The students’ home districts — Agua Dulce, Premont, Brooks County, Freer and Benavides — used to operate separately. They had a shrinking student population, were unable to provide much career and technical education, and struggled with low achievement. But seven years ago, a handshake between the superintendents of the Premont and Freer independent school districts gave rise to what would become the .

Today, the consortium, created to stave off consolidation threats and improve student outcomes, is being lauded as a . And the Texas legislature has encouraged other districts to follow its lead.

The five districts, located 45 to 90 minutes southwest of Corpus Christi and serving a student population that is at least 75% Hispanic, share six academies: Early College, for credit toward an associate degree; Grow Your Own, for future teachers; Ignite Technical Institute, focusing on welding; Next Generation Medical Academy, offering nursing and pharmacy education; Willa Zelaya STEM Discovery Zone, featuring computer technology, drone aviation and robotics; and Trade Winds Academy, for HVAC, construction and electrical.

Students wishing to participate in an academy choose the program they want in eighth grade. They take traditional core classes at their home high school and travel to the academies twice a week and every other Friday — about 10 times a month. 

Sophomore Juliana Farias catches a 6:45 a.m. van, driven by school staff and internet-equipped, at her high school in Agua Dulce for the 45-minute trip to the Grow Your Own Academy. Her friend Emmerson Perez, also a sophomore, does the same in the small town of Freer, nearly an hour west. 

They meet up at Premont Collegiate High School around 7:30 a.m. and walk to a nearby elementary to begin their day as teacher interns. The two won’t be in Premont long. They’ll return to their respective high schools by midday to continue their regular classes. 

Mylan Pena, a junior at Falfurrias High School in Brooks County Independent School District, chose the welding academy because it offers the chance to earn a free associate degree as well as industry credentials. When Pena was a child, his uncle and grandfather worked as oil pipeline welders, leaving home for weeks at a time. It’s a job he wants to pursue after he graduates.

“I’m blessed to even have this opportunity,” he said. “My mom is a single mother. I know she wouldn’t have the funds to provide this for me. Getting the opportunity to take college (classes) for free and learning to weld for free means a lot.”

Pathways like these are more commonly found in larger, wealthier metropolitan school districts. Texas has more schools in rural areas than any other state — about . As families flock to more densely populated communities, rural schools are left with scarce resources and sometimes merge as they struggle to serve isolated towns. 

That was the situation in 2019, when the Rural Schools Innovation Zone officially launched. 

The districts had to find something innovative to keep the doors open, said Michael Gonzalez, Rural Schools Innovation Zone director. “We had no opportunities for kids,” he said. “We needed to do something about it.”

The Premont and Freer districts obtained grant funding and partnered with Brooks County Independent School District to form the consortium. It expanded to include the Agua Dulce and Benavides districts in 2023. The five districts together have about 3,250 students.

Last year, 424 students were enrolled in the academies. Now, there are nearly 600. Gonzalez said 680 are projected to participate in the 2026-27 school year.

It “was phenomenal” how the Rural Schools Innovation Zone turned trends around for the communities in south Texas, Gonzalez said. He’s been the consortium’s director since it was created and was the sole employee for five years, before recently hiring a liaison to help coordinate between the districts and their college partners.

Premont, which had the worst of the partner school districts, increased its student population from 570 students in 2012 to in 2024. From 2018-19 to 2023-24, the school districts the percentage of their graduating students who pass the state’s in both math and reading from 30% to 51%. The percentage of seniors with dual credit jumped from 16% to 50%, while those with industry certifications increased from 8% to 38%.

Based on the program’s success, Texas legislators in 2023 to create a that funds similar collaborations among rural districts. The Rural Schools Innovation Zone is such partnerships across Texas. Last year, lawmakers for career technical and education programs, including the rural collaborations, and promoted them as a key strategy for economic growth in the state. 

Here’s a look inside some of the academies, and what their students have to say about their experiences.

Grow Your Own Educator Academy 

Farias chose the Grow Your Own Educator Academy at Premont Collegiate High School to fulfill dreams she’s had since she was a little girl.

“My mom was an aide for special education students and some of my best friends are autistic, and as a little kid, you don’t realize the differences until you grow up,” she said. “I get a lot of, ‘You don’t want to do special education. It’s a hard place to be and it’s a lot of work.’ But that’s what I want to do, so looking into the program, I was like, ‘I need to be in this. It’s something I want to do and I get to start early on in my life.’”

It was initially intimidating for Farias to travel to Premont, because she was the only Agua Dulce High School student in the teaching academy. But soon she met Perez, from Freer High School, and Ava Gutierrez, a Premont senior.

“They’ve made it so much more than just the program, and I think that’s what keeps our programs going — because we all have relationships within the program that make it so much more than just college hours,” Perez said. “It’s cool because we’re from different districts, but we’re still friends.”

The trio assist classes at Premont’s elementary school and day care before taking college courses at the high school. Premont High School staff teach some of the classes, while others are in person at colleges closer to Corpus Christi, like Texas A&M University’s campus in Kingsville, about 30 miles away.

“On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I was traveling to Kingsville, and then on Monday, Wednesdays and every other Friday, I was in the classroom in Premont,” Gutierrez said. “It was pretty overwhelming for a while, having to travel back and forth, but you get used to it. After a while, it just kind of starts becoming part of your routine.”

Will Zelaya STEM Discovery Zone 

Andrew Herrera, 16, is a junior firefighter for a Brooks County volunteer fire department. He has been known to stay up until 5 a.m. at the station fixing equipment and changing the oil in the fire trucks.

His dad, the department chief, encouraged the Premont sophomore to enroll in the school’s science, technology, engineering and mathematics academy because of his passion for drones and fire truck mechanics. The program offers instruction in computer technology, engineering, oil and gas drilling, robotics and drone aviation. 

Herrera is pursuing a drone pilot license to assist with fire department calls. 

“I want to do it because nowadays it’s been getting a lot more difficult for ranch (owners), since they’re building so many houses and stuff like that,” he said. “If there’s ever a fire, I’ll be able to fly (the drone) up and I can do 3D mapping or I can find better routes for the trucks to take.”

Haven Farias, a Premont senior, earned his drone pilot license this year. He said he’s also proud of his work building a life-size robot in one of his academy classes. The two passions are something he wants to continue to follow when he pursues a mechanical engineering degree in the fall at Schreiner University in Kerrville, Texas.

“I’m licensed to fly, so I’ll have more opportunities with jobs and everything for the drone side,” Farias said. “I think it’s a great opportunity. Even though I’m in, like, 10,000 sports, and I’m doing five college classes, and then I have to do all my high school classes, it’s not really difficult. It’s all about time management.”

Ignite Technical Institute 

For Amber Garcia, a commitment to achieving an associate degree is what’s kept her going at Ignite Technical Institute, the welding pathway at Falfurrias High School in Brooks County Independent School District. 

The Premont senior works two part-time jobs — sometimes overnight until 6 a.m. — while taking her regular classes, pursuing pathway courses and gaining college credit. Garcia was in the foster system when she was introduced to the Rural Schools Innovation Zone. Now she’s one of the best welders in the program, Gonzalez said, and one of the few female students.

“In my eighth grade year, my older brothers were doing it, and I was kind of inspired by it, but they didn’t like it,” she said. “I wanted to do it. I fell in love with it.”

Garcia said it’s sometimes hard to get up in the mornings and make it to school, but she always attends her welding classes. Gonzalez said he calls her on days she doesn’t travel to Falfurrias to make sure she’s still going to Premont High School. The work has paid off, she said, because soon she’ll go straight into the workforce as a welder.

“A lot of kids are lazy, and our generation is horrible, but you just have to want it,” she said. “You’ve got to push yourself. You have to say, ‘I’m going to do it.’ And no matter how frustrated you get, you just have to keep going. It’s just the growth mindset, but a lot of people don’t have that.”

Next Generation Medical Academy

Mary Alice Cantu was admiring neighborhood Christmas lights with her children and Freer High School’s curriculum director in 2016 when she heard the school had landed a grant to build a health science pathway. She was the school nurse at the time.

“I said, ‘I really would love to do that,’ ” Cantu said. “(My co-worker) turns around and goes, ‘You’re running it.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m what?’ So I went from the school nurse to this, which was a totally different hat that I wasn’t expecting, but I’ve loved it ever since.”

Cantu began teaching classes at what would become the Next Generation Academy without an education degree. She soon pursued a master’s program to have the credentials under her belt and entered her district’s new teacher academy. 

“I realized it’s one thing to be a teacher and another to be a nurse,” she said. “There’s behavior management, pedagogy — all these terms. I was like, ‘You want me to do a lesson plan?’ It’s like a patient care plan, but it’s for your class.”

The nearest college program and hospital is close to an hour away, so it’s important that the medical academy be equipped as closely to a professional setting as possible, Cantu said. The high school’s home economics kitchen was into a model hospital, complete with a reception desk, patient beds, drug administration carts, IV stands and dummy patients. 

Students wear blue scrubs, clock into class with timecards and poke needles into silicone arms to draw synthetic blood before they practice on each other. There are multiple 7-foot-long touchscreen tables with digital replicas of bodies donated to science. Cantu can peel back layers of the cadavers and simulate health conditions for her anatomy or physiology classes.

Students can earn certifications in phlebotomy, electrocardiogram testing, patient care and medical assistance that can be used in the workplace. The academy got so popular that Freer’s next school nurse was hired as a second educator.

“It’s a good problem to have that we’re going to have so many students with certifications, and I don’t mind it, the numbers are growing, and we’ll just figure it out,” Cantu said. “There’s just so much opportunity for these students, whether they decide to go into nursing or not, they’re going to have the confidence and the people skills to be able to step into any setting and succeed.”

This growing enrollment is a double-edged sword, Gonzalez said. As more students join academies like Next Generation, teachers have to play a game of Tetris with class schedules and schools have to consider hiring more staff in a remote area that’s hard to recruit for. 

Student attendance can also be tricky. Gonzalez said some teachers and coaches value athletics or extracurriculars over their academy programs, and students may miss a class they get only twice a week if their team has to travel for a game or conference. 

The number of educators who were present during the zone’s creation is also dwindling. The partner districts have gone through five superintendents in the past three years together, meaning more people are coming in who are unfamiliar with the model and how it works, Gonzalez said.

A couple of districts have the traditional eight class periods, while the others have block schedules, making it difficult to coordinate transportation between schools. And then there are the students who switch academies or decide to leave a program altogether. The STEM academy has the lowest retention rate, at 86%. Next Generation Medical Academy retains more than 96% of its students.

“It’s crucial that we have ‘kid magnets,’ or teachers who have a relationship with these youngsters,” Gonzalez said. “They keep them in there, right? I’m not going to lie — we lose kids all the time.”

Gonzalez’s own job keeps him working all hours of the day. That dedication earned him a from South by Southwest last year.

