The Career Pathways Movement: A Promising Strategy for Increasing Opportunity and Mobility

As the movement to raise academic standards has grown over the past 25 years, so has the notion grown that the primary purpose of the American high school is to prepare all students for college. High school students and their families have increasingly bought into the notion that the only legitimate destination after high school is “college.” The “college for all” mantra has to some degree been fueled by the dire predictions of economists that we were headed into a world in which there were only going to be two kinds of jobs: high‐skill, high‐wage jobs for those with at least a 4‐year degree; and low‐wage, low‐skill jobs for everyone else. The career pathways movement—based on the premise that everyone needs something beyond a high school diploma but not necessarily a 4‐year degree, and designed to connect young people to middle‐skill jobs in such growing fields as information technology, health care, and advanced manufacturing—offers a promising route to upward mobility for those young people not well served by our current education system.