How can schools help students envision a rewarding future and a pathway to achieving it?
In 2013, when I was teaching in the Morrisania section of the Bronx, I had a student named Angel. Angel was hardworking and kind. He had lived most of his life in the Bronx, though his family was from Puerto Rico. None of this made Angel particularly unique. Many of Angel’s classmates were similarly kind and diligent, and most were Puerto Rican or Dominican. What made Angel stand out was that at just 16 years of age he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to be a pilot. It was all he talked about, all he read about, and — when given the choice — all he wrote about. And because Angel knew that becoming a pilot required a high school diploma, and earning a high school diploma required passing my 11th-grade English class, Angel (a pseudonym, like all student names in this article) showed up to English class every day ready to do the work.
Every school has a handful of Angels, students who — without the school’s support — have identified a vocational, social, or other type of long-term goal and begun making a plan to achieve it. I now see that Angel had what scholars refer to as a “purpose” or, more specifically, a “career purpose orientation.” He had a sense of what he wanted to accomplish after high school, and this intention oriented how he behaved in the classroom and the experiences he sought out after the school day ended. In short, Angel envisioned a meaningful future and took steps to manifest it. He wasn’t constantly asking, “Why are we doing this?” or “Why do I have to do this?” because he saw how his current work connected to where he was going. In this way, Angel differentiated himself from many of his classmates in the Bronx and across the country, who are just going through the motions, working hard because it’s what their parents want, or not working much at all because they just don’t see the point.
How unique is Angel? Research into adolescent purpose is still relatively spare, but in a seminal five-year study led by Stanford psychologist William Damon (2008), researchers found that approximately four-fifths of young people ages 12-26 lacked purpose. Other researchers have found that students lacking purpose have higher levels of depression and are more likely to abuse substances, while students who have a purpose are more motivated to learn and to engage in positive social behavior (Brassai, Piko, & Steger, 2011; Hill et al., 2018).
Understanding purpose
What do we mean by purpose? Purpose here refers to a student’s constellation of long-term life goals or aims that are “meaningful to the self and of consequence to the world beyond the self” (Damon, Menon, & Bronk, 2003, p. 121). In recent years, scholars have developed a variety of approaches to understanding adolescent purpose. In a 2010 study, researchers at Ball State University found that some students don’t have any long-term aims, some have self-oriented long-term aims, some have other-oriented aims, and some have both self- and other-oriented aims (Bronk & Finch, 2010). More recently, Gitima Sharma and colleagues (2017) combed through the 2002 Education Longitudinal Study, a nationally representative study of adolescents, and found that students had one (or more) of four orientations: career purpose (a desire to realize career aspirations); interpersonal purpose (a desire to cultivate happy relationships and provide for their children); altruistic purpose (a desire to support their community or society at large); or self-oriented purpose (a desire to fulfill personal aspirations). I believe this taxonomy offers great promise for working with students.
As I think back through the students I have worked with over the years, it is easy for me to map these purpose orientations onto them. Interpersonal purpose? That’s Jayvar, the most extroverted and ebullient student you could imagine. Altruistic purpose? That’s Anya, a youth leader and activist who plans to start organizations that will teach students about the role of imperialism and how the colonized ultimately ejected their colonizers. Self-oriented purpose? That’s Mohammad, the budding scientist, who takes every possible opportunity to develop his skills. Career purpose? That’s Angel of course.
The college-for-all movement has led us to skip the crucial steps of engaging students in thoughtful conversations about who they are as people, where their interests lie, and how a postsecondary institution can help them get where they want to go.
These four purpose orientations help us understand that there are multiple pathways to student engagement and fulfillment. A student with an interpersonal orientation, for example, might recognize the need to find a career that involves a lot of interaction with others and put their energy into developing strong communication and conflict-resolution skills. And someone with an altruistic orientation might look into careers in social justice fields — or prioritize building a life that will allow time for volunteer work.
