Loose Ends
We never defined thriving.
Weโre now eight posts into a series thatโs likened innovation to a rubber band, invoked Schrรถdingerโs cat and Mean Girls, sent credentials through a funhouse, diagrammed the grammar of skills, and pointed out that our response to AI looks like the kind of pattern matching that AI itself runs on. It might be starting to feel a little like a TV show thatโs introduced enough subplots to require a recap episode. (Yes, we did just add another metaphor. We canโt help it.)
This is that episode. We have a summer hiatus planned, but before we go, we wanted to step back and walk through a key argument thatโs been running through the series. We’ve written tens of thousands of words about the importance of building pathways to thriving without ever defining what we mean by “thriving.” (Oops.) We’ve said what our working definition has tilted toward: economic security as the measure of a good life, with everything else a thriving life includes treated as a luxury or a means to that economic end. But
we’ve never said what a complete definition would look like. Which is a problem, given that our central argument is that pathways strategies that were designed to open doors keep narrowing what counts as a destination.
Our hypothesis about why thatโs been happening is that the pathways movement has been working from an incomplete definition of thriving. Pathways are organized around the goal of helping young people achieve economic security, with education functioning as a means to that end. Weโve gestured toward social capital, belonging, purpose, and agency as things that we value, but that aren’t the main job of pathways. But psychologists have argued that in fact theyโre โessential nutrientsโ for self-determination and well-being. If thriving means a life that economic security serves rather than defines, then an incomplete definition is a basic design problem, not just a failure to pay adequate attention to the full definition. An incomplete definition of thriving constrains our understanding of what pathways are for, which means it shapes what we think young people can become.
Main character syndrome
We’ll get right to that definition. Thriving is a state that encompasses four domains that are well-established in research and need to be in place simultaneously. Theyโre four dimensions of a single life, not boxes that can be checked in sequence or things that can be traded off against each other.
But weโve been treating one of the four domains, economic security and mobility, as the destination instead of one of four co-equal domains of thriving. We also work hard at a second domain, knowledge and capability, but itโs a narrowed version of it thatโs centered on what we think creates a direct route to economic security. And we conscript connection, belonging, purpose, and agency to operate in service of economic security instead of treating them as important outcomes in their own right.
Young people have the knowledge, skills, and dispositions to make meaningful choices about their futures, pursue meaningful careers, and continue learning throughout their lives. This domain includes preparation for future learning and the broad formation that lets a person understand the world and keep growing. Knowledge and capability should go beyond technical content knowledge and include the dispositionsโincluding critical thinking, problem-solving, resilience, and adaptabilityโthat enable people to navigate a changing world.
How the domain currently shows up in pathways: Weโve tended to narrow this domain to a focus on the skills employers are currently hiring for and a version of capability assessed via credentials meant to make it legible in the labor market. This is the domain that the pathways movement has worked the hardest at. Weโve identified it as critical to economic security, and funding and attention have flowed to scale work in this domain. What that work has valued most is signalsโcredentials and skillsโmatched to job openings that are then treated as sufficient stand-ins for the capabilities underneath them. Narrowing the definition of knowledge to what employers say theyโll pay for is how we end up treating young people as workers in waiting. Too many pathways resemble job training programs and focus on sub-baccalaureate degrees and credentials that may speed job placement in the short term, but are not easily stacked or transferred to bachelorโs degree programs, despite the wealth of data and a clear consensus among economists on the value of those degrees. Not all young people need to complete bachelorโs degrees, but we do need to provide viable pathways to them for all who want them, whether learners enroll in bachelor’s programs immediately after high school or following other postsecondary education or work.
Young people have the financial stability and opportunity to meet their basic needs and build secure futures. This is critically important, and our argument is not that economic security and mobility matter less than the pathways movement says they do. The role of education in this domain is to make sure a young person’s preparation is never the barrier between them and economic security. Education cannot compensate for a lack of fair wages or good jobs, and weโre asking for trouble every time we treat education as the singular solution to economic inequality.
How the domain currently shows up in pathways: This is the outcome weโve been organizing around. We look to job placement and starting wages to measure the success of pathways. But we shouldn’t reduce thriving to economic outcomes alone; this isnโt a zero-sum game. Economic security is about a trajectory that is largely setโand affected byโthe other three domains of thriving.