“I didn’t realize the magnitude of it,” he said. “It’s pretty neat. You know, I just try to stay the course, try to stay on it. I use the word ‘grinder’ a lot because that’s just the way I was raised.”

Gonzalez said the Rural Schools Innovation Zone allows the remote, small districts of south Texas to remain operating and, in turn, keep their communities alive. 

Each town can still gather under bright stadium lights on autumn Fridays to cheer on its football team. Students can continue to walk to their neighborhood school. And families stay because their children can still get big-city opportunities, he said.

“Why do kids pick schools? Usually for programs. They don’t go because they have the best English teacher, right?” he said. “They have the best nursing program, the best baseball program, the best football program. They go for programming and then the ‘kid magnet’ teachers running the program. So if I can allow you to be involved with the best program in the world and you don’t have to leave your school district, it’s a no-brainer. That’s what we did.”

This social capital — the knowledge of how to forge connections that make opportunities visible and attainable — is the missing curriculum in American K-12 and postsecondary education. And it’s a shortcoming with consequences.

Young people from well-connected families absorb social capital almost by osmosis when it comes to learning things like how to ask for help, follow up and signal ambition without arrogance. Others, equally capable but from less-connected families, must figure this out alone. The result is unequal starting lines and unequal outcomes — a yawning between social wealth and social poverty. 

Social wealth means having not only knowledge and credentials, but relationships that open doors, including mentors who give advice, supervisors who challenge us when we need to grow and networks that surface opportunities. Social poverty is the absence of those assets. It is being a talented individual without advocates.

Research finds that students from higher-income families are far more likely to report having mentors who help them consider careers, internships and next steps than students from lower-income backgrounds, first-generation college-goers and young women, especially those without college-educated parents. They report thinner networks and fewer trusted adults to guide them through critical transitions.

One of the most schools and colleges can counter social poverty is through mentorship. It’s not just a “nice to have” experience; young people with mentors are more likely to persist in education and transition successfully into work than those who lack such guidance.

But schools treat mentorship as an optional add-on, something that happens only if a motivated teacher, counselor or employer goes above and beyond.

Psychologist David Yeager what young people need is not generic encouragement, but relationships combining high expectations and genuine support. Effective mentors don’t simply reassure students that they belong. They communicate that growth is expected and that effort will be taken seriously.

This builds trust and reinforces agency. Young people are more likely to persist when they believe that adults see their potential and are invested in helping them meet it.

Yeager suggests these dynamics can be designed and structured rather than left to chance. This doesn’t mean turning schools and colleges into networking factories or diluting academic rigor. It means recognizing that social development is educational development. 

Just as literacy requires instruction and practice, so does learning how to form professional relationships and networks, seek mentorship and navigate institutions.

What would it look like for schools and colleges to design a system that takes this responsibility seriously? Here are six principles to guide this effort.

1. Make mentorship universal, not exceptional. Mentorship shouldn’t depend on self-selection or teacher heroics. Schools and colleges should assign mentors, integrate advisory systems and partner with local organizations to ensure every student has sustained contact with at least one non-family adult mentor. 

2. Start early. Students should encounter mentors beginning in middle school, when identities and aspirations are still forming. These relationships should become more formal and structured as students progress through school and college. Mentorship should be framed as normal, not remedial.

3. Teach the skills of relationship-building. Social capital isn’t only about access — it’s about competence. Students need instruction and practice in how to ask for help, follow up after meetings, give and receive feedback, and navigate professional norms. These skills can be taught, rehearsed and assessed, just like writing or public speaking.

4. Connect learning to people and places. Career exploration should include visits to workplaces, not just abstract classroom discussions about careers. Opportunities to shadow professionals on the job, internships, project-based learning and alumni networks help students see how knowledge travels into the world, and who helps move it along.

5. Signal high expectations with high support. Mentorship programs should avoid coddling or coldness. Adults should communicate clearly that they expect students to grow, stretch and persist, and that they’ll provide the guidance that makes growth possible.

6. Measure what matters. Schools and colleges track test scores and graduation rates but rarely monitor whether students graduate with mentors, references or professional networks. Simple measures, like verifying whether students can name adults who would help them find a job or write a recommendation, should serve as leading indicators of social wealth.

The remedy for this missing curriculum isn’t a mystery. It’s the will to treat social development as a core educational outcome rather than a byproduct. Reframing education around social wealth doesn’t diminish the importance of academic knowledge. It completes it. 

In a world where opportunity increasingly flows through relationships, schools and colleges that ignore social capital risk graduating students who are credentialed but stranded. Those that build it provide young people with the relationships and networks they need so they know that they are seen, supported and connected to a realistic future they can pursue.

That is the curriculum students need. And it’s one that schools and colleges can no longer afford to leave unwritten.

Gov. Josh Stein on Monday outlined his education priorities ahead of this year’s short legislative session, including raising teacher compensation and adding additional school support personnel to meet students’ nonacademic needs.

“If we truly believe that kids are the future of this state, then we have to make the job of educating them more attractive,” he said to a room of education leaders at nonprofit annual meeting.

Stein highlighted education items in his $1.4 billion , released earlier in March, including 5.8% average raises for teachers, funds to restore master’s pay for more than 1,000 teachers, and a 2.5% raise for principals. Beginning teachers would receive a 13% pay raise in the plan.

The state legislature starts its short session in April. It has not passed a new comprehensive budget since 2023. Stein’s proposal says it includes “critical funding needs that cannot wait until next fiscal year.”

He said teacher pay raises are needed to raise student outcomes, pointing out that the state’s average teacher salary ranks 48th in the nation, with its per-pupil spending ranked at 47th in the nation. Those rankings from the Reason Foundation using data from 2023.

“Teachers drive student success,” Stein said Monday. “They are the No. 1 in-school factor of student achievement. We know this, but we have not passed a meaningful raise for our teachers in years.”

Schools also need more support personnel, he said, like social workers, nurses, psychologists, and nurses to meet students’ nonacademic needs.

Stein celebrated recent wins, including the state’s highest four-year , highest on AP exams, and (CTE) courses.

He praised the state’s move to train teachers in “the science of reading,” or a body of research on how students learn to read. All pre-K to fifth grade teachers completed , a professional development program funded by revamping its long-time efforts to improve reading proficiency.

He also highlighted , the , — a teacher apprenticeship program — and passed by legislators and signed by Stein last year.

Local innovations like a Perquimans County program exposing high schoolers to hands-on teaching experience, he said, have much to teach the state.

“We have to take inspiration from and match our teachers’ tenacity and our principals’ passion,” he said. “If we believe that our kids are our future, investing in kids is the best we can do.”

Stein pointed to the , which he created with  and , as an example of bipartisan partnership.

“Public education is not a Democratic policy,” Stein said. “Public education is not a Republican policy. It is a North Carolina policy. It affects every child in this state. There are so many areas like the cellphone ban, where we can and we must work together for the benefit of our public school kids.”

Stein also urged the General Assembly to reconsider its tax policy, adding that upcoming federal cuts to Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), have changed the state’s financial pressures.

“The No. 1 item on the chopping block when cuts have to made will be our K-12 schools,” Stein said. “So your voice matters in these debates. I urge you to use it.”

The Office of State Budget and Management (OSBM) projected a budget gap between $2.5 and $4 billion between fiscal years 2027-28 and 2032-33 between the state’s revenues and the funding levels needed to continue its current services, adjusted for inflation and population growth. Current law has in place if revenue targets are met, including a 3.49% personal rate in 2027. The corporate rate is set to drop to 2% in 2027 and to 0% by 2030.

On Tuesday, state’s nonpartisan Consensus Forecasting Group (CFG) , showing that while there is an expected increase in the General Fund, there is a $360 million decrease in revenue expected in Fiscal Year (FY) 2026-27.

Stein said the loss of state revenue, along with federal funding cuts, will make the state unable to maintain its current funding levels, much less invest in new education efforts.

“Few ideas to enhance public education come with zero cost,” he said, estimating a $3.5 billion funding gap in the next two years. “Typically, they come with some cost, which is why, as a state, we must get our fiscal house in order.”

He said much of the state’s overall success, like its rankings as and , is the result of education investments “over the course of many decades.”

“We are bearing the fruit of an orchard that was planted a long time ago,” he said, “but today we risk hollowing out the institutions that have helped to create our success.”

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

Join ����Ӱ�� and the Progressive Policy Institute at 2 p.m. ET Tuesday for a special conversation about how apprenticeships can better prepare young people for success in a changing economy — and what policymakers need to do to ensure every student gets a strong start on the path to a good job.

PPI’s Bruno Manno will be joined by Adele Burns, chief of the California Division of Apprenticeship Standards; Chris Harrington, director of ApprenticeshipNC; Taylor White, director of postsecondary pathways for youth at New America; and a pair of young apprentices.

Sign up for the Zoom or tune in to this page Tuesday at 2 p.m. ET to stream the event.

Related coverage on ����Ӱ��: 

• Apprenticeships Aimed at Boosting Child Care Careers Have Been Flourishing
  
• ‘Stage Is Shifting Rapidly’ for High Schools: Are States Helping Them Keep Up?
  
• What’s a College Degree Worth? It Depends on the Major
  
• Coalition Hopes to ‘Accelerate’ Career Training, Apprenticeships

Students across the country will soon be able to receive Workforce Pell Grants to use toward tuition and fees for certain short-term workforce training programs.

Established by the in 2025, Workforce Pell Grants expand traditional to programs that are between 8-15 weeks, lead to a high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand job, result in a recognized postsecondary credential, and articulate credit into a certificate or degree program, among other requirements.

In December, the U.S. Department of Education (DOE) held a process to develop new rules for Workforce Pell Grants. In one week, negotiators reached an agreement on , which will be used as the basis of DOE’s forthcoming consensus rule. That consensus rule will be open to public comment before a final rule is published.

In the meantime, states are working to identify potentially eligible programs ahead of Workforce Pell’s anticipated launch on July 1, 2026. States play a critical role in implementing Workforce Pell — under the law and proposed regulations, governors must approve any eligible program before a federal approval process takes place.

However, during a Feb. 11 meeting of the , Jeff Cox, president of the N.C. Community College System, expressed caution about the number of programs that may ultimately qualify for Workforce Pell in the state due to the program’s federally-established . Eligible programs must demonstrate a 70% completion rate, a 70% job placement rate within 180 days, and a positive return on investment, demonstrated through a value-added .

“Just out of these initial screens — the number of hours and then the job placement and the completion rates — I think only about 4% or so of our overall short-term credential programs are going to qualify,” Cox said.

The status of Workforce Pell in North Carolina

During its February meeting, the council heard an update on the status of Workforce Pell Grant implementation in North Carolina from Andrea DeSantis, assistant secretary for workforce solutions at the N.C. Department of Commerce.

DeSantis opened with an overview of Workforce Pell Grants, highlighting that they provide a new opportunity to quickly move students into the workforce through short-term training programs, but that eligible programs must meet high standards.

“This is really a huge departure from the way that federal funding happens right now and the accountability measures for institutions,” DeSantis said.

