A national study has concluded that high school students' entire senior year is largely a waste, and that schools nationwide are failing at preparing their graduates for college or work.

Responding to growing concerns that too many students leave high school ill-equipped for what lies ahead, the U.S. Department of Education created the National Commission on the High School Senior Year. The commission's job is to examine students' experiences in the last year of high school and recommend ways to improve them.

A final report is expected to be released next month. In preliminary findings, the news is not good.

The 42-page report, which drew on expert testimony, focus groups with high school students and a review of other studies, characterized the senior year of high school as "a lost opportunity."

As a result, many young people arrive on college campuses poorly prepared for the academic demands about to be made on them.

"Instead of meeting new challenges in the classroom, too many high school students are drifting through the senior year," U.S. Secretary of Education Rod Paige said. "This is a lost opportunity we need to reclaim."

The 30-member commission includes educators, administrators and political leaders. It's headed by Gov. Paul Patton of Kentucky and Jacqueline Belcher, president of Georgia Perimeter College. The work is funded by grants from the Woodrow Wilson National Foundation, the Carnegie Corp. of New York and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.

This spring, the commission held public meetings in Texas, Massachusetts, Kentucky and Mississippi to gather input from parents, students, business leaders, educators and others. Tomorrow, the group will meet in a closed session at Simons Rock College of Bard in Great Barrington, Mass., to hammer out specific recommendations and suggestions about how to proceed.

The commission, the first ever to focus on the final high school year, concluded that "practically every college-bound student is aware that serious preparation for college ends at grade 11," in part due to early acceptance from colleges, usually in the fall.

The commission also determined that most recent high-school grads were not only ill-equipped for a rigorous college curriculum but also were "equally unprepared for the demands of the modern high-performance workplace."

Bored and unable to relate what they're learning in the classroom to post-high school jobs, many seniors view academics as pointless and "spend their time daydreaming about the freedom they will have after graduation and the purchasing power of their new jobs."

One proposed solution: A grand alliance of all those whose interests converge around the senior year -- parents, students, school leaders, colleges and universities, employers and the military -- need to agree on how to proceed and allocate responsibilities for improvement.

Both DOE officials and commission executive chair Cheryl Kane refused to disclose any details of the report's final recommendations. Some of the solutions discussed at the regional meetings include forging partnerships with businesses and colleges to mentor students, hiring more guidance counselors and making sure they're better trained to get students on the right path and developing programs to make the senior year more meaningful.

Administrators and teachers nationwide must come up with their own ideas to motivate seniors. Offering more advanced placement courses and internship programs helps keep students engaged, and so-called "articulation agreements" with colleges, which allow seniors to earn college credit while still in high school, can dissuade students from slacking off.

Quaker Valley, for instance, which offers students eight advanced placement courses, also encourages seniors to do a graded internship. Seniors choose careers they're interested in pursuing, find mentors and spend 12 weeks interning for those businesses. Programs such as the new Cisco Networking Academy, which teaches students to design, build and maintain computer networks, can give noncollege-bound seniors a head start on a career as a computer networking specialist or a computer engineer.

"Seniors need to feel they're moving into the next phase of their lives rather than simply finishing something out," Quaker Valley Superintendent R. Gerard Longo said.