Young people have mentors, professional networks, trusted adults, and peer support that provide meaning and access to opportunity. They experience developmental relationships and belonging, which is one of the most basic and well-documented human motivations there is, in educational and workplace settings. They are engaged in and contribute to their communities and build social capital that opens doors. As a domain of thriving, connection and belonging means young people are known and matter for reasons that have nothing to do with their economic productivity.
How the domain currently shows up in pathways: We too often instrumentalize mentoring, advising, and social capital as tools for achieving economic security. Social capitalโwho you know, who knows you, and who will vouch for youโis one of the strongest predictors of economic mobility, and a sense of belonging supports academic success and postsecondary completion. But even as we treat outcomes in this domain as tools conscripted in service of other domains of thriving, we havenโt invested in connection and belonging deliberately or built a clear set of strategies around them the way we have around, for example, dual enrollment or work-based learning. Our definition of thriving argues for treating this as an outcome in its own right and connection and belonging as integral to a life defined by thriving.
Young people have a clear sense of self, can articulate connections between their goals and values, develop identities, and choose their own direction and pursue it. This is agency in the full sense: the capacity to navigate the world as it is and to play a part in shaping it. This domain requires systems to create conditions where young people can explore, discover, change their minds, and make choices that reflect who they are becoming, not just who employers want them to be. This domain is unrealized for most young people, of whom only about one in five says theyโve found something they’d call a purpose. The rest are still searching, which is what adolescence is for.
How the domain currently shows up in pathways: We redefine agency as compliance with the pathways structures that weโve designed. Our working model of agency has tended to look more like asking young people what job they want to have, slotting them into a pathway designed to lead there, handing them some navigation tools, and then measuring whether they got to the job they thought they wanted when they were 15. Purpose, meanwhile, is often measured through engagement, meaning that what weโre talking about is really whether young people are staying on pathways they didnโt design.
So thatโs the framework. And if we zoom the camera out for a look at where the series has been, we can see that every post has been addressing what happens when pathways are designed for only half of the domains, with knowledge and capability turned in service of economic security. Each post has looked at the pattern from a different entry point; the graphic below traces how episode by episode.
In case it isn’t obvious, we produced this graphic with AI assistance. Charlotte and Kyle reviewed and edited all content.
In the very first post in this series, we offered a list of five imbalances in our pathways strategies. We said weโd been overindexing on careers and underindexing on college; prioritizing jobs over thriving; treating youth as a supply of workers over treating them as the people pathways exist to serve; emphasizing access over outcomes; and leaning into linearity over complexity. All five are the products of an incomplete definition of thriving. We framed them as a series of false choices, but when viewed through the four domains of thriving, it becomes clear that theyโre all variations of the same false choice between economic security and human development. Linear pathways are the inevitable output of a focus on two domains because credential-to-job-to-wage plots as a line. If we add in connection, belonging, purpose, and agency, we end up with something that looks messy, just like the business of growing up. The false choices exist because theyโve been baked into the design of pathways.
Ensuring that all four domains are real for every young person is a precondition for equitable pathways. Affluent young people already get all four: exploration, networks, second chances, and an education understood as the work of becoming a whole person. Pathways strategies too often hand the young people furthest from opportunity a narrower version: just the first two domains, which we tell them is a practical necessity. A definition of thriving that isn’t the same for everyone is just a more polite way of describing privilege.
This isn’t a new arrangement, and we won’t relitigate the full version of the history we offered in โCrossing the Cafeteriaโ here. The short version: a century ago, debates over the purpose of education hardened into an arrangement where privileged young people get a version of education that encompasses all four of the domains of thriving, while everyone else gets an education focused on only half of the domains: knowledge and capability and economic security and mobility. We’ve been working within the confines of that arrangement ever since.
Behind the scenes
It would be reasonable to wonder whether, even granting the importance of all four domains, we should continue to prioritize economic security, especially given the complexity of pathways work and the fact that weโre still working to get the economic outcomes part right. After all, economic security is a necessity; someone who canโt pay their rent is almost certainly not thriving. But the argument in favor of prioritizing economic security rests on two assumptions. The first is that itโs possible to pull economic security loose from the other three domains and go after it on its own. The second is that the other three can wait. Those who have been following this series will not be surprised to hear that we looked at the research on all of this. What we found out is that it undermines both assumptions. The short version of what it says is that our focus on just two domains actually helps explain why weโre struggling to get to the economic outcomes we hope to see.