DeSantis then outlined the federal timeline for Workforce Pell, noting that she participated as an alternate negotiator during DOE’ negotiated rulemaking process in December. DOE’s goal is to have a final rule by the spring, and according to , the program should launch on July 1.

“That timeline is going to move quick, and that means us as states, we have to move quickly too,” DeSantis said. “What will that mean in July? While we have not heard official dates from the Department of Ed, it means that the Department of Ed intends to be able to start reviewing applications from institutions that have programs that were approved at the state level.”

As states consider potentially eligible programs, DeSantis said that it is not the federal government’s expectation that all short-term training programs will be eligible for Workforce Pell. Instead, she said, “states should take this as an opportunity to say, ‘What are the needs in communities, and what programs are really essential for us to improve and fund?’”

DeSantis then provided an update on where North Carolina stands in Workforce Pell implementation. Since November 2025, staff from the Governor’s Office, Department of Commerce, and higher education agencies have worked with , a national consulting firm, to develop the state’s Workforce Pell approach.

This includes:

• Defining what a high-wage, high-skill, or in-demand job is: DeSantis said these definitions will build off assets from the within the N.C. Department of Commerce. To define in-demand jobs, DeSantis said LEAD has pulled a list of occupations that are in-demand at both the state and local levels. She added that high-skill jobs are those that require a license or additional postsecondary credential, and that no definition has been determined yet for what qualifies as a high-wage job. Importantly, to be eligible for Workforce Pell, a program must lead to a job that meets at least one of these three criteria. For example, a job that is in-demand but low-wage could still be eligible.
• Defining stackability and portability: These are two additional federal requirements for Workforce Pell — programs must result in a recognized credential, and they must articulate credit into a related certificate or degree program.
• Developing an application process: DeSantis said the group will also develop an application process that accounts for the data that a program must report and the high standards it must meet to qualify for Workforce Pell. “How do we leverage existing assets within the Department of Commerce and our as a potential pathway for institutions to apply?” DeSantis said.
• Determining how Workforce Pell can be leveraged for apprenticeships: DeSantis said that Workforce Pell can be used to cover portions of the cost of related instruction for a Reegistered Apprenticeship Program, which is a component of the policy the group is working on.

In April, the state hopes to have a draft policy and application for Workforce Pell that would be available for public comment. On May 13, the , the state’s workforce development board, would review the policy and application.

“Assuming that the federal level has put out their final guidance, we would then plan to have an application available sometime in late May,” said DeSantis. “This would give us enough time to approve initial applications before the July deadline.”

DeSantis also noted that the N.C. Community College System (NCCCS) has already published an initial , which is part of the system’s . This list includes short-term workforce courses and credentials that meet the time limits required by Workforce Pell — but not all of those programs will necessarily meet the grant’s additional eligibility requirements.

“Institutions have received individualized data to see, ‘OK, which programs do we offer at our own institutions — not just across the state — that we think could be eligible for Workforce Pell,’ based on the hour requirements, as well as that completion and job placement data, which is going to be really important,” said DeSantis.

Although all Workforce Pell programs must have existed in their current format for at least one year, DeSantis said this is an opportunity for community colleges to have conversations with employers and consider what new programs or adjustments to current programs may be needed to meet workforce needs in the coming years.

“This is expected to be a slow start,” DeSantis said of Workforce Pell’s launch. “This is not intended to approve every program, but to really be about intentional design at the state and local level.”

Cox echoed that sentiment, saying he is “a little bit underwhelmed” by the number of programs that may qualify for Workforce Pell.

“I’m excited about it, but I also want to inject a little bit of caution around the level of impact we’re going to have right out of the gate,” he said.

Updates on the council’s work

In addition to hearing this update on Workforce Pell, the council also reflected on its work in 2025 and discussed other key efforts that will help advance its goals.

In June 2025, the council outlining the state’s goals for workforce development, which are separated into four objectives: increasing attainment, expanding work-based education, focusing on key sectors, and highlighting workforce programs through a public outreach campaign. In December, the council released a that outlines 30 strategies to advance those goals.

Then, in January, the council’s co-chairs joined Gov. Josh Stein at an event to announce the state’s ranking as first for workforce development by .

“We now stand at a pivotal moment where strategy development is transitioning into action,” said N.C. Secretary of Commerce Lee Lilley, who is also a council co-chair, at the February meeting. “As we move forward today, our focus shifts toward implementation, accountability, and metrics, translating these strategies into meaningful outcomes for North Carolina’s workforce.”

The council heard a short presentation on how the relates to the work of the council.

Annie Izod, executive director of the NCWorks Commission, shared that as of February, the council and NCWorks Commission had aligned each entities’ four committees. In December 2026, the council committees will sunset, and the NCWorks Commission will continue to monitor progress toward the state’s workforce development goals.

New funding for youth apprenticeships

On Feb. 10, Stein announced that he is directing discretionary funds allotted through the federal Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) to to expand youth apprenticeships.

According to a , NC Career Launch “helps businesses develop registered apprenticeship programs for students beginning in grades 11 and 12 in high-demand sectors like child care, health care, skilled trades, and advanced manufacturing.”

This investment is connected to one of the council’s : to double the number of apprentices in the state, including both registered apprenticeships and apprenticeships. According to , youth apprenticeships can begin as early as 16 and are available in more than 1,200 occupations.

During the council’s February meeting, Kindl Detar, policy adviser to Stein, said youth apprenticeships allow employers to grow local talent early before students may drop out of the , and they allow students to earn and learn with pathways to career opportunities in their local communities.

According to Detar, the first year of the investment will focus on expanding existing youth apprenticeship programs that have wait lists and on expanding youth apprenticeships in the western part of the state as it continues to recover from .

“We know that making these apprenticeships work will require engagement from our employers,” said Detar. “In his announcement yesterday, the governor had a special call-out to employers to think about how these models of youth apprenticeships … can be beneficial to them, to not only provide opportunity, but to create that local workforce that they need.”

NCCareers.org sees record number of users

First launched in July 2020, is the state’s career information system. It aggregates key information on jobs, wages, and pathways, providing career exploration tools to help North Carolinians on their education-to-workforce journey.

During the council’s meeting, Jamie Vaughn, senior analyst for market intelligence at the North Carolina Department of Commerce, shared that the website had 1 million users in the last 12 months — representing 95% growth from the previous year.

The website has information on wages and demand across more than 800 occupations that can be sorted by 16 sub-state regions. According to Vaughn, more than half of school districts in the state are to help meet the that all middle and high school students complete a career development plan.

Vaughn also previewed new features that will be added to the website, including business listings of local companies that may hire employees in specific occupations, and information to help high school students better understand what CTE courses are available at their school that will lead to CTE pathways.

Cecilia Holden, president and CEO of , said that one component of myfutureNC’s proposed Workforce Act of 2026 for the legislative short session is $1.5 million for NCCareers.org, which would equate to $1.50 per user based on 1 million annual users.

For more information on NCCareers.org, see this

The council’s next meeting will be held on May 13 from 10 to 11:30 a.m.

This first appeared on and is republished here under a .

There is no shortage of credentials in the U.S. labor market. There is a shortage of matched skills and reliable pathways. Job openings remain despite cooling in some places. Even so, a persistent share of young adults are , signaling weak attachment to both employment and further training.

This gap is not a 2025 phenomenon. For decades, policymakers have invested in education while assuming that labor market integration would follow. The evidence suggests otherwise. The impacts of education by field, institution and completion status; and many credentials deliver little labor market value relative to their cost. Treating enrollment and completion as success metrics has obscured whether programs actually improve employment and earnings.

CTE was intended to create clearer routes into work. The shows positive effects on several high school outcomes, limited and uneven evidence on postsecondary and earnings outcomes, and large gaps in what has been rigorously evaluated.

Many CTE programs are well intentioned and well funded, yet weakly connected to labor demand. Program offerings frequently lag local employer needs. Credentials are not always portable across firms or regions. Accountability focuses on compliance and participation rather than job placement and earnings. Students complete programs without clear signals about whether those credentials will translate into work. Employers remain skeptical of what certificates represent.

These outcomes are not accidental. They reflect governance. The Department of Education was designed to administer grants, regulate institutions and ensure access. These are necessary functions, but they are not sufficient for building labor market pathways. Education agencies are not structured to continuously track employer demand, validate occupational skill standards or adjust programs based on employment outcomes. 

By contrast, the Department of Labor already operates systems that define success in labor market terms, including placement, earnings and retention under the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act.

Shifting CTE administration toward Labor aligns authority with objective. To ensure that this move is not just symbolic, policy should be governed by institutions that measure and manage those outcomes. The lesson for CTE is not ideological. It is operational. Here are three design choices.

First, employer leadership must be real, not advisory in name only. Employers should hold decision-making authority over occupational standards, credential validation and program relevance, with transparent governance and conflict of interest rules. Without employer control and input into the curriculum, pathways drift toward provider convenience.

Second, funding must be tied to outcomes that matter. Completion alone is insufficient. Programs should be evaluated on job placement, earnings, retention and progression, adjusted for local labor markets. Chronic underperformance should lead to canceling or revising programs.

Third, the system must allow for competition among multiple providers. Community colleges, employer consortia, nonprofits, high-schools and high quality private providers should operate on equal footing — even if they pursue the goals differently. 

Of course, pathway rules should be periodically reviewed and reauthorized, and the Labor Department is well-suited to provide review. Labor markets change faster than education systems. Sunset provisions force adaptation and prevent regulatory accumulation that freezes outdated models in place.

Critics often argue that tighter alignment with labor markets narrows education and reduces flexibility. The evidence suggests the opposite. The current system narrows options by steering students toward with uncertain payoffs while offering limited transparency about outcomes. expand choice by allowing students to compare pathways based on real consequences rather than marketing or tradition.

A well-designed pathway system does not lock individuals into a single occupation. It creates stackable credentials, portable skills and bridges to further education. It treats employment not as the endpoint of learning but as a core component of it.

The on education governance offers a cautionary lesson: Incentives matter. Systems respond to what is measured and rewarded. When accountability emphasizes inputs and compliance, organizations optimize for those metrics, even when outcomes suffer. 

The federal transition to Labor creates a rare policy opening. It acknowledges that education policy cannot substitute for labor market policy when the objective is work. Whether that acknowledgment leads to better outcomes depends on follow through. Structure matters. Incentives matter. Governance matters.

If CTE continues to be governed as education with different labels, results will not change. If it is governed as labor market infrastructure, it can finally function as intended.

Career and technical education is a lot more than learning to weld or draw blood.

It can expose kids to jobs they didn’t even know existed and help them figure out what they want to do with their lives.

It can also teach students concrete skills they can use on the job right after they graduate high school. But high school programs haven’t always lined up well with what employers are looking for, or prepared students for jobs available in their communities.

