The current career pathways movement can learn from past school-to-work efforts while building on recent trends.  

You’ve no doubt heard the complaints: It has become harder and harder to find a decent job with just a high school diploma, but schools haven’t done enough to prepare students, especially those from low-income backgrounds, to succeed in higher education and move into the many good jobs that are available, and which employers are desperate to fill. 

It’s not a new dilemma. Many of us remember hearing and making similar observations about education and the economy back in the 1980s, prompting the rise of the school-to-work movement and leading to the many current initiatives that fit under the larger umbrella of “career pathways” (Schwartz, Ferguson, & Symonds, 2011).  

Of course, history never really repeats itself, and today’s situation is not precisely the same as what we faced in the 1980s. Since then, manufacturing jobs have contracted in the face of automation and off-shoring. A generation of skilled workers has retired, and White men have come to be outnumbered in the workforce by women and people of color. The college-for-all movement supplanted school-to-work, and many more young people now enroll in college (though many of them do not complete a degree program; Rosenbaum et al., 2015).  

In the 1980s, concerns about the nation’s prosperity and the education system’s failure were driven by the rise of Japan and Germany as manufacturing powers competing with U.S. industries. In A Nation at Risk, the National Commission on Excellence in Education (1983) likened the inadequacy of K-12 schools to “unilateral disarmament” and called for a renewed commitment to rigor sufficient to enable all high school graduates to go to college. A counterargument subsequently emerged that accepted the seriousness of the economic challenge but questioned the feasibility and appropriateness of sending all youth to four-year colleges, advocating instead for a wider range of learning opportunities (Youth and America’s Future, 1988b). In particular, German-style apprenticeship programs, which had seen some investment during the Carter administration, began to receive serious attention, inspiring both policy initiatives and youth apprenticeship demonstration projects.  

This ferment culminated in the passage of the School-to-Work Opportunities Act of 1994 (STWOA) — fulfilling one of President Bill Clinton’s campaign promises — which offered federal grants to states and school districts to create work-based learning opportunities that were connected to school-based learning. Expenditures of $1.85 billion under this program stimulated a great deal of enthusiastic activity but failed to achieve the systemic change that advocates sought. George W. Bush’s election in 2000 ensured the termination of federal funding, but the legislation was already scheduled to sunset, the grants having been touted as “venture capital” for starting programs that would rely on the financial commitment of states and districts to continue.  

The school-to-work movement brought together a community of advocates, practitioners, and researchers whose influence continues to be evident today. 

Perversely, the school-to-work movement put so much of its energy into the legislation that, once the federal funding dried up, the movement itself seemed to run out of gas. In important ways, though, it continued to influence policy and practice. For instance, it established the principle that work-based learning can be powerful and appropriate for all students, not just vocational students. It sparked interest in providing young people with internship opportunities, which have since become common in secondary and postsecondary education. It also gave a boost to career academies, which have continued to gain prominence. And perhaps most important, the school-to-work movement brought together a community of advocates, practitioners, and researchers whose influence continues to be evident today. 

Toward a comprehensive system  

While the current career pathways movement owes much to the school-to-work effort of the 1980s and ’90s, it also improves upon it in some ways. For example, while the earlier generation of advocates unintentionally conveyed the impression that work-based learning is for students who are not likely to go to college, the career pathways movement has adopted the more inclusive mantra of college and career readiness, where “college” is understood to include two-year colleges and career and technical training institutions. Further, career pathways advocates are more careful to argue that all students should meet rigorous academic standards, that real learning can go on outside of conventional teacher-centered classrooms, and that instruction should have personal and real-world relevance to students (beyond the idea that “you’ll need to know this for college”). 

Still, today’s career pathways movement has yet to tackle the main problem we faced in the school-to-work days: STWOA called for the creation of a comprehensive career preparation system, but it failed to specify what such a system would look like. Worse still, the legislation invested mainly in individual school-to-work projects, without providing ongoing support for and attention to building a larger school-to-work infrastructure. Thus, it virtually guaranteed that recipients would create their own discrete, local programs that fail to add up to an effective network of supports and services.  