The definition of thriving that we just put forward is one we deserve very little credit for formulating. Itโs based on decades of research that has all arrived at the same conclusion. Researchers studying human motivation, scientists tracking what helps humans flourish, economists rethinking the relationship between economic security and agency, and young people describing what they’re working toward keep arriving at the same short list: relationships, competence, agency, meaning, and yes, the ability to earn a decent living. Self-determination theory identified autonomy, competence, and relatedness as basic psychological needs. Positive youth development research landed on competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring. The flourishing literature settled on happiness, health, meaning, character, and close relationships. The capability approach reframed development as expanding what people are able to do and become, with agency and affiliation at the center. All point in the same direction: all four domains are necessary, and itโs not possible to focus on just one and think that will somehow produce outcomes across them all.
Economic security canโt be achieved in isolation from the other domains. Julia Freeland Fisher has argued that opportunity gaps are a function not just of what students know (i.e., their knowledge and capabilities), but of who they know, and that education systems systematically underinvest in the relationships that drive mobility. The Opportunity Insights team has provided large-scale associational evidence to support this through their work mapping twenty-one billion friendships against income records. It turns out friendship is among the strongest predictors of upward mobility anyone has found. โEconomic connectedness”โthe share of a child’s friends who come from higher-income familiesโis associated with a twenty percent rise in adult earnings.
This finding builds on half a century of research that stretches back to Mark Granovetterโs work in the early 1970s showing that more than half of workers found their jobs not through formal applications, but through someone they knew, and more often through an acquaintance than a close friend, because the people slightly outside your circle hear about job openings that the people you know best donโt. Granovetterโs argument about the โstrength of weak tiesโ was affirmed more recently by a study of LinkedIn data that demonstrated that jobseekers were most likely to find new roles through users with whom they had only a modest number of mutual connections.
So itโs clear that connection matters very much indeed to economic security. And we havenโt forgotten that, a few paragraphs ago, we argued that pathways strategies subvert connection and belonging in service of economic mobility. That remains a concern. Connection, belonging, and social capital should be treated as outcomes, not just tools to support income growth, and failing to measure them as outcomes leaves young peopleโs access to social capital to chance and systematically unmeasured. Both things can be true.
The relationships between the domains intersect and overlap in ways that show that three of the four are more than stepping stones to financial stability. For example, connection and belonging support both economic security and stronger learning outcomes. One study, which was later replicated across 22 institutions, of an intervention focused on increasing young peopleโs sense of belonging found it raised Black students’ GPAs over three years and reduced disparities in academic achievement. Purpose and agency, meanwhile, are preconditions for the economic outcomes pathways are trying to produce. Critical consciousness, including an understanding of structural barriers and a sense of capacity to act on them, is predictive of adolescentsโ development of vocational identity and commitment to future careers. In other words, a young person who understands how the world works and sees a role for themselves in it is more likely to successfully build a meaningful career. Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach reframes education’s purpose as expanding what a person is able to do and become, with agency at the center instead of income standing in for everything.
Which brings us to the second assumption, which offers a tempting fallback: even if the domains are connected, maybe economic security is still the right first priority. The โletโs worry about that after economic securityโ model suggests that a young person whoโs running short on belonging or purpose can be topped up after the economic foundation for thriving is in place. The research on basic psychological needs says it doesn’t work that way. Self-determination theory has been arguing for four decades that human motivation and well-being rest on three basic needs: competence, autonomy, and relatedness. (In other words: knowledge and capability, purpose and agency, and connection and belonging.) Leading researchers call them “essential nutrients;” all are necessary, and frustrating any one of them does active harm. You can’t cover a deficit of one psychological need with a surplus of another, just like you canโt fix a deficiency of one vitamin by eating more of a different vitamin. The positive youth development literature comes to a similar conclusion via its widely used “Five Cs” model that holds that young people thrive (their word) through competence, confidence, connection, character, and caring. Taken together, those produce a sixth C: contribution to family and community. Belonging, meanwhile, isnโt a nice-to-have. Itโs a “powerful, fundamental, and extremely pervasive motivation,โ and a lack of belonging produces measurable damage to health, adjustment, and well-being.
The โletโs worry about that after economic securityโ model suggests that a young person whoโs running short on belonging or purpose can be topped up after the economic foundation for thriving is in place. The research on basic psychological needs says it doesnโt work that way.
