While not as numerous, "gappers," bound for graduate school are following suit.
More than half of the students bound for graduate school were planning to continue in a STEM discipline, and a small number planned on shifting to non-STEM disciplines.
And this year's college-bound graduates will receive $624,000 in scholarship money -- more than double what last year's graduates received.
At Princeton, the 30.4 percent of finance-bound graduates last year pales in comparison to 2006, when a whopping 46 percent of Princeton graduates went into finance.
We're preparing so many students for college, as we should be, but we should also be ensuring that those few non-college-bound graduates are receiving 21st-century vocational training.
About 58 percent of the city's college-bound graduates in 2007 went to CUNY schools; 15 percent went to State University of New York colleges, with the remainder attending private colleges or public colleges out of state.
A questionnaire sent to the six mayoral candidates asked, "What would success with your education agenda look like at the end of your first term?" The responses were mostly campaign boilerplate — fewer dropouts, higher test scores, more college-bound graduates and better classroom technology.
The best gifts to give college-bound graduates come from the heart and help ease their transition to college life.
One of the city's 35 Gates scholars in 2013 was a Fenger student and its number of college-bound graduates has been on the rise.
"I don't know how to describe my current emotional state," Anne Paik, a newly minted high school graduate bound for the University of California, Los Angeles, wrote recently in a post to The Choice.
This may not overtly be the conversation that goes on in a family of a high school graduate bound for college, but it could certainly be going on in their minds.