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The Trump administration wants to see career and technical education, or CTE, focus more on preparing students for jobs. To do that, that have been under the Education Department’s purview for decades and moved them to the Labor Department, which has historically focused on short-term job training for unemployed adults.

Trump officials say the end goal is to boost participation in the labor force, especially for the millions of young adults . The change, they say, will reduce the administrative burden on states and make it easier for states to centralize their own workforce development programs.

Jason Tyszko, a senior vice president for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, said there could be some short-term disruption, as well as some hard questions to work through. But if the end result is more accountability for programs and more young people in jobs, that would be a “win for families and learners.”

“We think the more alignment, the better,” Tyszko said.

But many career-technical education advocates, as well as Democrats in Congress, say this move is another step toward dismantling the Education Department. They fear there are simply too few staff in both the Education and Labor Departments to manage the transition, and they worry the change will end up steering kids toward short-term job training with fewer paths to advancement.

High school CTE programs can help create “a springboard for lifelong opportunity,” said Amy Loyd, who served as the assistant secretary over career and technical education during the Biden administration.

For example, students who take advanced manufacturing classes in high school can set themselves up for admission to a trade school, while teens who take college-level health care classes can often earn credit toward an associate or bachelor’s degree.

“One of the challenges that we in the career and technical education community have been working to combat is the still-pervasive stigma of career and technical education being for ‘those kids,’” she said. “I think by focusing on the shorter-term credentials we are again rebuilding this narrative that CTE is for kids who are not college material.”

Two agencies in charge of career-technical education

The Education Department says this change is in line with the calling for the consolidation of “fragmented Federal workforce development programs that are too disconnected from propelling workers into secure, well-paying, and high-need American jobs.”

In May, Trump officials that maintains the Education Department’s oversight authority for career-technical education, but hands over the day-to-day operations to the Labor Department. That includes distributing over $1 billion to states in Perkins funding, which pays for CTE programs in K-12 schools and community colleges, making compliance monitoring visits, and helping states and schools with technical questions.

this transfer of funds and responsibilities is illegal, and the proposal should have gone to Congress. Others in the career and technical education field say the Education and Labor Departments already work closely together and this move isn’t necessary to improve collaboration.

Anna Chappelle, the executive director of the Alabama Workforce Board, hopes what happens at the federal level resembles the transformation happening in her state. The share of young people who were not working or in school in Alabama was the highest in the nation in 2019, according to a .

In recent years, Alabama has , and has . In June, , who led that work under Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, as the second-in-command for CTE at the Education Department.

Alabama launched a state apprenticeship agency that . The state also for identifying which job credentials and career pathways are most valuable in different parts of the state — whether that’s the space industry in the north or the maritime industry in the south.

“When we have this separation, that keeps states siloed,” Chappelle said. “Being able to have credentials of value and workforce pathways in Labor, that is going to help people get the education and training that they need.”

She thinks the federal change will lead to more money for training and education programs, “rather than the bureaucratic red tape.”

But Loyd, who is now the CEO of All4Ed, a nonprofit that advocates for equity in education, worries there aren’t enough federal staffers left to provide the kind of “personalized and intensive” guidance her team of 80 once did.

The office “was really leaning into helping states think differently, to not just rubber stamp what always has been,” Loyd said. “I worry that all of that capacity-building, all of that partnership with the field, is ultimately hindered and gutted.”

to the Labor Department, but how many is unclear. The Education Department did not respond to questions. Chalkbeat received out-of-office automatic replies from multiple spokespeople due to the government shutdown.

Some advocates fear states and schools won’t get clear answers to questions about whether new ideas are allowable under the law or how to make sure CTE programs serve all students.

“​​If we had a question about kids with disabilities and CTE, we knew where to go,” said Braden Goetz, who served in the CTE office during the Biden administration and is now a senior policy advisor at the Center on Education and Labor at New America, a left-leaning think tank. “I’m concerned that in the Department of Labor they won’t have those resources.”

Some fear overemphasis on short-term job training

The Education Department has said its agreement with the Labor Department will integrate education and job training programs “with an employment first perspective, which places employers at the forefront of workforce development programs.” The document mentions “upskilling” students — a term that’s typically used to refer to retraining adults in the workforce, not kids in K-12 schools.

Some education advocates worry that sends the wrong messages to students about the purpose of career-technical education programs, and .

Loyd, the former Biden official, worries that folding CTE into the Labor Department’s work will lead to an overemphasis on helping students earn industry credentials that .

CTE programs to prepare students for jobs that are “high-skill, high-wage, or in-demand.” A heavier focus on short-term job outcomes could steer more students toward in-demand jobs that don’t pay very well, Loyd said, such as certified nursing assistants or home health care aides.

“I love programs like phlebotomy programs in high schools where students can earn meaningful certificates that can get them a job,” Loyd said. “But again, this should be a stepping stone,” she said, not the end game.

Tyszko, of the Commerce Foundation, says time will tell if kids get steered like that. He notes that the Labor Department does have experience connecting young people with apprenticeships, which .

“They’re very capable of supporting a set of activities in the field that promote career awareness and aren’t directly tied to job placement,” Tyszko said, adding it would be wrong to assume the Labor Department’s focus on short-term job training “would entirely consume” career-technical education.

The Labor Department also may be better positioned to hold CTE programs accountable for their outcomes in the workforce, and whether they actually match what employers want and need, he said.

Chappelle in Alabama says what programs kids have access to also affects whether they can make an informed decision about their path. The kind and quality of CTE programs offered at schools varies a lot depending on where kids live, and states and businesses share in the responsibility of closing any gaps.

“We are all working together to make sure we have what’s available for our students and our citizens to go up in life,” she said. “We’re not trying to keep people down. That doesn’t serve anybody.”

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools. This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at .

While it’s important to think creatively about how to train workers in a variety of industries, too many workers are being locked out of traditional apprenticeships — ones that promise to open doors for anyone hoping to enter a career in construction. Until we fix this, we’re leaving talent on the table in an industry .

Currently, the discourse around traditional apprenticeships focuses on the limited number of slots, which is certainly a challenge; but it obfuscates a more troubling issue: the composition of these slots. Apprenticeships in the construction industry are highly selective and essentially designed for the student who is already passing the class. It favors those with pre-existing knowledge or skills, requires advanced coursework with technical content and has cumbersome application processes. If you’re a student who’s motivated but needs a little bit of extra help, you’re being .

So, how do we change this?

Pre-apprenticeships are one answer. These short-term programs provide exposure to multiple careers and employers, build professional and technical skills, connect participants with a mentor and prepare them for entry assessments. Often, participants can leave with industry recognized credentials.

During a six- to eight-week , for example, students might visit union job sites, earn an OSHA certification and come away with both a clearer understanding of what career path fits them best and the confidence that they know what it takes  to enter the workforce. They’re like internships but better.

High quality pre-apprenticeship programs — ones that are well-designed and connected to real opportunities like union programs, employers and registered apprenticeships—are effective in helping people make that leap to the next step in their career journey.

Why then are pre-apprenticeships not more popular? The answer is simple: Programs lack funding. While there are for this, the result is the same: Programs are limited in how many people they can serve and the support they can provide. They also lack capacity to track and collect outcomes data — and unlike their registered apprenticeship counterparts, aren’t federally required to do so. That limits a program’s ability to attract funding, perpetuating the cycle of underinvestment.

But breaking this cycle is possible, if we get creative:

First, let’s rethink how to finance wraparound support. Transportation, childcare or lost wages — real barriers that lock many people out — represent the most expensive but most critical element for learner success. Providing — like zero-percent loans or emergency lines of credit, designed so that participants only repay if their earnings increase — would help minimize the financial burden and risk for workers. Unions, trade associations or employers could also partner to repay these loans for participants who join them, creating a mutually beneficial situation: a pipeline of diverse, skilled talent for employers and life-changing access for learners.

Collecting better data is another key step. Until programs can demonstrate a track record of achieving outcomes, they will struggle to grow and scale. In particular, programs must show that they can graduate students and place them into apprenticeships that lead to longer-term employment.

Those steps will help unlock new funding sources. There are plenty of stakeholders who care about economic mobility and want to think creatively about improving our current workforce training system. With evidence showing tangible, improved results from pre-apprenticeship programs, there’s no reason why these programs can’t attract additional grants or philanthropic investment.

Making these changes will take partnership and intentional, strategic investment across a wide range of stakeholders — from employers and unions to government agencies and philanthropy. So, while we expand apprenticeships in other industries, let’s not lose sight of ensuring the current system reaches its full potential by investing in construction pathways that allow all people to access these opportunities. This will create a ripple effect: helping to bolster the talent pipeline needed to fill in-demand jobs, putting people on the path to economic mobility, and creating best practices other industries can learn from. It’s a win-win for everyone.

Too often, high schools separate so-called academic students from those perceived unlikely to attend college, a process commonly known as tracking. Two high schools in Cranston, Rhode Island are showing that career and technical education programs can prepare students for both college and the workforce.

In fact, seniors who completed CTE paths in the past school year included those with the highest academic rankings at both Cranston High School West and Cranston High School East. Across Rhode Island, students who have completed at least two CTE-specific courses perform higher on national assessments and have a higher four-year graduation rate than other students.

“There used to be a division between postsecondary education and vocational education. At Cranston, we’ve been able to make these two things the same thing,” said Zachary Farrell, executive director of secondary programs for Cranston Public School District. 

High school students in Rhode Island’s second largest district can choose among coursework in Medical Pathways, Pre-Engineering/Robotics, Information Technology, Culinary Arts, Computer Science, Criminal Justice and more. Those who complete a CTE track graduate with real-world work experience and either industry credentials, college credits or both, in paths that the state has approved as aligned to a high-wage, high-demand career. Students do this alongside their existing general education coursework, so they can take AP classes or participate in extracurriculars with the rest of their classmates.

When Santomassimo, the valedictorian, entered the Medical Pathways program her freshman year of high school, she thought she wanted to do direct patient care. But the program’s work-based learning, including a placement at a nursing home, helped to change her mind: “I realized direct patient medicine isn’t for me because I don’t like blood…[Then] [s]chool helped me get set up with an internship at an engineering site…[so I’m] back on the science and research end, not direct patient care.” 

Santomassimo credits Medical Pathways with helping her carve out a specific vision for her future. “I really want to do research…to help inform public policy,” she said. At Brown, she plans to double major in physics and political science.

Students who complete that pathway, which is available at both high schools, leave with healthcare workplace safety training and a CPR and First Aid certification. They have the option of completing a certified nursing assistant or emergency medical technician certification. Even though she isn’t planning to become a healthcare practitioner, Santomassimo has no regrets about the hands-on classes she took. She completed 40 patient hours as a certified nursing assistant (CNA) in training and successfully passed her licensing test this summer after graduation: “It’s a really good certification to have and will never not be a needed job. I will have that certification as a backup if I ever need it.”

