inspired me to create Educate To Career (ETC). We feel that students should make well informed and pragmatic decisions about college and career – based on the reality of what the job market is looking for and the ROI of a college education.  ETC’s tools and programs are very easy to use, and address these issues with real facts and figures.

The innovative CareerBuddy program allows students and parents to apply the student’s personal academic strengths and weaknesses to research college majors for over 6,000 two and four year colleges.  The CareerBuddy program assists users in selecting majors which lead to real careers with good employment opportunities and earnings.  The program is free, easy to navigate and requires no registration by the user.

The information provided includes:

• Recommended colleges
• Recommended careers
• Starting salaries

CareerBuddy, used in conjunction with ETC’s other programs – CollegeBuddy and SalaryBean, enables a student to find all of the pertinent information they require to sensibly plan his or her post high school career and college path – all in one place.

Students have been unable to find the proper tools to assist them in making informed decisions about their future – as evidenced by the over $1 trillion in nonperforming college student-loan debt, coupled with the very high unemployment and underemployment of college graduates.

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Educate To Career was founded to provide high school students with free, online navigator and calculator programs to ultimately guide them to a real career – defined as one in which their education leads to a real job with a good salary.

Educate To Career is the leader in providing information, data, tools and programs in the area of college and career outcomes.