Cultivating a sense of purpose in school does not mean that all high school students should be expected to identify their one true life’s purpose before graduating. This would be both unrealistic and misguided. Major life changes, such as having a child, a parent falling ill, or the emergence of a global pandemic, force each of us to periodically reevaluate our purpose. Similarly, students should not be expected to hold firmly onto aspirations formed in high school as they grow and mature. Developing purpose is about identifying areas of passion, whether they involve a specific career or more general life path, and then building the kinds of skills that will be of value on that path. Some of those skills might be directed toward a particular career, while others might be more general socioemotional competencies that will be valuable to students on a variety of paths.
I don’t know if Angel ever became a pilot. He may be high in the skies, flying a 737 as I write this sentence. Or he may have chosen a different career pathway. After all, people change. If Angel never became a pilot, or if, after becoming a pilot, he determined that it wasn’t for him, we oughtn’t think that Angel’s pursuit was a waste of time. The career competencies that pilots need, and that Angel worked to develop — including the ability to comprehend technical information, communicate clearly, make decisions under difficult circumstances, and work well with a team — are broadly transferable to other fields and useful in all sorts of life pursuits that go beyond careers.
Not every student comes to school with a forward-thinking mindset like Angel’s, but the good news is that there is a lot that adults can do to support students in cultivating a sense of purpose across all four orientations. The not-so-good news is that today — as in the past — there is no shared belief that schools should support students’ cultivation of purpose.
High schools and the dereliction of purpose
Given the centrality of individualism to American culture, it is curious that U.S. high schools do not do more to develop the individual, let alone help individual students identify a postsecondary purpose. Curious, but not surprising given the broader contours of U.S. history. Public high schools, as the historian William Reese (2007) puts it, were built “to educate young people for the world of work and to reinforce middle-class sensibilities’’ (p. 79). In the early 19th century, when the first high schools were established, capitalism and democracy were the twin animating forces of the era, and the high school was tasked with transmitting these values to students, regardless of student interest. If the transmission of these values served to reinforce racial, class, and gender hierarchies, this did not perturb the predominantly white male educational leaders of the day. Which isn’t to say that these values were universally held, or that the ideologies and policies that have shaped teaching and learning have been static since the founding of the first high school in Boston in 1821. In fact, as educational historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban (1995) have written, the past 200 years of U.S. schooling has been characterized by a continuous churn of policy cycles and educational trends: “In the politically conservative 1890s, 1950s, and 1980s, policy talk about schooling stressed struggle for national survival in international competitions . . . while liberal eras such as the 1930s and 1960s stressed an ideology of access and equality” (pp. 44-45).
During the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, the most far-reaching trend to capture the educational community’s attention was vocational education (Kliebard, 2004), but its appeal was not universal. The philosopher and educator John Dewey, for example, emphasized a child- and community-centered approach to education that explicitly critiqued the stance that education was primarily about preparing young people for the world for work. Dewey was less interested in preparing young people to work the factory lines than he was in fashioning an educational system that would build up families, strengthen democracy, and contribute to civic life. Similarly, W.E.B. DuBois was also a vocal critic of vocational education, particularly for Black students. He argued that a focus on “practical” or vocational skills would ultimately be harmful to Black students, as this focus would inevitably deny them the intellectual training necessary to achieve equal rights. In the end, however, the proponents of vocational education — such as Booker T. Washington, who led the renowned Tuskegee Institute, and his allies in the white corporate philanthropic community — won the day (Anderson, 1988; Kliebard, 2004). Teachers, because school counselors did not yet exist, had an additional responsibility: prepare students for the world of work.
One hundred years later, when I was working with students like Angel, the vocational education movement had lost its sheen. The new educational trend to capture the attention of the policy and philanthropic world was “college for all” (Carr, 2013). In 2010, President Barack Obama, in a major speech at the University of Texas at Austin, declared that “in the coming decades, a high school diploma is not going to be enough. Folks need a college degree.” Large urban districts like the New York City Department of Education set aside millions of dollars to promote college access for all. Across the country, college access organizations were multiplying. In the same way that high school graduation rates had long been the organizing principle for high school leaders, college enrollment became the central metric around which we in the postsecondary access community organized our work.