Cranston Superintendent Jeannine Nota-Masse has seen the benefits of exposing students to passions and careers: “At both our high schools, we have an educator training program. You’d be surprised at how many students [say] ‘I love little kids, little kids are so funny,’ and then go into it and don’t love it. They have that hands-on experience before their parents pay for college and they realize ‘Oh I really don’t want to be a teacher.’”

Graduating high school with college credits in hand is another way that the CTE tracks across Cranston help save students time and money. Mark Lizarda, part of East’s second-ever Medical Pathways cohort, graduated with college credits from three different institutions under his belt, not to mention a high score on the AP Calculus test, which converts into college credit.

In 2024, Lizarda won first place in the Medical Terminology exam at the SkillsUSA championship, a national CTE organization for students, and is attending University of Rhode Island this fall. “Those three years [were the] hardest classes I’ve ever taken, but that’s the reason I stayed. It was so captivating and rigorous. I wanted to prepare myself for college.”

The programs also benefit CTE participants who choose to go directly to the workforce. For example, culinary students graduate with food handling and food safety certifications, Information Technology students graduate with CompTIA certifications and all CTE programs include a financial literacy class. “If your child wants to get a job after high school and they have no skills whatsoever, it’s going to be difficult,” Nota-Masse said. “But if they even have entry-level skills, they are still more competitive in the job market than their peers who don’t.” 

Farrell sees the inherent value in a program that connects to student interests. “Forget credentials,” he said. “If students really enjoy the program that they’re in and are learning and having fun and it’s part of their identity, I think you can’t really put a price tag on that.” 

The aquaculture path at West, the only one of its kind in the state, is a model for making learning fun and practical. Rhode Island is known as the Ocean State, and its over 400 miles of coastline are crucial to the economy. Launched by longtime science educator Leonard Baker in 2000, the aquaculture path prepares students for careers in the state’s fish hatcheries and shellfish farms or for further study in the biological sciences. 

With access to an on-campus aquarium, laboratory, pond and greenhouse, students learn about water chemistry, aquatic plant science and how to breed fish. Baker sets every student up with their own aquarium to practice keeping plants and animals alive: “They say ‘I can’t stand chemistry,’ but they’re measuring water temperature and pH balance…They say ‘I can’t stand insects,’ but they’re feeding frogs. We’re making science meaningful, relevant and important to students.”

Every single senior who has completed Baker’s program has been accepted to a four-year institution. On top of that, many of the people running the state’s fisheries are graduates of his program, and one even started a fishery in another state. Some go on to careers in nursing or other healthcare professions because they’ve had exposure to complex refrigeration and filtration systems and extensive practice working in teams.

Stephen Osborn, who leads statewide opportunities for students at the Rhode Island Department of Education (RIDE), credits the program for getting young people excited and ready for their future: “They can“get a job after graduation if they want, but [the program is] also preparing many of them to go onto college. Kids are doing incredibly complex things in their classrooms and they don’t realize it because they’re having fun.”

A between RIDE and, launched in 2018, helped unlock changes that enabled Cranston to give students more options. Cranston high schoolers previously had rotating daily schedules, like most high schools, but switched to a college-style schedule where students only take four classes a semester and are in them for almost 90 minutes instead of 50. This way, students get longer blocks of time for hands-on and work-based learning.

“It took a lot of professional development and a lot of community communication,” said Nota-Masse, reflecting on the process. “People kept saying ‘kids won’t be able to sit in a class for 84 minutes, they’ll go crazy.’ We’re not saying we do that perfectly, but if you’re in construction and you’re working on a project, 84 [minutes] is certainly better than 50 [minutes] to start and clean up.” These technical changes allowed Cranston to expand CTE programs, while keeping room in the schedule for AP courses, electives, special education services or services for English language learners. 

Cranston Public School District is a powerful leader in the state, but it’s not alone. is the new statewide initiative, with the goal that all of Rhode Island’s kids take at least one CTE course before they graduate. Coursework that’s rigorous and relevant is helping to unlock students’ freedom of choice. Says Osborn: “We don’t tell [students] whether to go to college or work. They have the skills and an open door to choose what they want to do after high school.”

Disclosure: is a financial supporter of ����Ӱ��.

In a few short weeks, Aldine Independent School District in Texas will welcome a new cohort of ninth graders to the HEAL high school programs — one of the biggest career-technical education experiments underway in the state and just one of many that the Houston-area district is implementing to ensure its graduates are equipped with real-world skills.

Through a partnership with Memorial Hermann Health System — the largest health care provider in the Houston area — students pursue one of five pathways, identified for their resistance to automation and urgent local workforce needs: nursing, rehabilitation, pharmacy, imaging, and non-clinical administration.

In ninth and 10th grades, students participate in job-shadowing and practice their skills in simulation labs; starting in their junior year, students have access to paid health care internships and professional mentoring, among other work-based learning experiences. Students at HEAL, or the Health Education and Learning program at Nimitz High School, still take traditional academic courses to meet state graduation requirements, but they also enroll in specialized health care classes co-taught by Memorial Hermann employees.

The school was established with the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies. Once the school is fully phased in over the next three years, it will serve approximately 760 students who will graduate with the skills and in many cases the certifications needed to move directly into high-demand health care jobs with family-sustaining wages.

“We’ve made a big push to re-leverage how we’re using CTE programs and industry-based certificates for kids that are in high-demand, high-wages career fields,” says Adrian Bustillos, the chief transformation officer at the district. 

“The hospital system was telling us we have a shortage in these pathways and careers that we need to fill. Well, let’s work with our students sooner so we can get them in today. Give them access to their building, give them access to their training and to the experts in the field, and help cultivate future healthcare workers,” he says. “This is a game changer.”

The 58,000-student school district, where the vast majority of students are from low-income families, offers other workforce pathways focused on cybersecurity, energy, engineering and more — partnering with local businesses to offer students real-world experiences, industry certifications and dual credit opportunities. 

Looking ahead, Bustillos says, Aldine is focused on how to make these options available for all students and on how to orchestrate a wholesale shift from a century-old learning model rooted in class time and passing exams to one that prioritizes skills gained. 

“How do we find the other premier programs that are rooted in a model similar to this, that students want and the community needs, and that will help drive the market? How can we leverage our thinking and drive it out to scale across the district with different pathways?”

Bustillos is far from the only district leader asking such questions these days. The slow recovery from the pandemic combined — along with the swift integration of artificial intelligence and a workforce that’s increasingly interested in skills and experiences over four-year degrees and pedigrees — has scrambled long-held assumptions of teaching and learning. Faced with a moment that’s forcing the education community to rethink what students should be able to do by the time they graduate, many are attempting to pivot away from test scores, GPAs and essays toward more tangible, employable skills. 

Indeed, Aldine is part of a new cohort of two dozen school systems from across the country whose leaders are already pursuing this type of transformation. The , launched this summer by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, aims to establish a “new architecture” for high schools across the country — one that sets ambitious goals for students, offers meaningful, rigorous and engaging learning experiences and uses improved tools to measure and accelerate student progress.

The network is part of a larger effort by Carnegie to redefine the so-called “Carnegie unit,” or what many know as the credit hour. Developed back in 1906, the unit defines the amount of time students need to spend in a course to earn credit toward a high school diploma. More than a century later, it still serves as the basis for calculating credits needed for graduation in many states and school districts. And while it once played an important role in standardizing a fragmented public education system, the time-based system, most agree, has outlived its usefulness. 

“There is really broad scale recognition that the current design for the American high school isn’t meeting the needs of young people, isn’t meeting the needs of the economy and probably isn’t preparing young people effectively for participation in civic society,” says Timothy Knowles, president of the Carnegie Foundation. “You layer on top of that the intensity of the economic transition that the nation and the world is in, and it makes a very strong argument for this being an important moment for high school transformation. 

“Lots of states are grappling with how you move away from time conflated with learning. The Carnegie unit was our creation and it doesn’t really comport with what we now know about how young people learn,” he says. “Now is a critical moment of opportunity not for tinkering around the edges with small elegant examples but with more sustainable and scalable examples.”

The goal of the high school network is for members to collaborate on a framework that helps other districts modernize their outdated systems and expand competency-based high school models that accelerate student engagement, achievement and success in postsecondary education and work — whether that’s community college, medical school, a certificate program, the military or directly into the workforce. 

The cohort is wildly diverse, both geographically and when it comes to the demographics of students the schools serve. It includes traditional public school districts like Aldine, Akron Public Schools in Ohio, Roanoke County Public Schools in Virginia and New York City Public Schools; and it incorporates more innovative public and public charter systems like the Rural Alliance Zone in Indiana, and the Springfield Empowerment Zone in Massachusetts. 

That wasn’t an accident. If the goal is to pursue high school transformation at scale, then the first step, Knowles says, is to prove that it works in states and districts that look like the rest of the country. 

“What is it that Aldine is doing — particularly preparing young people for careers in healthcare — and how does that actually work in a way that would be useful for other systems across Texas, but also anywhere, and then elevating those lessons and building evidence.”

While the programs are unique and, in most cases, speak to the needs of the local workforce, the through-line is the same: an endeavor to equip students with more meaningful learning. 

Northeast Academy for Aerospace and Advanced Technologies student Garret Wand explores the flight simulator with Kim Mawhiney, Director of STEM. (J.K. Yezdanian)

In Elizabeth City, North Carolina, students at the Northeast Academy for Aerospace and Advanced Technologies (NEAAT) choose between three science tracks: aviation, computer, and health. All high school courses are honors courses, and the majority of students also take classes at nearby Elizabeth City State University and the College of the Albemarle.

“We were dissatisfied with the opportunities our students had in the region, and decided it was time to do school differently,” says Andrew Harris, CEO of the academy. “We strive to graduate students who are ready for the real world, and that looks quite different than taking a bunch of multiple choice tests or sitting in rows or any of the things that we might have thought about from our own experiences. We try to make sure that students learn through experience.”

Roughly one in three students at NEAAT graduate with a two-year degree, and two out of three finish with at least one year of post-secondary coursework already completed. All students participate in local internships and are encouraged to earn 150 hours of volunteering in the community.  

“If I’m going to have heart surgery, it’s important that the surgeon has passed the test,” he says. “But it’s a whole lot more important to me that he can actually perform the surgery and has a history of doing it. We’re trying to make sure our kids can match this sort of technical knowledge with real world experiences.”

Appetite for the academy’s model is overwhelming. What started with 120 students in eighth and ninth has grown a decade later into 760 students in fifth through 12th. If the school had the funding, Harris says, it would expand enrollment by another 500 to establish a pre-K through fourth grade. The school handles enrollment through a lottery system and receives nearly four applications for every open seat. 

Carnegie is joined by several nonprofits and philanthropies to support the high school network’s efforts, including the XQ Institute, which has been pushing school leaders to rethink high school and embrace new models of teaching and learning for the last decade. 

“We wake up every day thinking about how high school needs to change,” says Keith Dysarz, chief academic officer at XQ. “We have all this data that shows what we’re doing now isn’t preparing students for success when they leave high school.”

