Eleventh- and twelfth-grade students in California comprehensive high schools and Regional Occupational Centers/Programs spend about one million hours a day on vocational education. California students who took a concentrated sequence of high school vocational subjects during 1981 had a 26 percent unemployment rate in the spring of 1982, compared to a 23 percent unemployment rate among all 16- to 19-year-olds and 27 percent unemployment rate among high school dropouts. Evidently, high school vocational training did not give students any relative advantage in finding jobs after they graduated, nor was it effective in dropout prevention. Furthermore, there is no evident way in which reallocating resources among existing high school vocational programs would bring about much improvement in labor market outcomes for graduates. Instead, fundamental changes should be made in vocational education at the secondary level. Comprehensive high schools should stop trying to provide skill training for entry-level jobs and instead should use vocational education to prepare young people for a working life of continual learning, problem solving, and communicating. To accomplish this broader purpose, vocational education should include all students at some point in their high school career. The success of vocational education in high schools should be measured by improved performance in academic subjects, lower dropout rates, and lifelong gains in productivity at work. (KC)