At a glance
- Many students lack access to the tools and support they need to make it to college, earn a degree, and gain the professional skills and social capital that are crucial to succeeding in a career.
- For example, the average ratio of students to guidance counselors in public high schools is 385:1, far higher than the 250:1 ratio recommended by the American School Counselor Association. As a result, far too many talented, motivated young people are left behind in the transition after high school to the next phase of education, missing out on careers and wages that postsecondary education could help unlock.
- Data on median earnings over a 40-year career shows that a bachelor’s degree holder earns about $1.2 million more than someone with only a high school diploma, and that an associate degree holder earns about $400,000 more than someone who is a high school graduate only.
- By working together, funders, educators, policymakers, employers, and communities can transform disconnected efforts into a unified movement that ensures access for every student, regardless of background, to high-quality pathways that lead to meaningful careers.
The latest updates on pathways
How does creating more pathways for students lead to more potential?
From the interview chair to serious barbecue: CEO Mark Suzman in Texas
Meet the NAU student who’s graduating debt-free
Our strategy
We aim to ensure that all students—especially those facing economic or structural barriers—receive support at every stage of their education-to-career pathway. This means ensuring access not only to postsecondary education—resulting in a college degree—but also to tools, resources, support, and relationships that can help them discover a path, stay on it, and ultimately thrive in their adult life.
Visit our U.S. Program website
Our U.S. Program works to ensure that everyone in the U.S. can learn, grow, and get ahead, regardless of race, gender, ethnicity, or family income.
Areas of focus
When school systems, postsecondary institutions, and employers work together, they can identify approaches that support success for young people.
Why focus on educational pathways?
Not all young people have access to opportunities that facilitate success in school and in life. The data shows that many students, particularly Black and Latino students and students experiencing poverty, lose momentum in disproportionately large numbers during key transition periods between high school, college, and employment due to lack of support.
If we want to ensure greater economic mobility for all young people, we must ensure that they have the tools, resources, and services they need to not only make it to college, but to earn a valued credential and gain the social capital that will help them succeed in a career, achieve financial stability, and make meaningful contributions to their community. We know that relationship-based services, including mentoring and advising, can be crucial in enabling young people to get on a path to realizing their dreams.
Few education systems currently provide these supports, especially at key transition points. This contributes to persistent opportunity and outcome gaps: Only 36% of students from families in the lowest income quartile earn any postsecondary credential, compared with 78% in the top quartile; and only 36% of Black Americans and 30% of Latino Americans over age 25 have at least an associate degree, compared with 52% of white Americans.
This has real impact on workforce needs: In 1983, 32% of jobs required more than a high school diploma—by 2031, the figure is projected to be 72%.
Good work is underway—by educators, policymakers, and community-based organizations, among others—to keep students on the path to education after high school and then to career success. But these opportunities are not available to all students and are limited by an ecosystem in which K-12, higher education, and employers are working with different goals, funding sources, and policies. Better coordination is needed, but resources are limited. We want to accelerate progress and contribute to the growing momentum toward opening doors to more and better career-connected education options for all students after high school, across the nation.
Related programs
The K-12 education team works to improve K-12 teaching and learning, with a focus on math as the cornerstone skill for academic success and greater opportunities in the workforce.
The Economic Mobility and Opportunity team works to help the U.S. economic system better meet the needs of those experiencing poverty and significantly increase their opportunities to achieve economic success.
The Postsecondary Success team supports colleges and universities in making institutional reforms that eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of educational success.
Our partners
CCWT conducts and support research, critical policy analysis, and public dialogue on student experiences with the transition from college to the workforce in order to promote academic and career success for all learners.
We support the Dana Center’s Launch Years initiative, which aims to ensure that every student has access to high-quality math education that is relevant to their future.
We support the Who You Know initiative, which helps schools take innovative approaches to building students’ social capital through networks of relationships.
We support JFF’s Building Equitable Pathways initiative, which works to strengthen national systems of high-quality college and career pathways to better serve all young people.
OneGoal addresses systemic barriers to students from low-income communities completing their postsecondary education, by focusing on the transitional years from high school through the first year of college.