For Dysarz, the most important part of the effort isn’t simply dismantling the current model; it’s gathering data and evidence of what works to support the types of policy needed for scalable and sustainable change. 

“There’s a lot of momentum in this work across the country right now, and this network is going to help us reimagine and envision new models for high school. We need these proof points, these examples that can turn into exemplars to really show that it’s possible.”

Disclosures: The Future of High School Network and ����Ӱ�� both receive financial support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, XQ and the Walton Family Foundation.

On Friday, undocumented immigrants, banned from Head Start and career and technical education programs and adult education earlier this month, were granted a reprieve through Sept. 3 in the 20 states — and the District of Columbia — where attorneys general fought the Trump administration’s recent directive to kick them out, according to . The U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, the U.S. Department of Education, and the U.S. Department of Labor all agreed to the delay.

From cradle to career, President Donald Trump has launched a comprehensive campaign to close off education to undocumented immigrants, undercutting, advocates say, the very reason many came to the United States: for a chance at a better life. 

Preschoolers without legal status are now banned from Head Start and older students and adults without papers are blocked from career, technical and adult education. Some states are rescinding in-state college tuition for those here illegally and K-12 schools are being targeted by the president’s sweeping immigration enforcement crackdown

The affecting Head Start enrollment was released July 10. The federally funded early education program was created in 1965 to help underprivileged children succeed in school.

On the same day, the U.S. Department of Education shut the door on older undocumented students and adults hoping to gain job skills, earn dual enrollment credits or learn to read. Education Secretary Linda McMahon : “Under President Trump’s leadership, hardworking American taxpayers will no longer foot the bill for illegal aliens to participate in our career, technical, or adult education programs or activities.”

The nation’s K-12 public schools, filling the vast middle between early education and college and careers, have been leveraged in the administration’s aggressive, deportation effort with federal agents arresting and detaining students and . 

These and other enforcement tactics have terrified newcomer families to the point that some students are , prompting educators to suggest a solution that was once unthinkable: a return to remote learning.

“I know districts are contending with, you know, ‘Do we move to the hybrid approach that we learned how to do back in the pandemic in the fall so that students are not subject to ICE raids by just walking in the classroom door?” Amy Loyd, head of CTE and adult education under former education secretary Miguel Cardona, told ����Ӱ��.

has already started offering this option, a nod to the numerous barriers undocumented young people already face in pursuing higher education. Cost is among the most pressing; these students . 

The financial hurdle was alleviated when at least two dozen states, often with bipartisan support, extended in-state college tuition to local high school graduates who lack legal status. These policies, some in place for decades, are now under attack by the Trump administration. 

The president in the spring saying the policies needed to stop because they offered more affordable in-state tuition rates “to aliens but not to out-of-State American citizens.” In June, the justice department sued to end the practice, setting students adrift. Within hours, the voluntarily agreed to abolish its program, the oldest in the country. 

was first to act, moving to eliminate in-state tuition for undocumented students in February. 

Augustus Mays, the vice president of EdTrust, an equity-focused advocacy group, called out the bigger picture in reacting to the CTE and adult education restrictions earlier this month. 

“Let’s be clear: this move is part of a broader, deeply disturbing trend,” he said in a statement. “This is not about protecting taxpayers. It’s about punishing students. This administration is choosing to weaponize policy against hope itself.”

On July 23, the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights , including the University of Miami and the University of Michigan, for offering scholarships to undocumented students protected by the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which gives them the right to live and work in this country. The inquiries will examine whether granting scholarships to DACA recipients discriminates against American-born college-goers.

“As we mark President Trump’s historic six months back in the White House, we are expanding our enforcement efforts to protect American students and lawful residents from invidious national origin discrimination of the kind alleged here,” Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Craig Trainor said in a statement.

The youngest — and the oldest — learners 

Sarah Orth is chief executive officer at the Blind Children’s Center, which was founded in Los Angeles in 1938. Its programs now include Head Start, which serves 85 early learners from birth to 5 years old.

“This move against Head Start is so egregious because infants and toddlers are the most vulnerable,” she said, adding she’s unsure how her program will identify and remove undocumented students. “Are the children who are already enrolled going to be grandfathered in or am I kicking the kids out next week? I have no idea. I have people on my staff who are crying because they are going to have to deliver this news.”

Orth said some families could never find the breadth of services their kids need in their home countries. She recalled one 4-year-old girl brought into the program by her parents, who were young and Spanish-speaking. Their daughter was visually impaired, had sensory issues and had not been exposed much to the outside world. 

“When they first enrolled her, dad would carry her from the car to the classroom and would never put her down,” Orth said. “If you tried to do that, she would lift her feet up because she didn’t know what was happening.”

Within six to eight months of enrolling in Head Start, the child was walking on her own — both indoors and outside — and playing with friends. As she grew in confidence, she was no longer “clinging to dad with the fear she had when she first came to us.”

Her parents also learned how important it was for her to have social-emotional connections, Orth said. 

An estimated 115,000 Head Start children and families could be impacted by the move to bar the undocumented. Together, they comprise roughly 16% of the program’s total 2024-25 enrollment, according to by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which runs the program. The federal government of Head Start’s cost, devoting to the program in 2023.

“For 60 years, this program has never required that kind of [citizenship status] validation or verification,” said Luis Bautista, executive director of the Los Angeles County Office of Education Head Start and Early Learning Division, which serves some 7,000 children and families. “This is just adding to the fear and confusion families are experiencing amidst all of the other actions out there — including immigration.”

He called Trump’s move “extremely unfortunate,” adding that he doesn’t agree with the president’s characterization of kids born on foreign soil. 

“I don’t consider a child — especially a 3-year-old — to be illegal in any way,” Bautista said, adding money devoted to young minds is well spent. “Ninety percent of brain development happens before age 5. That is where the investment should be.”

It’s unclear how many older students will be affected by Trump’s citizenship restrictions. participated in CTE in the 2020-21 school year, the most recent year for which federal data is available, according to the Association for Career & Technical Education. 

Congress each year sends some for competitive grants to support CTE efforts across the country. These programs, through their funding, are required to support nine “special populations,” including single parents, those with disabilities and English learners. 

Loyd, who is now CEO of the advocacy organization , said she’s concerned about Trump’s focus on higher education, including CTE programs, which she said help students from all walks of life.

“Basically, we are relegating high school students to entry-level, dead-end jobs,” she said. “It’s just mean-spirited and certainly consistent with the administration’s commitment to undermine the vital presence of immigrants in our nation. It’s so dehumanizing.”

The $715 million the federal government spends on adult education , adults and out-of-school teens 16 and older. The funding, among the $7 billion temporarily frozen by Trump this summer, covers a range of programs, including high school diploma equivalency, adult literacy and vocational job training for people with disabilities. 

The programs are run by . Many . 

An adult education teacher in Indiana told ����Ӱ�� that the 300-plus immigrants in her program — many from Haiti, Guinea and Senegal — enroll to learn English and earn a high school diploma equivalency. Some of the younger students, she said, use the program to prepare for college while the older participants hope it will help them land better-paying jobs. 

The teacher, who asked not to be identified because she feared losing funding for her program, described her students as “the most respectful, grateful people I have ever met in my life.” 

She said they respond with copious appreciation even for a gift as small as a pencil.

“I’ll say, ‘Just take it,’ and they will use it until it’s down to the nub,” she said. “They are just so eager to learn.”

Will Plyler be next?

The administration is changing the narrative around programs like Head Start and CTE, moving them away from their educational roots and the view that they were beneficial to the economy and casting them instead as federal public benefits. Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for such programs, including food assistance and non-emergency Medicaid.

Wil Del Pilar, senior vice president at EdTrust, asserted that this is part of a wider strategy by the president to scapegoat some of the country’s most vulnerable people.

“This is not a new trope,” he said, adding that German, Irish and other immigrant groups were similarly castigated upon their arrival to America, fueled by the notion that newcomers “are taking something that belongs to you, that they are getting a benefit you don’t receive.”

And while many of Trump’s initiatives are facing legal challenges — 21 Democratic attorneys general earlier this month over the and directives — the president has prevailed in his efforts on immigration. 

With each new announcement, immigrant advocates worry Trump could be inching closer to dismantling or undermining Plyler v. Doe, the landmark 1982 Supreme Court ruling that a child cannot be denied a public education based on immigration status. Some immigrant advocates fear his administration might try to argue that a free, public education is also a public benefit program — and so off-limits to undocumented K-12 students.

The U.S. is home to roughly undocumented residents. In 2021, the American Community Survey ages 5 to 17 who had been in the United States for three years or less, and another 1.5 million immigrant children living here four years or more, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff and architect of the president’s immigration crackdown, searched for ways to undercut Plyler. In June, one of the authors of the conservative playbook, who has proposed challenging or overturning the ruling, became the Education Department’s newest . Both Texas and have recently tried to weaken K-12 protections for undocumented students.

Pamela Broussard, a Texas-based educator and advocate for English learners, said overturning Plyler “would betray the very principles upon which public education was founded.”

She maintained that education is a right — not a privilege — and that all students deserve to be supported in their learning.

“When any group of children is denied access to education, we create an underclass more likely to face poverty, unemployment and social marginalization,” she told ����Ӱ��. “At its core, Plyler v. Doe affirmed that the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment applies to all people, not just citizens.”

Missouri high school graduates may soon be able to attend career-certificate programs for free after state lawmakers passed a bill creating a reimbursement process for career and technical education.

The legislation now awaits Gov. Mike Kehoe’s signature or veto.

“This will increase (the workforce) astronomically,” said state Rep. Ann Kelley, a Republican from Lamar. “And it’s great for the kids who are in those career tech programs. It gives them another avenue to make themselves better.”

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Kelley, who filed the bill in the House, told The Independent that she got the idea for the legislation after talking to a student. He was eligible for the state’s , which pays for two years of public community college, and he wanted to use the funds to train for his commercial driver’s license.

But his goal of operating a dump truck business was derailed when he realized that the state’s program wouldn’t cover the type of education he needed.

So Kelley proposed a new program — one with eligibility requirements mirroring the A+ Program but to fund career-certificate programs.

To qualify, students will need to graduate high school with at least a 2.5 GPA, at least 95% attendance rate, 50 hours of unpaid tutoring and achieve proficiency in the Algebra I end-of-course exam. The Missouri Senate added another path to eligibility, opening the door to students with .

“Currently a student who wants to obtain a certificate or license right out of high school… must pay for these out of pocket because the courses are too short to qualify for the A+ reimbursement program and are not Pell eligible,” Kelley said in a committee hearing in February. “These students are typically ones who are not interested in going to a two-year or four-year school.”

Some students use the state’s to pay for training and licensing, but the program requires participants to be at least 25 years old. Some students take jobs outside their career path to pass the time and avoid shelling out thousands for their certificate, Kelley said, but this legislation seeks to “fill the gap.”

