Schrödinger’s Futures 

We tell young people they have to choose “correctly” before they have the information, experience, developmental capacity, or inclination, to do so. We call this “choice,” but choice implies genuine options. What we’ve actually built is a high-stakes sorting mechanism dressed up in the language of opportunity. Pathways are too often designed so that when young people inevitably need to course-correct—because that’s what exploration actually looks like—they run into dead ends instead of structures that support the type of non-linear growth that comes with changing direction. 

In our last post, we argued that designing pathways to meet employer demand leads to treating young people as workers in waiting instead of whole humans. Instead of starting with questions about how we can build strong talent pipelines, what if we asked something more like: “How can we backward map pathways from young people’s visions for their own futures?” 

We realize this might sound like we’re proposing to turn over a decade’s worth of carefully crafted pathways strategies on their heads. (We sort of are.) But just hear us out. 

Pathways need to be designed to hold a tension: youth need both the agency to define success on their own terms and the skills and credentials the data tells us are required to access economic opportunity. These goals are interdependent and mutually reinforcing. Pathways that force young people to make premature choices aren’t developmentally appropriate or responsibly designed. And worse than that: they risk systematizing inequity by forcing young people furthest from opportunity into narrow pathways while their more affluent peers have access to the support it takes to explore all the options available to them. 

The fiction of choice

To imagine alternatives to existing pathways strategies, we wanted to understand more about what would work for young people. Armed with curiosity and our trusty degrees in the humanities, we waded into some of the research on the science of adolescence and youth development to try to understand what pathways calibrated to the reality of young people’s needs might look like. 

We quickly saw that pathways would need to contend with the fact that adolescence isn’t a dress rehearsal for adulthood. Decades of work in developmental science have shown that adolescence—which stretches deep into one’s twenties—is a distinct developmental stage focused on identity formation, experimentation, and figuring out who one can—and wants to—be. Here are just a few of the other things we learned, organized by broad area of research: 

That’s a lot of research—and we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s out there. The short version of what we’ve learned is this: adolescents need space to explore multiple identities, real opportunities to contribute and build a sense of purpose, and genuine, supportive relationships. They need systems that allow for uncertainty, not systems that try to eliminate it. So how did we end up with a set of pathways strategies that don’t address these developmental needs? 

Pathways got their start as helpful choice architecture, kind of like the arrows on the floor in an IKEA store that create a one-way path through the showrooms. It’s a layout that makes it hard to change course—if you realize while you’re enjoying your meatballs in the cafeteria that you forgot to check out the bookcases, it’s annoying and difficult to backtrack. Pathways are constructed in a similar fashion. They got their start as a way to help young people navigate confusing and disjointed systems. But their focus on doing so while efficiently accelerating young people toward specific careers is misaligned with what the research on youth development tells us. Strategies designed for the developmental needs of young people shouldn’t eliminate structure, but they should keep options open during a stage of life that’s marked by a need for exploration. 

Young people are navigating systems that limit their room to grow, experiment, and redirect. And when they inevitably need to correct course—because that’s what healthy exploration looks like—the system treats it as failure rather than growth. Our systems reward choosing early, not necessarily choosing wisely. 

So if our current approach—early choices, targeted focus on chosen careers, sporadic connection—isn’t developmentally appropriate, what would be? We still think that we need an urban planning approach that’s intentional about designing less linear pathways that intersect and offer multiple routes to a variety of destinations, with options for a detour in case of construction. (And of course there’s always construction.) 

How might we design pathways differently? 

We’re now four installments into this series, and we’re keenly aware that we’ve offered more critiques than ideas about what we might do instead. So we tried out a move from diagnosing challenges to getting curious about what solutions might look like, beginning with thinking more expansively about the outcomes we hope pathways will achieve. We need to think about pathways that support young people in building lives defined not just by employment—or even economic security—but by meaningful relationships and connections, agency, choice, purpose, and belonging. It would mean measuring outcomes that include not just credential completion, skills, and job placement, but things like pathway flexibility, the availability of multiple options, and the quality of young people’s professional networks. 

To do that, we’re turning to a tool used in design thinking, which is an iterative and human-centered approach meant to solve complex problems through a collaborative and experimental process. This process often involves “how might we…” questions, which is design-thinking jargon for questions that are meant to reframe problems and encourage brainstorming about solutions. Below, we pose three such questions grounded in the research we’ve explored. 

• How might we build pivot points into pathways instead of dead ends? 

• How might we support navigation and exploration instead of encouraging premature selection? 

• How might we build connectedness as infrastructure instead of as an add-on? 

For each question, we’ve also sketched out some preliminary thinking in something akin to a theory of action that speaks to why this matters, what we could try doing differently, what we could measure, and what outcomes we might achieve. These aren’t definitive answers, but they feel like a productive place to start.  

Superposition as strategy

The key point about quantum superposition is that you can’t force observation without collapsing possibility—the measurement itself changes the outcome. Our pathways systems demand that measurement and ask young people to choose now—and choose correctly the first time. This approach essentially builds an elaborate infrastructure that collapses the quantum state of youth prematurely. It’s as though we’re demanding not only to know whether Schrödinger’s poor cat is alive or dead, but that it provide us with a thoughtful articulation of its occupational identity. 

comprehensive solutions. We’re still learning and hope these ideas might represent a starting point for designing pathways backward from what young people actually need rather than forward from what employers say they want. Some of these changes are program-level and can start tomorrow. Others require policy shifts that’ll take years.  

We’re determined to take accountability for doing something about this rather than placing the burden on young people to navigate systems that weren’t designed for them. The question isn’t whether they can handle choice — it’s whether we can build pathways that offer it for real.  

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