Course Correction

It’s time to change the conversation about pathways. 

It’s a conversation we’ve been part of for more than a decade. We hoped that pathways that bridge K-12, postsecondary education, and careers could effectively address inequities in our education systems and labor markets and give young people who are far from opportunity a real shot at economic advancement. But we’ve been having some sleepless nights wondering whether pathways are achieving those goals, or whether their true effects might be the opposite of what we intended. We’re worried that pathways systems are on a trajectory that puts them at risk of becoming overly linear and limited—and ultimately limiting young people’s choices and agency by closing more doors than they open.

Where we’ve been

The 2011 Pathways to Prosperity report published by the Harvard Graduate School of Education catalyzed a national pathways movement with its compelling vision for a new social compact with youth. This compact would focus on the creation of high-quality pathways that prepared young people for adulthood while ensuring family income was not a barrier to opportunity. The report’s call to action inspired policymakers and practitioners—representing K-12 and postsecondary education, intermediary and community-based organizations, workforce and economic development, and business and industry—across the country to roll up their sleeves to do the hard work of building pathways systems.

The resulting pathways movement has spurred meaningful progress. It’s driven a national conversation about the need to prepare young people for careers, changed systems, fostered new cross-sector partnerships, and created real opportunities for young people. Pathways leaders have shown the power and promise of work-based learning and career navigation systems and expanded the reach of interventions, such as dual enrollment, with demonstrable positive effects. We have been proud to collaborate with these leaders in national efforts to design and implement pathways strategies and systems, including in our work with the Pathways to Prosperity Coalition and now through All4Ed, where we look forward to both engaging in new conversations with old friends and building new partnerships that contribute to All4Ed’s leadership on pathways.

Despite these achievements, some data that’s emerged in recent years gave us pause and made us wonder if our pathways strategies, many of which were developed based on information that’s now almost 15 years old, were enough to get us to our goals. So we went running off to look more carefully at the latest research. What we found made us feel increasingly uncomfortable—and increasingly curious about how we might create new strategies and adapt existing ones to account for what we learned. The questions we asked—and the answers we found—included:

Many pathways end in nondegree credentials, but we don’t have evidence of the long-term value of those credentials. Only 12% of certificates deliver real wage gains, and credentials often don’t meet learners’ expectations. Meanwhile, by 2031, two-thirds of good jobs will require bachelor’s degrees, and our economy faces a skills shortage crisis that’s overwhelmingly due to a lack of new workers who have a bachelor’s or more.

AI’s long-term effect on the labor market and implications for young workers remain uncertain, but it will likely increase employer demand for durable skills. The integration of AI within education can create systems that are better able to support students, but also presents risks such as exacerbating racial disparities and undermining efforts to build connections and social capital.

Pathways data tends to count inputs and outputs rather than measuring outcomes. For example, only 15 states measure either college or career readiness outcomes, rather than inputs, in their K-12 accountability systems, and just three states measure outcomes related to both college and career. Without outcomes data, we’re left with some strategies for which we lack clear quality standards or proof of long-term value.

Young people seek pathways to thriving, not jobs, and see themselves as their own best change agents. They view work as a means to achieve a good life—characterized by health, wealth, stability, and control—defined on their own terms. Youth value human connection and want to engage in and give back to their communities.

These answers to our questions are still incomplete, but they’re enough to suggest that we need to learn more, think differently about pathway outcomes, and find new ways to reach our goals. We’re worried that, in the years since the Pathways to Prosperity report was published, we’ve lost sight of its core promise: a social compact with youth that provides pathways not just to jobs, but to successful adulthood, thus ensuring that each young person has a “real choice about how to shape their future.”

Where we’re going

All4Ed aims to collaborate with pathways leaders across the country to design a new theory of change that leads to the outcomes that matter most—especially for the young people we serve. The pathways movement has largely coalesced around efforts, in policy and practice, to implement a set of core pathway components that include dual enrollment, work-based learning, credentials of value, and advising. This highly technical work is essential, but we are in danger of too narrowly focusing on employment outcomes, which are only one part of a successful transition to adulthood. Job training programs can be an important support for adults who need to upskill or reskill, but they are not developmentally appropriate for adolescents. In its early days, the pathways movement provided a badly needed counterbalance to the then-prevailing “college for all” narrative, but now it’s pathways strategies themselves that need rebalancing.

In the years since the Pathways to Prosperity report was published, we’ve lost sight of its core promise: a social compact with youth that provides pathways not just to jobs, but to successful adulthood, thus ensuring that each young person has a “real choice about how to shape their future.”

