As fewer young people choose college, this district wants to ensure they have career options
by Ariel Gilreath, The Hechinger Report
July 30, 2026
NIAGARA FALLS, N.Y. — For the last year, Niagara Falls High School senior Ciara Johnson has ripped up tile, torn out walls and built custom cabinets in her high school construction class. To get a taste of each of the trades, the students here have been renovating the former cafeteria kitchen in the old high school campus downtown, a once bustling area now marked by vacant storefronts.
Ideally, the seniors will graduate this summer and get a job or, like Johnson, enroll in a trade school that will lead to a career. In a community where fewer students are enrolling in college, the construction class presents a slate of opportunities that don’t require a degree. It wasn’t until her class poured and paved hundreds of pounds of concrete to build a pavilion in a local park her junior year that Johnson realized she enjoyed the meditative nature of working with cement.
“It just clicked to me: ‘Maybe I should do this,’” Johnson said.
At Niagara Falls High School, students are encouraged to consider their careers upon arrival in ninth grade. By 11th grade, every student at the school must pick from one of five pathways, ranging from business and finance to design and engineering. The shift toward career education comes as about one-third of seniors at Niagara Falls High are rejecting college and instead choosing to enter the workforce after graduation, compared with roughly a quarter a decade ago, said Superintendent Mark Laurrie, who retired in June. In a town that’s struggled with population declines, where now-shuttered manufacturing plants once dominated the local labor market, there’s an urgency to prepare high school students for careers.
“It’s important to give them hope for the future with a career pathway — a career, not a job — to have something to aspire to and, hopefully, keep them in the city and in the state,” Laurrie said.
Across the country, a growing number of communities are contending with population declines, driven, in part, by dropping birth rates and tighter restrictions on immigration. More than half of all counties in the U.S. lost population from 2010 to 2020. Enrollment in higher education, too, has sunk nationally, down about 1.5 million students since 2010 as the cost of tuition has risen and more families question the value of a college degree.
The students graduating from college now are also entering a difficult labor market, spurred by uncertainty around tariffs, inflation and how artificial intelligence might disrupt jobs. In communities where population is trending down, there’s an added pressure for schools to better prepare students to leave high school able to enter the workforce, said Emily Passias, deputy executive director of Advance CTE, a nonprofit that represents state career and technical education leaders.
“There are a lot of communities across the country where the local opportunities for great jobs are evolving,” Passias said. “We see a lot of communities trying to very intentionally look at their labor market conditions,” she added, “and prepare young people for those types of roles.”
At Niagara Falls High, that means every class is tailored to a career, such as English 435, “Writing for the Workforce,” or a class where students study science through the lens of natural disasters and public policy. Electives, too, all serve a larger purpose at the school: Students interested in law school or law enforcement might take a new elective course called “Street Law.”
“If we understand that not every kid is geared for college, that makes the high school experience and below all the more important,” Laurrie said.
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Niagara Falls, a community defined by its natural wonders, attracts millions of tourists each year to view waterfalls that rank among the largest by volume in the world. More than 3,100 tons of water plunge over the cliffs each second in Niagara Falls State Park, the oldest state park in America.
As manufacturing plants have closed and jobs have shifted over the past seven decades, the waterfalls are steadfast. Hospitality and tourism has eclipsed manufacturing as the largest industry, said Dawn Cody, senior employment and training coordinator for Niagara County.
That shift has had consequences for the community, which was hit hard when tourism plummeted during the pandemic. Last year, tense relations between the U.S. and Canada led to a 21 percent drop in border crossings from Canada into New York, or about 3.4 million fewer tourists than normal. The Niagara Falls USA Visitor Center said visits were down 27 percent.
The dramatic drop in immigration could also have consequences not only in Niagara Falls, but in the broader Western New York region, said Timothy Glass, a state labor market analyst for the area. Buffalo, which sits about 20 miles south of Niagara Falls, reversed a 70-year population decline on the 2020 Census because of immigration into the city. With immigration in the U.S. dropping drastically more recently, it’s unclear whether that trend will continue.
“Buffalo has been increasing in population and steady in unemployment; Niagara Falls, however, has still struggled,” Glass said.
While the Canadian side of Niagara Falls has been growing its population, the number of residents on the American side has been cut in half over the last 60 years, from more than 100,000 people in 1960 to fewer than 50,000 residents today. The decline of manufacturing plants stems from many companies moving production overseas, where costs are lower, Glass said. Fewer employment opportunities is a major reason many families in the town moved elsewhere to find jobs.
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Niagara Falls High principal Bryan Rotella grew up a few blocks off Pine Avenue, a downtown neighborhood affectionately known as Little Italy for the lively restaurants and stores that once lined it. He’s witnessed much of Niagara Falls’ changing landscape.