These efforts, by some measures, have been successful. In 1990, before the college-for-all movement gathered steam, the immediate college enrollment rate for high school graduates was 60%. By 2012, the overall enrollment rate for high school graduates had increased to 66%, and while significant gaps remained between students from high-income and low-income families, and between females and males, the measurable differences between white, Black, and Latinx students had disappeared, at least for the time being (National Center for Education Statistics, 2014). At the time, this was cause for some degree of satisfaction. Ten years later, we have come to understand that much work remains. This hawkeyed focus on college may have contributed to the increase in college enrollment over the past 30 years among students of color and low-income students. The problem is that many of these students haven’t been persisting. Too many are leaving college before earning a degree, all too often after accruing mountains of debt.
I don’t wish to argue here, as some conservative researchers do (Caplan, 2018), that too many students are going to college. I don’t think this is the case. Rather, the problem is that the college-for-all movement has led us to skip the crucial steps of engaging students in thoughtful conversations about who they are as people, where their interests lie, and how a postsecondary institution can help them get where they want to go. When students engage in such conversations and participate in experiences that help hone their interests, they are more likely to identify a college program that they have a reason to stick with or to choose instead a workforce training program, service program, or other postsecondary option that will point them in the direction of their life’s purpose(s).
A path for cultivating purpose
I noted earlier that Angel developed his purpose on his own, with little support from his high school. Our school counseling office — the entity most commonly tasked with supporting students’ postsecondary preparation — did not do much. Angel did not meet with his school counselor until his senior year and, together, they identified a small set of schools that included the study of aeronautics, to which Angel applied. As I think back at my time in the classroom, I wonder, how might we, as a school community, have done better?
There need not be any conflict between purpose exploration, college and career preparation, and socioemotional development. It is all interconnected.
Research by Complete College America (2019) suggests that when community colleges foreground academic and career advising and support students to begin college with a clear sense of purpose, students are more likely to graduate on time and pursue majors that align with their interests and connect to potential careers. Could such a “purpose first” approach to postsecondary support work in high school? I believe it could. At New Visions for Public Schools, a New York City school support organization, my colleagues and I are in the early stages of developing just such an approach. We have worked with dozens of schools across New York City to identify students’ strengths, interests, and goals and then support educators in using what they have learned to structure and inform learning experiences in school, as well as college and career exploration outside school. As I think through the work we have done, and the work that remains, four key areas of support seem particularly important.
Student interest inventories and curricular resources
Schools interested in pursuing a purpose-first postsecondary support model need to know what their students are interested in and curate or create curricular resources to support learning relevant to those interests. One place to start this work is by systematically administering student interest or career interest inventories; these online career exploration and planning tools enable students to connect their interests with college and career options and allow educators to analyze these interests at the group level to inform lesson planning, course scheduling, and internship programming. Career One Stop (www.careeronestop.org), My Next Move (mynextmove.org), and Career Explorer (www.headed2.com) are examples of online interest inventories with flexible pricing models that schools can use. Inventories such as these help students learn more about themselves and help educators see the distribution of purpose orientations (such as career, interpersonal, altruistic, and self) across their classroom and school. And students love these tools because the focus is on their questions and their interests. Many counselors across the New Visions network have begun using them with students to jump-start postsecondary planning conversations in the 11th grade, while others are looking to start the conversation as early as 9th grade.