To build a genuine system, policy makers and practitioners will need to create not just large numbers of high-quality work-based learning opportunities but also career information and advising services, stronger connections between secondary and postsecondary education, trustworthy career credentials, and organizations to support and facilitate all of these efforts. To make real, lasting improvements on the accomplishments of the school-to-work era, today’s career pathways movement will have to put these pieces together: 

High-quality work-based learning 

One of the shortcomings of STWOA was that most grantees offered one form of work-based learning, then stopped. Most chose job shadowing, in which students visit a workplace and follow a professional in their area of interest for a day, since that allowed programs to expose a lot of students to a lot of careers for relatively little investment. However, the effects of such one-off programs — and work-like experiences such as simulations and short-term service-learning projects — were bound to be limited. It takes more resources to arrange more formal, longer-term experiences such as internships and, even more intensive, apprenticeships. However, such experiences also tend to be much more powerful and, for many students, more responsive to their developmental needs.  

High-quality work-based learning provides engaging opportunities for academic learning, offering hands-on alternatives to learning content that is also taught in classrooms. But it also provides opportunities to learn important nonacademic knowledge and skills — having to do with responsibility, collaboration, trust, ethics, and more — that classroom instruction rarely fosters, and that doesn’t show up in grades and test scores (National Research Council, 2012). For instance, if young people apprentice at a car repair shop, they’ll learn that adjusting an automobile’s suspension requires them to calculate angles, multiply decimals, and master other academic content. And at the same time, they’ll also learn that their everyday behavior has real consequences. If you show up late to class, your teacher might be annoyed and mark you tardy, but if you show up late to the workplace, you let down your colleagues and customers. 

Career information and advising 

When designing career pathways that lead to actual jobs, educators must be careful to expand students’ opportunities, not steer them into narrow lanes. A 14-year-old may be sure she wants to pursue a career in medicine, but she should still receive the preparation needed to major in engineering in college, in case her interests change.  

At the same time, pathways should be responsive to the changing labor market, which will require educators to learn something about the economy and the workforce, asking: What are the fastest-growing job sectors in the local area, and what competencies will students need if they want to pursue careers in those fields? For example, if advanced manufacturing is in decline throughout the region, then that may not be the right pathway to offer. And if the health care sector is taking off, then it might be time to create a pathway into nursing, including coursework that would also allow students to go into a college premed program. For this sort of information, the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET and Occupational Outlook Handbook are good places to start, but educators should also develop partnerships with employers and workforce development experts. 

It’s not enough for educators to create such opportunities, though. They must also share labor market information with high school students and their parents, so they can make informed choices about the kind of work they might want to pursue, how to prepare for it, and how to broaden their career options, rather than boxing themselves into a dead-end job (Vondracek, Lerner, & Schulenberg, 1986). This means that school counselors will need more time to provide meaningful career counseling, which also means that schools will need to bring more counselors on board. Further, schools should leverage their partnerships to tap into other sources of advice and guidance, helping students connect to local adults whose professional experiences and knowledge can inform and inspire them.   

Trustworthy career credentials 

Diplomas are not the only or even the most useful career credentials. Trustworthy certificates, licenses, and other formal testaments to career competence have real value in the workplace (Carnevale, Rose, & Hanson, 2012), and countries that have well-developed apprenticeship systems also have elaborate credentialing systems to signal to employers that graduates have truly learned the skills they need to succeed in the given field.  

Recognizing this, a National Skills Standards Board was created in 1994, in parallel with STWOA, to generate occupational standards and credentials. However, by the time the board’s funding ended, in 2003, it was still in the early stages of its work. It helped some occupations to create trustworthy credentials before its termination, and many schools now confer industry-recognized certificates or licenses to students who meet the requirements for some occupations (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012-13). However, many other occupations still do not have such standards in place (Cass et al., 2018), and the relative scarcity of widely accepted formal credentials has created a serious barrier to expanding apprenticeship to new career areas. After all, if a credential provides no real advantage in getting a job, students have little reason to invest the time and effort needed to earn one.  