We’ve overindexed on career while underindexing on college.

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 bachelor’s 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 bachelor’s 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.

We’ve overindexed on jobs as the destination while underindexing on thriving as the destination.

Young people view careers as part of a process, not an endpoint, and seek to experiment with career possibilities as they form occupational identities. Pathways are often not intentionally designed to support the developmental needs of adolescents, including opportunities to exercise leadership and build connections. We need strategies informed by the science of adolescence and by youth voice and lived experience, not just labor-market data.

We’ve overindexed on youth as the supply side while underindexing on youth as the demand side.

Pathways strategies often frame young people as a supply of workers who can meet employers’ talent needs and are thus designed backward from industry needs. We need a youth-centered approach that focuses on designing pathways to careers that meet young people’s expectations—and recognizes that, for many young people, jobs are a means to larger ends.

We’ve overindexed on equity in access while underindexing on equity in outcomes.

Equity in access is necessary, but insufficient. Doubling down on efforts to increase access and scale pathways will move the needle only on outputs, not outcomes, without strategies that are intentionally designed, based on evidence, and calibrated to the needs of young people.

We’ve overindexed on linearity and zero-sum thinking while underindexing on complexity and nuance.

Linear pathways can lead to dead ends that limit opportunity rather than expanding it. Pathways too often present young people with a series of false choices: between college and career, between the liberal arts and career preparation, between skills and credentials, between credentials and degrees, between having a sense of purpose and making a living, and between self-determination and economic security. We need strategies that grapple with the complexity of young people’s aspirations for their futures and create routes to multiple destinations.

Linear pathways from a youth perspective

“There are so many paths, but each path allows you to go down one path and not explore others.… [There’s] a lot of different options out there…and each one expects something different…. There’s so much knowledge [that I] can’t get.”

—20-year-old quoted in the Broken Marketplace study (2025)

To achieve the right balance, we’ll need a new paradigm for pathways. The technical aspects of building specific pathways—such as identifying jobs to which they might lead, designing course sequences, and embedding work-based learning and advising—are similar to the work of civil engineers who carefully plan and design roads that will safely convey travelers to their destinations. This is critically important work, but pathways, like roads, should be designed to intersect, offering multiple routes to multiple destinations. For that, we need urban and land use planning. Pathways systems should be designed in ways that account for the complex terrain that youth navigate. This includes the education, employment, and economic landscapes and the broader social and cultural structures and forces that shape those landscapes.

Pathways to thriving should be about more than the technical work of career preparation. We’re seeing renewed attention to this issue in efforts such as the Commission on Purposeful Pathways’ inclusion of a sense of belonging, connection to purpose, and opportunities to build social capital in its list of core pathways experiences. Julia Freeland Fisher, a longtime champion of the importance of social capital

and connection for young people, is warning us of the urgency of that need given the disruptions caused by AI. Michaela Leslie-Rule emphasizes the importance of pathways designs that account for the richness of young people’s identities and the complexity of their visions for their futures. More Perfect has called for civic learning and national service to ensure that youth transition to adulthood as informed and engaged citizens. Too often, such considerations have influenced some of the language of the pathways movement, but done little to shift our tactics and real-world implementation.

We believe the need for action is urgent. Linear pathways strategies are at risk of creating a second-class education system that exacerbates inequities. It is not tenable to funnel youth who are the furthest from opportunity into pathways focused just on credential completion and job placement in the short term, rather than on what young people value for their lives—even as their peers from more affluent families have access to the full array of educational options and opportunities to try on the futures they envision for themselves. Doing so threatens to replicate the tracking systems of decades past and to systematize inequity under the false banner of creating opportunity.

Linear pathways strategies are at risk of creating a second-class education system that exacerbates inequities.

Moving past an instrumentalist view of pathways that is ultimately about preparing workers for jobs will both benefit young people and bolster our communities and democratic institutions. Much of the current conversation about the value of higher education focuses on its economic payoff for individuals, but our K-12 and higher education systems were designed to support both individuals and a broader public good. And they are succeeding. Increased educational attainment leads to broad economic growth that supports entire communities. Its benefits also extend to areas of national and community life that include public health, civic engagement, and democracy. In the midst of rapid technological change, we have a shared responsibility to design pathways strategies that support human dignity and civic engagement.

It’s time for new ideas. Normal will get us nowhere.

This post is the first in a series in which we’ll 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 what’s not working and how we can better serve young people.