A student interest inventory is a strong way to launch postsecondary exploration. From there, schools will need curricular materials to develop students’ socioemotional learning competencies and to build students’ college and career knowledge. In Teaching for Purpose, Heather Malin (2018) profiles schools across the country that have implemented curricular materials rooted in purpose. One school that Malin describes, eStem High School in Little Rock, Arkansas, partners with the Noble Impact program to offer a three-year curricular sequence that supports students to develop purpose and share this purpose with others. Students engage in classroom activities such as journaling, class discussions, and a variety of student-initiated projects; and, in the third year of the sequence, they participate in an apprenticeship that directly connects to an area of their interest. While most of the schools Malin profiles partner with organizations that offer fee-based curricula, Malin also describes how schools can take advantage of open educational resources such as the free Fostering Purpose Toolkit (www.fosterpurpose.org) that educators can download and modify as needed to meet the needs of their school population.
In-school group learning opportunities
Few of the nation’s high schools devote significant amounts of time to teaching students about college and career opportunities and helping them explore how their interests and passions might map onto such opportunities. All too often, such topics get crowded out by academic subjects and other classes required for graduation. For students of privilege, this is not a major problem. I know, for example, that if my own white, middle-class children’s public schools do not provide them the opportunities to develop a postsecondary purpose, I can help them fill in the gaps. However, for students from low-income communities and communities of color that have been systematically deprived access to important types of social capital, the school’s lack of support can have significant ramifications.
To ensure that students have access to postsecondary guidance, many schools in the New Visions network take the initiative to schedule every student for college- and career-prep classes and/or advisory. During these classes, students explore topics such as the postsecondary landscape across New York City, how two- and four-year colleges differ, what to look for in a workforce training program, and the importance of self-awareness and responsible decision making. Why self-awareness and responsible decision making? Our educators know that awareness of oneself and the ability to make sound decisions are socioemotional competencies that are not only critical to college and career preparation but also have broad relevance across the curriculum and beyond the school. Schools in the New Visions network have exhibited great creativity with how they schedule students for college-and career-prep and/or advisory. Some schools provide these classes two or three times a week for one or two years, while others find a way to offer the opportunity to students during each of their four years of high school.
Work-based and extracurricular learning
In-school learning experiences can help students define a sense of purpose, but school is not the only, or even the best, site for adolescents to explore their interests. Self-chosen extracurricular opportunities — such as athletic programs, dance, or Model United Nations — often enable students to extend their learning and discover areas of passion. Similarly, work-based learning experiences — in the form of internships, service learning, apprenticeships, and paid employment — can allow young people to explore their interests, likes and dislikes, and careers that might be a good fit for them. Plus, both extracurricular opportunities and work-based learning experiences help students build social capital, develop workplace skills and socioemotional competencies, form positive relationships with adults, and sometimes even earn a paycheck—which is rewarding and self-validating for all students and can be critical for students from low-income families. Because accessing these opportunities can be a challenge, though, schools should take an active role in connecting students with relevant programs.
In 2014, I conducted research at a high school that required students to complete 120 internship hours over their four years. But students weren’t left to their own devices — rather, they were asked to share their interests with school counselors, who did their best to connect them to opportunities that would likely interest them. For example, Yessica, who had dreams of becoming a nurse, was sent to a nursing home called Hebrew House to explore her interests. Once there, she not only had a chance to work with and learn from nurses, but she also received postsecondary preparation support that included tutoring, college counseling, and a résumé-writing workshop (Greenfield, 2015). Yessica had a fabulous experience at Hebrew House. She loved the counselors and loved working with senior citizens. In many ways, this internship was more meaningful to her than any of her academic classes.
I don’t mean to suggest that schools can, or even should, do this work on their own. Some countries, like Germany, Singapore, and Switzerland, have integrated apprenticeship ecosystems that connect learning academies to the workforce. The United States is a different place, and more work is needed to build the kinds of connections necessary to give students the kinds of opportunities Yessica had. Not long ago, I was on a call with principals from across New York City who described their efforts to secure internships for their students and the value they placed on career-connected learning. They explained that there were not enough internship opportunities to meet their students’ needs, and their budgets prevented them from hiring a staff member — such as an internship coordinator — who could take on the responsibility of moving this work forward. There is a lot schools can do to promote work-based and extracurricular learning, but they cannot do it alone.
