For too long, the pathway from graduating high school to starting a good career has been filled with an overabundance of complexity, and more than a little elitism.

For multiple generations, the prevailing thought (at least one projected through popular media) was that “successful” kids went to college before entering the workforce. Everyone else – the less academically achieving, the trouble-makers, the ones with “less potential” – they would forgo college to immediately begin laboring in the lesser category of jobs known only as “the trades.”

For your child to become a plumber, a contractor, a pipefitter, a welder, et cetera, was like admitting they couldn’t be “more,” that they lacked ambition or any other number of derogatory assumptions based on the reality that they didn’t wind up sitting in an office somewhere doing white-collar work.

It was not until a generation of kids who went through college only to find themselves in a similar place as they were before college – unemployed, uncertain what their true passion was, what they could do with their new, ludicrously expensive degree – or competing for a finite number of jobs in brutally competitive fields – that we started to realize the error in this generalized way of thinking.

Thankfully, Rhode Island has been atoning for this monumental mistake at an advancing rate for the past decade. Hundreds of career and technical education (CTE) programs have started up in schools all throughout the state, giving kids the opportunity to explore dozens of different possible career pathways that lead directly to certifications, apprenticeships, or directly into jobs with tangible upward mobility immediately upon graduating.

As we covered in a recent story where more than 200 recent high school graduates were welcomed into the professional world by state officials and executives from General Dynamics and Electric Boat, there already exists one example in Rhode Island where an industry giant actually relies on this pool of talent coming from our high schools to fill their talent rosters.

We shouldn’t rest on the laurels of this success. While Electric Boat is a great place to land for any student who enjoys industrial trades, and while it helps bolster our national defense at a time of growing international uncertainty, we can’t help but wonder why there aren’t more “Electric Boat-type” graduating ceremonies in the state.

Imagine having five more partners with the same level of commitment. Imagine if cybersecurity, green energy and other forms of advanced manufacturing all had similar pipelines ready for young people. What kind of economy could we build then?

State leaders should be proud of the connection forged between high schools and Electric Boat, but they should also be eager to find the next Electric Boats and bring them to Rhode Island – companies that have a place for eager, hard-working and intelligent Rhode Islanders to begin working directly after graduation. We would all benefit from those opportunities.