Credentials are important not just as barriers prospective workers must cross to get a job, but also as guideposts for career pathways. For instance, the credentials required to practice nursing make it clear what a would-be nurse will have to learn, and what a nursing program will have to teach. When careers have no recognized credentials, career pathways are obscured. To turn an old adage on its head: If any road can take you there, then you don’t know where you’re going.  

Links to postsecondary education 

Many school-to-work advocates aimed to provide students with pathways to college and well-paying jobs, not just to offer them an alternative to higher education. But still, the movement did sometimes give the impression that it was for young people who opted out of the college-prep curriculum. For example, one of the movement’s most influential reports, The Forgotten Half, included, in its interim version, the unfortunate subtitle, Non-College Youth in America (Youth and America’s Future, 1988a).  

Many school-to-work advocates aimed to provide students with pathways to college and well-paying jobs, not just to offer them an alternative to higher education.

The messaging was all wrong — suggesting that some students are not college material — but the underlying reasoning made good sense: The fact was, and remains, that most young adults do not earn college degrees (National Center for Education Statistics, 2019), and this “neglected majority” (Parnell, 1985) needs real career support, not just more encouragement to pursue higher education. Otherwise, their only option is to look for the same kinds of low-paid jobs they held in high school, hoping that with age and experience they can land a job paying enough to support a family.  

Today’s career pathways advocates, some of them older and wiser school-to-work advocates, are more astute about the need to link their programs to college admissions and degree requirements as well as realistic job opportunities. But creating real bridges between schools and colleges can be challenging. High school graduates rarely move on, as a class, to the same college; rather, they choose from a plethora of options, near and far. A single high school simply cannot coordinate its career pathway curricula with the entry requirements of every college its graduates might attend.  

However, among students attending public four-year universities, the majority (56.2%) attend a college no more than an hour’s drive from home, and nearly 70% attend one within a two-hour drive (Wozniak, 2018). Further, while many of us assume that going to college means moving into a college dormitory and taking a full course load, that’s not the experience of most college students: In 2011-12, only 12.1% of postsecondary students lived on campus, 46.1% lived off campus, and 33.5% lived with parents or relatives (National Center for Education Statistics, 2012-13). In short, a large percentage of students attend colleges near where they’ve grown up and are grateful for opportunities to accumulate credits and earn diplomas and certificates part time while working and living at, or near, home. The question is how to make it possible for more students to succeed in doing so, rather than expecting them to work at a low-wage service job and take traditional college courses on the side. 

Since the 1990s, the growth of dual (or concurrent) enrollment has done much to help facilitate career pathways. Dual-enrolled high school students may travel to a nearby campus for classes, a college instructor may travel to the high school, or a high school teacher may be authorized to teach a college course. Similarly, early college high schools, which are colocated on community college campuses, and other programs (such as the well-known P-Tech model) allow students to go to high school through “grade 14,” obtaining their associate’s degree and high school diploma simultaneously. In the past, most dual-enrollment programs strictly focused on academic coursework. However, community and technical colleges have substantial capacity to teach career and technical education courses, and increasing numbers are offering dual-enrollment programs that enable students to earn college credits that also count toward a meaningful credential. 

Supporting organizations 

As many veterans of the school-to-work movement came to learn the hard way, few schools or colleges have the capacity to put in place all the elements of a truly comprehensive career pathways system. Realistically, some parts of the system will not be created or maintained without the help of supporting organizations — be they public/private collaborations, grant-funded institutions, university-based initiatives, or some other kind of organization — that can serve a range of important functions, including: facilitating relationships between educators and employers; raising and distributing the funds needed to operate career pathways; designing programs and course sequences; providing professional development and technical assistance; conducting research and program evaluations; creating materials to inform students, parents, employers, and educators about career pathways and how they work, and advocating for investments in career pathways, whether in city halls and state capitals or at foundations and chambers of commerce.  

