In this essay I review an important report on school reform, published in 2007 by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and written by a group of twenty-five panelists in the USA from industry, government, academia, education, and non-profit organizations, led by specialists in labor market economics, named the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce. These neoliberal commissioners desire a broad overhaul of public schooling, ending what is now a twelve-year high school curriculum after the tenth-grade with a series of state board qualifying exit examinations. In this plan vocational education (also known as career and technical education) has been eliminated altogether in the secondary-level schools as curricular tracks are consolidated into one, signifying a national trend of ratcheting-up prescribed academic competencies for students. I argue that college-for-all neoliberals valorize the middle-class values of individualism and self-reliance, entrepreneurship, and employment in the professions. Working-class students are expected to reinvent themselves in order to succeed in the new capitalist order.