“The Como Restaurant, this was a staple, and now it’s closed,” said Rotella, gesturing toward the bright red sign still hanging on the storefront. “My grandma worked here for 50 years. Places like that are where people had their banquets, their weddings, things like that. Those cornerstone places are gone now.”
Vacant buildings with signs that say “office space available” are scattered among the businesses that remain. The shuttered storefronts are another reminder that students who graduate from Niagara Falls High School have fewer employment options in the town than graduates did decades ago.
Student enrollment in the Niagara Falls City School District, too, has gone down, dropping from about 7,500 students in 2006 to fewer than 6,500 today. After the Covid pandemic, the school district ramped up its efforts to focus on the career options students do have, preparing them for jobs both local and far. In 2023, the principal announced that every junior and senior in the school must choose a career pathway. Since then, the high school has refined its course catalog so that each class falls into five career categories: visual performing arts; business, finance and entrepreneurship; computer science and information technology; design, engineering and construction; and human services.
Within those categories, guidance counselors push students to pick classes related to a specific career. Just over half of the students at Niagara Falls High choose human services, a broad pathway that includes careers like teacher, law enforcement officer and attorney, among others. Other pathways include careers where students will likely have to leave Niagara Falls, in biotechnology and mechanical engineering.
“We start doing career interest inventories in ninth and 10th grade to start exposing them to what’s out there,” Rotella said.
Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.
There’s a delicate tension high schools must balance — students should be exposed to careers but also have the opportunity to explore outside of a rigid pathway, said Jerre Maynor, senior director of solutions design and delivery at Jobs for the Future, a nonprofit that advocates for workforce solutions. Students who don’t plan on enrolling in college after graduation may change their minds later, meaning programs should prepare them for both paths.
Despite college enrollment numbers dropping and surveys that show more people are questioning the value of a higher education degree, 72 percent of jobs will require some level of postsecondary education by 2031, according to a 2024 report from Georgetown’s Center on Education and Workforce. Overall, jobs that require degrees tend to pay better, too, though salaries vary significantly by career and degree.
Niagara Falls High has been trying to address those demands by adding “dual credit” options to pathways that historically haven’t had them — 62 of the high school’s courses offer students the chance to simultaneously earn college credit, including classes like criminal justice for students in the law enforcement path, through a partnership with the State University of New York Niagara, the local community college. Staff in the school’s postsecondary success office, which was created in 2021, have also been working to increase the number of employers willing to offer internships to high school students.
Students in a pre-med or biomedical research pathway can apply for a three-week summer internship at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo. For major industries that don’t offer internship opportunities, like the nearby aerospace propulsion company Moog or the manufacturing company Voss, counselors and teachers have been coordinating day trips so students can get a glimpse of what a career there might be like.
“As a public education institution, we have a moral obligation to graduate kids that not only get a degree, but have a pathway choice where they’ve had some exposure and some work to their next phase of life,” Laurrie said.
What students do with these experiences when they graduate from Niagara Falls High is up to them. The staff knows some students will leave the community for different opportunities. Johnson — whose construction class is helping transform the old high school campus into an arts and cultural center — hopes that a career in cement masonry will take her beyond Niagara Falls.
“There’s a lot of job opportunities in the world — why stay in one place?” Johnson said.
Others said they want to stay to be a part of the revitalization of the only town they’ve called home.
In the waning days of the school year in June, senior Leo Nadrowski was planning for the seventh annual Soap Box Derby held in honor of his dad, an elementary school safety officer who started the event and who died in 2022. The event always draws hundreds of participants to watch children race in hand-made soap box cars. Nadrowski’s evenings are often filled with events like this. On a Monday evening in June, he went to the baseball game of a student his mom teaches in her elementary school classroom. A local pizzeria brought food, and bystanders walking their dogs joined the crowd.
“People say, ‘You don’t want to live in Niagara Falls because it’s bad.’ What I saw yesterday, it looked like you could have been filming a movie,” Nadrowski said. “It was the American Dream.”
High school senior Emily Webber has always wanted to work in schools. Specifically, she wants to work in schools in Niagara Falls, where she’s lived her whole life.
When Webber finished her final classes at the high school in June this year, she left with 25 hours of experience in elementary classrooms, thanks to the high school’s internship program. She also had enough credits to shave about a year off her college coursework, putting her on a fast track to a teaching degree.
Her plan is to save tuition money by getting her associate degree in teaching at SUNY Niagara before transferring to a master’s program in Buffalo, where she’ll also be able to complete her bachelor’s degree.
She doesn’t want to stay out of Niagara Falls for long, though. Despite the town’s long-term population declines, she believes in the spirit of the community to rebuild.
“With the right assistance, I think we can bring Niagara Falls back,” Webber said.
Contact staff writer Ariel Gilreath on Signal at arielgilreath.46 or at gilreath@hechingerreport.org.
This story about career options was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for the Hechinger newsletter.
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