In the school-to-work era, such supporting organizations received too little attention, as federal grants went mostly to starting individual programs. The School-to-Work Opportunities Office did its best to serve some of the functions described above, and the nonprofit organization Jobs for the Future (now JFF) emerged as a key provider of information and professional development. But it is only in recent years that more significant efforts have been made to create and fund the sorts of robust organizations needed to support local and regional career pathway systems. Notable examples include the James Irvine Foundation’s creation of Linked Learning (Schwartz & Seeskin, 2015), which in turn inspired the California Career Pathways Trust. In addition to funding demonstration projects at the school and district levels, the foundation created a new organization, ConnectEd, which designed and tested the model, created curricula, conducted professional development, and crafted policy. The Linked Learning Alliance was formed subsequently to perform advocacy and other supporting functions. This is the sort of multifaceted support or infrastructure that will be needed to make career pathways effective and enduring. 

Prospects for system-building 

Cynicism is an occupational hazard for education reformers. Trends come and go, the pendulum swings to and fro. But current enthusiasm for career pathways presents an opportunity to make secondary and postsecondary education more effective for all students, whether effectiveness is defined in terms of college readiness or career readiness. One reason for optimism that college and career readiness can be linked is the fact that employers are seeking employees whose competencies line up quite well with those associated with a liberal education.  

Another source of strength in the current context is that the impetus for career pathways is coming from states and regions, not the federal government. While federal leadership and money can be useful, it proved fickle in the school-to-work era. In the long run, we are more likely to succeed by building a career pathways system that mirrors the decentralized nature of our education system, with districts and states taking primary responsibility and providing most of the funding. Proceeding with limited federal funding may take longer, but the results are more likely to last.  

References 

Carnevale, A.P., Rose, S.J., & Hanson, A.R. (2012). Certificates: Gateway to gainful employment and college degrees. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce. 

Cass, O., Doar, R., Dodge, K.A., Galston, W.A., Haskins, R., Jacoby, T., . . . & Wilcox, A.B. (2018). Work, skills, community: Restoring opportunity for the working class. Washington, DC: Opportunity America, the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, & the Brookings Institution. 

National Center for Education Statistics. (2012-13). Table 5.12. In State education reforms. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. http://bit.ly/CPCredentials 

National Center for Education Statistics. (2013). Table 311.10. In Digest of education statistics. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education.  

National Center for Education Statistics. (2019). College enrollment rates. In The Condition of Education. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. 

National Commission on Excellence in Education. (1983). A nation at risk. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Education. 

National Research Council. (2012). Education for life and work: Developing transferable knowledge and skills in the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academies Press. 

Parnell, D. (1985). The neglected majority. Washington, DC: Community College Press. 

Rosenbaum, J., Ahearn, C., Becker, K., & Rosenbaum, J. (2015). The new forgotten half and research directions to support them. New York, NY: William T. Grant Foundation.  

Schwartz, R.B., Ferguson, R., & Symonds, W.C. (2011). Pathways to prosperity: Meeting the challenge of preparing young Americans for the 21st century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Graduate School of Education.  

Schwartz, R. & Seeskin, A. (2015). From demonstration to field-building: The James Irvine Foundation’s Linked Learning initiative. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Education Press.  

Vondracek, F.M., Lerner, R.M., Schulenberg, J.E. (1986). Career development: A life-span developmental approach. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. 

Wozniak, A. (2018). Going away to college? School distance as a barrier to higher education. Medford, MA: Tufts University, Econofact Network.  

Youth and America’s Future: The William T. Grant Commission on Work, Family, and Citizenship. (1988a). The forgotten half: Non-college youth in America: An interim report on the school-to-work transition. Washington, DC: Author. 

Youth and America’s Future: The William T. Grant Commission on Work, Family and Citizenship. (1988b). The forgotten half: Pathways to success for America’s youth and young families. Washington, DC: Author. 

Note: This article is based on a paper written with support from the Ford Foundation, which drew from interviews with more than 40 people.