To pay for the grants, the bill sets up a fund managed by the State Treasurer’s Office. Funding would have to be appropriated annually by the state’s general assembly, though the fund would also be open for donations.

The state estimates a cost of , according to a fiscal note.

Kelley is “positive” that Kehoe will sign the bill given his vocal support for career-tech initiatives.

In his inaugural in January, Kehoe placed an emphasis on career and technical education and .

The legislation has also generated support from advocacy groups. In committee, lobbyists from the Missouri Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Missouri National Education Association spoke in favor of the idea.

“Skilled technical talent is a major asset to Missouri employers across all industries,” the chamber of commerce’s lobbyist Cade Tremain said in a hearing in February.

The legislation received wide support, drawing just two “no” votes in the House and one in the Senate. It ultimately passed as part of a with bipartisan support.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Missouri Independent maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jason Hancock for questions: info@missouriindependent.com.

Newark Public Schools will pay over $300 million over 30 years for its new trade high school — but after many delays, the gym and auditorium may not be finished when it opens this fall.

The Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design is expected to welcome students in September, per an amended lease agreement that extended the deal from 20 to 30 years and was approved by the district’s Board of Education last month. But the deadline for the developer to finish those parts of the school isn’t until the middle of 2026.

The district also has the option to purchase the building for $1,000 at the end of the 30-year lease, according to the revised agreement obtained by Chalkbeat through a public records request.

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The amended lease agreement comes after the developer of the property and Summit Assets CEO Albert Nigri would be finished by the start of the upcoming school year.

When the lease for the new trade high school was first signed by the district in 2021, NPS agreed to a $160 million, 20-year lease. The following year, Superintendent Roger León in the city’s East Ward at an invite-only groundbreaking ceremony. He touted the school — the first of its kind in the district — as an opportunity for students to fast-track their technical careers and earn a contract to work with the district.

It was originally scheduled to open in the fall of 2022. But issued by the state’s Department of Labor and Workforce Development over wage complaints and changes in contractors have delayed the project.

The district’s communications director Paul Brubaker did not respond to questions from Chalkbeat about the project’s setbacks, how the district plans to pay the lease for the school, or its reasoning for extending the lease agreement. Nigri did not respond to calls seeking comment.

The Newark School of Architecture and Interior Design is set to focus on three trades — plumbing, electricity, and HVAC — and allow students to study architecture and interior design. The curriculum will also give students a high school diploma and a license for trade work, district officials have previously said.

The new school is housed at the former St. James Hospital building that has stood vacant for years in the middle of the city’s Ironbound neighborhood. When it opens, the school will enroll 240 ninth grade students and add a grade level each year. Payments to Nigri, the property’s landlord and developer, are set to begin when the school opens this fall.

New high school delayed amid pay complaints

The latest version of the amended lease, approved by the school board in May, includes two new deadlines for the completion of the school.

By Aug. 1, 2025, the base of the school building must be completed, which includes new walls, roofs, and windows, elevators, restrooms, a courtyard, and landscaping. By June 1, 2026, the newly constructed gym and auditorium must be completed and the building must be finished, according to the lease amendment.

Those deadlines are later than those in approved by NPS in August 2024, which were for the base of the school building to be completed by Jan. 9, the new gym and auditorium to be finished by July 30, and the building to be completed by Sept. 1.

The amended lease also extends the deal from 20 to 30 years and bumps up the total lease to $295,979,990 over 30 years. The district must also pay a total of $20 million in additional payments to Nigri between year two and year six and year 26 and year 30 of the lease.

Union workers at the high school’s construction site also encountered poor working conditions that were making their jobs unsafe and many were being paid late or in cash. That resulted in the union filing wage complaints with the state.

In September 2022, the New Jersey Department of Labor issued stop-work orders to Summit Assets as well as the former general contractor and an ex-subcontractor. That order halted work on the site for months before Nigri hired a new contractor and subcontractor.

Days later, dozens of union workers demanding that León intervene after they were forced out of work and owed pay. León addressed laborers’ complaints and reiterated the district’s plan to open the school in September 2023.

, the Department of Labor issued a second stop-work order on the site and to the new contractors and subcontractors of the project. Although the work subsequently resumed, district leaders have not addressed the project’s delays or issues related to worker pay.

Instead, the district began to advertise a fall 2025 opening date, and this spring, it opened up enrollment to the school. Brubaker did not respond to a request for comment about the district’s contingency plan if the landlord fails to deliver part of the building by Aug. 1.

State remains responsible for new school construction in Newark

on the project, former assistant school business administrator Jason Ballard said that leasing a high school building is more affordable than building a new high school, which he said costs an average of $134 million. That’s less than half of what the district will pay on its lease for the new trade school, based on construction plans in other New Jersey cities.

The Schools Development Authority is the state agency responsible for paying construction projects in Newark and 30 other low-income school districts. According to its , the cost per square foot for a high school project was $369 at that time.

The agency’s largest and most expensive construction project is , which opened its doors last fall and cost $284 million to add room for nearly 3,300 students.

Over the years, the agency has promised the district it would pay for school repairs and provide new buildings. But despite efforts to address these challenges, including the allocation of $18 million in state funding for building upgrades over the last three fiscal years, the district estimates that it would need more than $2 billion to repair and update all schools.

The Newark school district has identified 33 out of its 64 total schools that need replacing and dozens more that need renovations. The state agency last summer promised to replace , but the deal still leaves out 20 schools that need replacements. The state agency also said it would spend a new University High School and relocate Hawthorne Avenue Elementary School, but the plan is still in its early stages.

In 2023, the Schools Development Authority purchased the former University Heights Charter School building and transferred it to the district to fulfill its promise to provide a new elementary school, now known as the

This story was originally by Chalkbeat, a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

But nowadays , said Christina Sanchez, a school and college counselor at in the San Fernando Valley.

Sanchez, who has worked as a counselor for more than two decades, has put in the time in schools to know what students think and feel about their possible future career paths. 

She said career and technical education is amongst today’s high school seniors, and, as far as she can tell, even are feeling the shift. 

But from her perch at Triumph Charter High, a , Title I school, Sanchez also said students should be mindful of the path they choose, whether it be college or the workforce. 

“If they are going to college just because somebody told them it’s best, that usually doesn’t work out,” she said. “But I also think they should consider the benefits of a college education.” 

Read on as Sanchez weighs in on why the CTE is ascendent, what colleges are doing to adjust, and whether this shift is good for students. 

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

University enrollment has declined over the past decade, and vocational programs are rising in that same timeframe. Have you noticed this trend and what do you attribute this to? 

We still have students going to college, but yes it is definitely a declining number. 

I would say there’s more interest in a quick payout. They see that more in trades. So, students are gravitating toward trade school where they can focus on a career and get out sooner. They feel they can make money quicker, and just as much, if not more, as with a college education. 

They’re equating education with money more, especially since the pandemic. Yes, there are obvious connections between those. But, it’s not the only factor, and it really depends what field you go into. 

What are universities doing to avoid a decline in enrollment?

There are still schools like UCLA and UC Berkeley who are very selective. UCLA is not begging anybody to apply.

I’ve definitely seen private colleges sending marketing emails more to get students to apply, and even waiving application fees. Sometimes they say ‘you don’t even need to do the extra work, just send us a transcript.’ Public universities are extending deadlines often as well. 

Community colleges are also increasing and promoting their trade programs more than ever. That’s becoming a focus for them because they’re trying to compete. 

Are there more downsides to a college degree now than in years past, and are students more pessimistic about going to college?

There’s definitely a resistance to taking out student loans. It doesn’t help that parents will often highlight cautionary tales, like a niece or nephew who went to college and is now working retail. 

I haven’t noticed any increases in unemployment rates or underemployment rates. Those are specific instances, not really a trend. When we do hear back from our alumni who went to college, they are almost always working on something related to their degree. I rarely have a student come back and say they haven’t been able to get a job. 

Why are trade careers becoming more interesting to students? 

There are always trending careers, but they ebb and flow. Today, social media has more of an impact on what careers students see. Sometimes I talk to students and ask, ‘How did you even know about that?’ and they say they saw it on social media. 

People highlight their career paths, and students see the best of it. They see what the person chooses to show. Just like it is with people’s private lives, you may not see the bad days or the bad sides of it. They’re not highlighting the negatives. I definitely see that influencing students when it comes to career paths, especially in the last five years. 

What advice would you give to a student choosing between a trade school and a university in this current job climate? 

I think everybody should do what’s right for them. If they are going to college just because somebody told them it’s best, that usually doesn’t work out. But I also think they should consider the benefits of a college education, other than what type of job you can get. I do find that there are benefits beyond that. 

Some are not seeing that job opportunities are wider with a college degree. If you are trained in one industry and you don’t enjoy it, you don’t have as much flexibility as someone with a college degree. You’re 17 years old, how do you know you want to be an electrician? 

When they make the decision, they need to be open to everything so that they know for sure it is the right one for them and not just one they made because they didn’t work to explore their options. 

I think what needs to be done more in schools is career exposure. Students are mostly making decisions based on what they see on the internet, what they read, and random examples. They’re not really experiencing the world of work because we have such an academic focus in our schools. Many schools promote college prep, and it almost seems like career things are considered ‘anti-college.’ 

That might be doing students a disservice to students who don’t get to see all these careers and what they look like. So I do think schools should do more with career guidance. I’m in support of career education, apprenticeships, and dual enrollment, but it should be done for careers you get with a college degree, not just trade school careers. It does seem like when schools do have career programs, they tend to be in the trades. It should be both. 

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

With the nation’s second largest school district now offering nearly 450  programs across 160 schools, Los Angeles Unified students are embracing CTE. 

More than 47,000 students have access to programs that range from internships and dual enrollment courses to clubs, electives and required classes aligned with core academic subjects. 

Earlier this month, hundreds of high schoolers demonstrated new skills at the California Endowment Center, from horticulture to computer programming, while middle school students toured booths and explored the programs they could soon join.

“I want to go into landscaping, designing people’s yards,” said senior Serenity Flores, who takes a horticulture class at Sylmar Charter High School. “And this class kind of brought me around to that.”

District data shows these offerings are growing fast. The number of paid student interns more than doubled, rising from just over 700 in 2023–24 to more than 1,600 this school year.

Industry certifications have also grown in popularity. Students earned more than 6,000 credentials in 2023-24, a 60% increase from the previous year, in areas like Microsoft Office, food handling and CPR.

One reason for the increase is the rise of Linked Learning, a California-based program that blends academics with career exploration and college credit.

The  began in 2009 as a pilot in nine school districts. Today, it’s grown to more than 50 districts. In LAUSD,  participated during the 2023–24 school year.

Romero’s school, Hilda Solis High School in Boyle Heights, is one of many that offers a .

“I really enjoy it because it shows that I’m capable of doing things like this,” said Ivan Romero, who is enrolled in the school’s engineering design class.

To meet rising demand, the district announced a two-year pilot program in 2024 to trai new CTE teachers. LAUSD officials  was to address the growing need for skilled educators in CTE programs. 

