Career pathways have a scaling problem. Here’s what needs to change.
Imagine a student named Jeremias who started high school this fall. Like most incoming freshmen, he hasn't made any decisions about what comes next. He doesn't know yet what he's passionate about or where he wants to end up. What he does have is options. A lot of them. Everything from agriculture to health sciences to entrepreneurship. But Jeremias isn’t looking for more choices. He’s looking for a way to make sense of them. What he needs is to understand which options connect his hopes and dreams and abilities to a real career and a real future.
Jeremias's situation isn't unusual — it's the norm. Across the U.S., we've invested heavily in building pathways for students to connect to future careers, but far less in making sure students can actually find and follow them.
This is a mistake: we've gotten good at creating new programs, but not at building a pathways system that works for students at scale.
The promise of career pathways
Over the last two decades, career pathways have gone from supplemental to core programming, with states and philanthropies investing billions to ensure students have access. More than two dozen states have now adopted some version of a Portrait of a Graduate — a shared vision of what students should know and be able to do when they leave high school that formally centers career readiness. And 21 states now submit unified education and workforce plans that braid and maximize federal funding for career pathways training programs. Bloomberg Philanthropies alongside other funders like Gates and Walton Family Foundation have in recent years announced significant investments in this area.
If there is so much momentum behind the movement, why isn’t the reality on the ground changing at a much faster pace?
Career pathways that students can navigate require an enormous amount of coordination from an often-siloed set of actors: districts, postsecondary institutions, employers, and state agencies, each with different incentives and timelines. Even under the best of intentions, that coordination is hard to start and often breaks down. Predictable frictions emerge: funding is haphazard, employers don’t see an incentive for deeper engagement, and it's very hard to measure whether there is any change happening. These are not isolated issues, but systemic patterns that highlight the gap between policy intent and delivery in practice.
1. See the system from the student’s perspective
The evidence from implementation is clear about what's possible when those leading reform are supported to see the whole system and create coherence across actors. This starts with mapping the chain of individuals, organizations, relationships, potential bottlenecks and risks that influence how effectively a student experiences career pathways. We call this the delivery chain.
We have seen delivery chains produce countless ‘a’has’ as state education leaders realize they never communicated their pathways plan to community colleges or district leaders realize they each were operating under different assumptions about the role of advisors.
For example, nonprofit, Learn to Earn Dayton, used a delivery chain to unpack the differing variables at play when implementing pathways in suburban vs. rural vs. urban districts. They used the findings to identify which elements could transfer across districts and where adaptation was required.
Seeing the system means seeing it the way students experience it — not as disparate courses and programs but as a chain of relationships, decisions, incentives, and actions that shape a student’s journey.
2. Set a clear goal for the system
Understanding how a system works is only the first step. Once leaders can see the actors and sequences that shape students' experiences, they face a significant hurdle: defining what success actually looks like.
For many years, success has mostly been measured by access: the number of students who have taken a career and technical education (CTE) course, how many concentrate in a pathway, or how many have taken dual enrollment courses. These data points don't tell us how a student is experiencing a career pathway or whether it led to meaningful outcomes.
The Massachusetts Alliance for Early College (MA4EC) shows what a strong vision and goals can do. The alliance pushed to define success not just in terms of how many students were participating in the Early College program, but what would occur if more students did: a 15% annual increase in associate degree attainment and a meaningful reduction in the state's equity gap.
Ambitious goals matter because they point to the destination and give disparate actors something to rally behind. If state governments set a clearer vision for the scale and impact career pathways need to achieve — and build the systems to track progress toward it — local and regional partners would be far more likely to align behind specific efforts. Alignment is a step toward coherence, and coherence is what's needed for students to experience pathways as a clear journey toward their goals.
3. Put someone in the student’s corner
Seeing the system and setting goals are necessary, but neither guarantees that Jeremias finds his way through it. When leaders map the delivery chain, one pattern surfaces repeatedly: the roles closest to students, advisors, career navigators, counselors, are also the ones with the least clarity around funding, accountability, and scope. A school counselor managing 400 students cannot do this work. A single career fair cannot do this work.
The most effective pathways programs treat navigation as a designed, resourced function rather than an afterthought. They create dedicated navigator roles who combine individual advising, career-connected learning, and employer engagement. This is what makes the other two pieces real: the delivery chain tells you where navigators need to sit in the system, and the bold goal tells you what they are working toward.
Jeremias does not need more options. He needs pathways that provide clarity instead of confusion, advisors and teachers who help him understand his options, and a system designed to meet his unique needs at every step.
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