School counseling support
Inventories and curricular materials and opportunities to explore areas of interest in and out of school are essential, but the most important ingredient in a purpose-first model is educators, the individuals on the ground implementing the work. In a purpose-first high school, administrators, teachers, and non-pedagogical staff all play important roles in ensuring that students have frequent and systematic opportunities to explore purpose. A principal is needed to set the vision, distribute responsibility across their staff for enacting the vision, and ensure that systems and structures are in place to support students and families. Teachers need to enact culturally relevant and sustaining instructional practices that help students find themselves (or their future selves) in the curriculum.
While the role of teachers and school administrators are undeniable, I focus here on school counselors and college and career counselors because, like former school counselor (and now a university professor) Mandy Savitz-Romer, I believe school counselors play a unique and indispensable role in a school’s ecosystem. In Fulfilling the Promise, Savitz-Romer (2019) draws an analogy between our nation’s medical system and our educational system. Primary care physicians, she explains, serve as a node, not only providing one-on-one care to patients but coordinating patient care and connecting patients to specialists when necessary. In a purpose-first postsecondary model, counselors play an analogous role. They provide one-on-one counseling, and with care and precision, support each student in their caseload to develop a postsecondary plan, adjust that plan as their interests change, and, ultimately, pursue their plan. And like the primary care physician, they also make connections. They guide students to relevant coursework and internships. They organize virtual college trips, chaperone in-person college tours, work closely with families and caregivers, and support students’ financial aid application process.
It’s a lot. It may even sound like too much. However, with reasonable caseloads, strong teams, and equally strong systems, this vision can become a reality. To ensure reasonable caseload size, districts and schools need to prioritize the recruitment, hiring, and development of counselors. This is no easy task. Across the country, there is a counselor shortage. According to a report from the National Association for College Admission Counseling (Patel & Clinedinst, 2021), in 2015-16, only two states (Vermont and New Hampshire) had average counselor caseloads below the recommended ratio of 250 students per counselor. In Arizona, the average counselor caseload is 902, and in Michigan it is 744. Certainly, individuals are unlikely to flock to the counseling field if wages remain as they are.
In the face of these structural challenges, principals across the New Visions network have become increasingly creative at addressing this problem. They are hiring one or two dedicated college and career counselors and — with the support of the central New Visions office — hiring recent high school graduates to serve as part-time near-peer advisers. When these near-peer advisers are hired, they join existing teams that meet regularly to review the progress of students, identify which students need additional support, and create plans to carry out and track the completion of this support. In this way, groups of adults take responsibility for subgroups of students and develop systems to ensure all students take the steps necessary to prepare for and transition into their chosen postsecondary path.
Making the connection
The concept of grounding postsecondary support in purpose, rather than tracking students into college-only or career-only pathways, may appear lofty and even unrealistic. Certainly, this was the reception that the great John Dewey received when he argued for the centrality of purpose in the 1930s. In Experience and Education (1938/1997), Dewey wrote:
There is, I think, no point in the philosophy of progressive education which is sounder than its emphasis upon the importance of the participation of the learner in the formation of the purposes which direct his [sic] activities in the learning process. (p. 67)
In the 1930s, the Deweyan approach of foregrounding liberal studies and student interest lost out to the efforts of its supposed rival, the vocational educational movement. But there need not be any conflict among purpose exploration, college and career preparation, and socioemotional development. It is all interconnected. The task before us is to design coherent high school programs that interweave these elements and are nimble enough to respond to changes that will consistently and inexorably come our way.
References
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This article appears in the May 2022 issue of Kappan, Vol. 103, No. 8, pp. 37-42.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeremy S. Greenfield
JEREMY S. GREENFIELD is the deputy director of college access and success at New Visions for Public Schools, New York, NY.