Other evidence of how the domains depend on one another has been discussed throughout this series. Michaela Leslie-Ruleโs surviving/striving/thriving framework was developed based on what young people said thriving means to them: control over their time, enough to live on, and the ability to give back to their families and communities. Thatโs the closest we have to a youth-authored definition of thriving, and it draws on the two domains weโre most apt to marginalize. The Search Instituteโs work on developmental relationships grounded our argument back in โSchrรถdingerโs Futuresโ about the need to treat relationships as a core part of pathways infrastructure.
And the development that happens in adolescence canโt be put on hold while young people work toward economic security. (Think network TV, not streaming service.) Identity formation takes place on a timeline set by biology and context, not by a theory of change for pathways. If we donโt deliberately design for exploration that builds a sense of purpose, relationships that build a sense of belonging, and the experiences of agency that build a sense of self, young peopleโs identities will still form, but we will have missed the opportunity to offer support. Thereโs not an option to just come back to it later.
The field is already starting to move in this direction. The Pathways Impact Fund is supporting intermediaries in implementing strategies grounded in the Commission on Purposeful Pathwaysโ A Launchpad for Life, which is anchored in a vision for pathways that cultivate student agency, purpose, belonging, and social capital. The Urban Instituteโs Student Upward Mobility Initiative is identifying evidence-based interventions aligned to the three pillars of their framework for upward mobility: dignity and belonging, economic success, and power and autonomy. LearnerStudio is working toward a vision of youth flourishing that encompasses careers, yes, and also individual and democratic flourishing. The CAPS Network is measuring sense of purpose, confidence, and occupational identity in its profession-based learning model.
Taken together, the research is unambiguous. It says that we need to pay attention to all four domains, and that connection, belonging, purpose, and agency need to be treated as ends in themselves. It also says that they are useful levers for improving outcomes in the other domains: connection really does improve persistence, and a sense of purpose really does support career readiness and success. The problem is that, to the extent that pathways strategies account for these domains at all, they rely only on their instrumental value. The work in front of us isnโt a simple matter of paying more attention to something weโve been neglecting. We need to rethink the destination of pathways.
Chekhovโs gun
From the very first post in this series, weโve been arguing for holding tensions. Between college and career, innovation and scale, degrees and credentials, et cetera and so on. Weโve said we need to reject false choices and zero-sum games. And weโve also written a series of posts that might sound like weโre just arguing for the other side of each binary. We are not actually opposed to economic security, skills, credentials, or any of the other things weโve spent over a decade building with our pathways friends across the country.
More than that, strategies not organized around all four domains of thriving systematically shortchange the young people furthest from opportunity, offering them a stripped-down, second-class version of the education that more privileged young people get as a matter of course.
We make jokes (some better than others), but what weโre up to is in fact a painfully earnest effort to get things right. We dragged readers through a series of funhouse mirrors because the distance between the number of credentials with evidence to support them and the number of credentials on offer is alarming, and young people are making real decisions based on what we tell them. We diagrammed the grammar of skills because our frameworks havenโt accounted for how capabilities actually develop, which means weโve been building assessment and credentialing infrastructure based on a misconception. We let a chatbot loose inside a post about AI because our response to AI has been reproducing all of the patterns weโve been naming in this series. Economic outcomes are in our definition of thriving because we meant it when we said we believe in their importance.
What we’ve been arguing, with increasing specificity, is that organizing pathways exclusively around economic security and a narrowed, employer-defined version of knowledge and capabilityโwhile conscripting everything else in service of those twoโproduces strategies that arenโt reliably leading to the upward economic mobility they’re organized around. Thereโs no shortage of research saying so. More than that, strategies not organized around all four domains of thriving systematically shortchange the young people furthest from opportunity, offering them a stripped-down, second-class version of the education that more privileged young people get as a matter of course.
The pathways movement is in a very real bind thatโs created by the systems and structures we work within. Federal and state policies are incentivizing employment outcomes, and accountability systems rely heavily on short-term inputs and โpredictive proxiesโ instead of measuring long-term outcomes. Systems that measure only credential completion and first-job placement will, unsurprisingly, produce strategies organized around credential completion and first-job placement. Funders seeking to demonstrate a return on investment often hope to see student-level outcomes within the span of a one- or two-year project period, with the result that programs focus on metrics they can measure in that window of time. Employers have job descriptions and headcount targets more often than they have questions about young peopleโs sense of purpose, and the pathways movement was built to try to engage employers without pushing their thinking. The pathways movement is serving young people in the context of these structural realities, all of which make focusing on only two domains of thriving an entirely rational choice.
But focusing on all four domains is what makes the tensions weโve been naming stop looking like tensions. Exploration may look like an inefficiency in the pipeline from a credential to a job, but itโs a non-negotiable for the development of a sense of purpose and agency, which, as the research shows, is in turn a precondition for the sustained motivation that produces positive economic outcomes. Credentials stop being endpoints that prioritize the demands of employers by design; instead, they operate in service of learnersโ ownership of their own knowledge and capabilities. Career-connected learning doesnโt compete with liberal arts and humanities. Both are necessary: one for situated knowledge and capability, the other for the critical consciousness and breadth that contribute to purpose and agency. Work-based learning isnโt reduced to a skill-development strategy; it becomes a critical means of building relationships that support connection and belonging.
Hereโs what the shift from pathways designed with economic security as the destination to pathways designed with thriving as the destination might look like across four core components of a pathway. (We regret that we were unable to present this as a montage.)
Charlotte and Kyle wrote the words in this table; AI beautified it.
We are perfectly serious when we say that we need all four domains. We’re not proposing that the pathways movement abandon strategies that weโve painstakingly built and proven to be effective. Whatโs needed is a shift in the intended destination of pathways from economic security to thriving, with economic security as one among four domains that need to be real for every young person. Which is more complexโit does, we realize, quadruple the number of domains weโre working toward. And also less complex, because it resolves tensions and false choices the pathways movement has been wrestling with for many years, including college vs. career, exploration vs. efficiency, and purpose vs. a paycheck. Pathways that help young people build professional networks and form developmental relationships that persist beyond pathway completion aren’t doing two things. Theyโre doing one thing well because theyโre designed for connection and belonging as an outcome rather than as a byproduct. To get there, we need to stop presenting young peopleโand ourselvesโwith false choices and start holding our pathways work accountable to four domains, not two.
The cliffhanger
So now you have it. Our definition of thriving: four domains, coequal and interdependent, each an end in itself. And now you know why we think the patterns, tensions, and outright false choices this series have been naming keep appearing: weโve been designing pathways using half the definition. (And all in a post thatโs only about half as long as our last one. Youโre welcome.)
That’s a wrap on season one. We have a bit of a summer hiatus planned, but weโll be back in the fall with more to say about all the things, from critiques we havenโt made yet (there are several) to getting concrete about strategies for building pathways with thriving as the destination. Weโre looking forward to it all. We’re also aware that we’ve set ourselves an ambitious agenda, which is probably why we need the summer to get ourselves together.
So what do you think?
If you’d like to talk through what you find when you answer these qustionsโor anything else that’s on your mindโwe’d like that, too. The strategies we’ve been talking about will be better if we build them with you. Set up a conversation with us this summer. We’re not actually going to be on vacation the whole time.
In the meantime, we have homework for you. Before we come back in the fall, we’d invite anyone who sees their work in some of what weโve written to do some reflection. Look at the pathways strategies you’re building or supporting and ask yourself a few questions to which we suspect you already know the answers:
- Which of the four domains are you actively designing for?
- Which ones show up in your strategies as goals in their own right, which ones show up in service of something else, and which donโt show up at all?
- Where have you done better than you expected? Where are the bright spots that the four-domain framework helps you see and name?
We want to work with the people doing this work every day, both those we already know and the new friends we want to make, with anyone who read this post and found it persuasive, and with anyone who read this post and thought, โYes, butโฆโ The conversation isnโt finished. Weโre just getting to the interesting part.
This post is the first in a series in which weโll share more about our thinking about the need for a new set of pathways strategies and explore how we might collectively go about creating them. We are committed to embracing nuance and complexity and thinking bigger about what the pathways movement seeks to accomplish. All4Ed aims to lead in a new direction, and we hope that both longtime pathways leaders and those with new perspectives to add to the conversation will join us in getting curious about whatโs not working and how we can better serve young people.
Meet The Authors
Charlotte Cahill
Senior Advisor
Kyle Hartung
Senior Advisor
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