The pilot will support 25 new CTE teachers per year and pair each with a mentor. 

According to a U.S. Department of Education study, students who took two or more CTE courses had a 94% graduation rate, compared to 86% for those who didn’t. Employers are also on board, with 96% viewing CTE applicants favorably.

Many of these students are graduating high school with certifications or finished college courses. 

“Basically, when they graduate, they can start working,” said an LAUSD spokesman. “The emphasis on it is, when they get out of college, they’re ready to go to work.”

Although most students said the courses help build on their college plans or inform them of higher education choices, some have chosen blue-collar and trade programs as an alternative.  

Sergio Garcia, a senior at Banning High School, gets to learn how to put out fires and do CPR from the Los Angeles Fire Department. Other students said they had never thought of becoming a firefighter before being introduced to the course. Now they can expect to have certifications and be working for fire departments straight out of high school. 

Some educators say all students, not just the ones in blue-collar programs, should have that opportunity. Darryl Sher, who teaches the robotics club at LACES Magnet School, said students are often told college is the only route. CTE programs show otherwise.

“Most of them are going to college, but they could get jobs in tech right out of high school,” Sher said.

Even if the majority of students plan to go to college, or need a degree to pursue their ultimate career goals, there are plenty of programs to help students earn money right out of high school. 

“Some have automotive programs, some have food safety courses,” Frank said, highlighting auto repair and customer service jobs as starting industries for many students. “They can get a job and do something that can support their college education.” 

This article is part of a collaboration between ����Ӱ�� and the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

President Donald Trump’s vision to revive American manufacturing — a linchpin of his economic and national security strategy — rests on a bold promise: a renaissance of high-tech factories staffed by skilled tradespeople. The White House, defending steep tariffs to incentivize domestic production, that decades of trade deficits have “hollowed out” America’s manufacturing base, resulting in “a lack of incentive to increase advanced domestic manufacturing capacity.” This, in turn, has “undermined critical supply chains; and rendered our defense-industrial base dependent on foreign adversaries.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick painted a bracing picture of this industrial renaissance. “There’s going to be mechanics, there’s going to be HVAC specialists, there’s going to be electricians — the tradecraft of America,” he on CBS’s Face the Nation earlier this month. “Our high school-educated Americans, the core to our workforce, is [sic] going to have the greatest resurgence of jobs in the history of America, to work on these high-tech factories, which are all coming to America.”

It’s a stirring vision, but it hinges on a question that’s been largely ignored amid the political and economic debates over tariffs: Does America’s education system have what it takes to produce the workforce needed to staff a manufacturing revival? To put the question bluntly, is it any better at career and technical education than teaching kids to read and do math proficiently?

The evidence suggests a mixed picture: CTE is a comparative bright spot in America’s challenged education system, but serious hurdles, from misaligned training to automation’s rising demands, raise doubts about whether schools are equipped to meet the moment. Fewer than 40% of the country holds a college , so Lutnick is correct to say high school-educated Americans are the “core” of the workforce. But manufacturing is no longer reliably safe terrain for an unskilled worker with minimal education. Even before Trump took office, a 2024 forecast a need for up to 3.8 million additional skilled manufacturing employees by 2033 — while predicting that half of those could go unfilled if skills and applicant gaps go unaddressed.

Let’s start with the good news. CTE delivers tangible outcomes where core academics often stumble. While only 26% of eighth-graders scored proficient in math on the 2022 NAEP, the Nation’s Report Card, CTE programs demonstrably funnel kids into the workforce. High schoolers who take multiple CTE courses peers who don’t in earnings and employment rates. Even more encouraging, a 2022 published by the Annenberg Institute at Brown University found these CTE “concentrators” are 8.4 percentage points more likely to avoid poverty and are significantly more likely to earn above the poverty threshold seven years after high school. They are also less likely to be disengaged — neither employed nor participating in education or training.

These are positive outcomes, and unsurprising. With 85% of 2019 high school graduates earning at least one CTE credit and 77% of CTE students graduating on time — often despite being at-risk — CTE’s focus on jobs over test scores suggests that K-12 can do something right when the goal is paychecks, not just test scores. At its best, CTE aligns education with the practical demands of the labor market, offering pathways to careers that don’t require a four-year degree but still promise stability and dignity.

But those successes are not universal, and the broader K-12 system’s weaknesses cast a long shadow over Trump’s manufacturing ambitions. A by my former colleagues at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute found that CTE programs often fail to align with the needs of local job markets. Nothing useful comes from schools churning out workers trained as welders in regions where robotics or advanced manufacturing jobs dominate — or might in the future. More concerning, only about 5% of CTE concentrators focus on manufacturing, lagging behind other fields such as health science, agriculture, business management, and hospitality and tourism. tourism. A co-authored by Boston College’s Shaun Dougherty found that schools have an even tougher time filling CTE teaching positions than openings in academic subjects, and that CTE teachers in high-growth areas with occupational licenses are much more likely to leave the profession and enter industry, where they can earn more. 

The broader K-12 system’s academic struggles don’t inspire confidence, either. That 26% math proficiency rate among eighth-graders isn’t just a statistic; it’s a flashing red warning light. The elephant in the room is automation, which shifts manufacturing job demands toward advanced skills like robotics and computer numerical control programming, which involves writing instructions, or code, that tells a machine how to operate and perform tasks like cutting, drilling or milling. In sum, manufacturing is no longer about low-skill, repetitive tasks, but about sophisticated, tech-driven processes. If three-quarters of students can’t master middle school math, the demands of modern manufacturing are likely beyond them. 

The poor performance of K-12 education doesn’t augur well for a renaissance in even semi-skilled labor. Specialized CTE high schools and postsecondary schools perform well, but most such students are still in traditional settings, notes Dougherty. “I don’t think that we have evidence that in … comprehensive high schools where we’re offering CTE, that we are systematically doing better in teaching CTE than we are in math and reading,” he tells me.

Finally, and perhaps ominously, there are factors schools can’t fully control. Soft skills like initiative and work ethic are critical in manufacturing, yet they’re notoriously hard to teach. Tim Taylor of America Succeeds, a nonprofit aimed at mobilizing business to support education, shared an anecdote about an Austin, Texas, manufacturer who handed out 75 business cards at a career fair, inviting students to come for a job interview. Only three showed up. Taylor’s organization emphasizes mid-skill, mid-wage jobs as the goal — not low-skill, low-wage work that’s easily automated or offshored. But fostering the initiative to seize those opportunities requires more than curriculum; it demands a cultural shift.

So, can American education rise to the challenge of Trump’s manufacturing revival? The answer is a qualified maybe. CTE is a proven pathway for getting kids into the workforce, and its focus on practical skills makes it better suited than traditional academics to meet industry’s immediate needs. Getting serious about this revival will take more than tariffs and rhetoric. It means ensuring CTE programs are tightly aligned with local economies and forward-looking enough to prepare students for an automated future. It means fixing the academic foundations — math, literacy, problem-solving — that underpin technical skills. And it means cultivating a culture that values hard work and opportunity, not just credentials. 

Such a school could expose students to a multitude of career fields, allow students to choose learning opportunities that reflect their passions, and facilitate credential-building experiences that support students in launching careers they care about – all before entering college or the workforce. 

This type of learning isn’t hypothetical, and it isn’t always restricted to high school. Innovative communities across the country are proving the power of career-connected learning – which integrates real-world skills and experiences into curricula – to give students of all ages the 21st-century know-how needed to thrive and lead in the future. 

Just outside Austin, Texas, IDEA Round Rock Tech recognizes that must access computer science courses to be prepared for the region’s . The school implemented a comprehensive COMP3 (computer science,computational thinking, and general computing) progression for all of its pre-K through high school students. Programming languages like Python and JavaScript bolster students’ access to tech jobs (if they want them) and build the foundational logic and problem-solving skills they’ll need in any career. 

At the Brooklyn STEAM Center in New York City, 11th and 12th grade students from across the borough spend their afternoons “learning by doing.”  Located at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, a robust industry ecosystem with over 400 businesses, STEAM students choose from six in-demand industries, engaging in professional work, developing robust industry networks, and ultimately creating tangible pathways to a career.

Students’ personal stake in the industry and opportunities they pursue is helping STEAM build toward its founding goal of transforming the “school to prison pipeline” into “school to career.” It’s working: 83% of STEAM’s first graduating class earned a career credential, 100% had a fully-developed post-secondary plan, and 95% enrolled in a four-year college.

Career-connected learning solves for the future by engaging students today. Where I work at , a national nonprofit committed to extraordinary learning for all children, my colleagues and I are hearing from too many students that school is falling short. It is not engaging, relevant or connected to their real-life. They are telling us directly in surveys like our and continued tracking of Gen-Z engagement. They’re also telling us by simply not showing up to class. 

By giving students agency to pursue the kinds of relevant, rigorous learning experiences they care about, career-connected learning can help solve the youth disengagement crisis. 

In Chicago, families designed Intrinsic Schools to address the troubling reality that just of kids entering local public schools would earn a four-year degree by the time they were 25. Intrinsic built a unique school design where students personalize and own their learning with support from innovative technology that helps students and teachers know where to focus and adjust day-to-day. 

For Isaaq, who went on to graduate from University of Chicago with a degree in computer science and psychology, this flexible design was key in pursuing his budding passion for math. While taking three math classes concurrently – unheard of in a traditional curriculum that stresses sequential, paced progression – Isaaq launched a club around video games and used his math skills to code a real-time rankings system he’d been told “couldn’t be done.” 

This student-centered design looks different for every kid, but gets results for most of them: more than 90% of the class of 2023 enrolled in college, compared to the national college enrollment rate of 39%.

Rural communities are also tackling student engagement with career-connected learning. In Colorado’s Clear Creek School District, students were increasingly disengaged in school as their community confronted a serious water crisis. Spurred by students’ advocacy for project-based learning, Clear Creek High School transformed 34 of its classes to tackle real-life challenges, in part by learning more about the careers that influence them. 

In AP Bio, students began learning about filtration systems and water quality. Some students delved into communications, fundraising, and liaising with school and business leaders. In just one school year, students’ belief that they’ve “seen adults in my school listen to the ideas and voices of youth when making decisions” grew from 45% to 54%. And the momentum generated by Clear Creek students led to a commitment of at least $150,000 to mitigate the water issues.

In each of these communities, career-connected learning is giving students a say in what, where, and how they learn. IDEA Round Rock, Brooklyn STEAM, Intrinsic, and Clear Creek are refusing to accept the limitations of a school model designed over a century ago, with students batched by age, curriculum standardized, and uniformity prized. Instead, these schools are elevating student voices and re-designing their education offerings to meet the needs of modern youth. 

Importantly, all of these schools arrived at their career-focused innovations through “,” a process that starts by listening to students and engages the whole school community to reshape school to meet student needs. When we listen to students, they tell us they want to grow new skills, explore new opportunities, and build their own futures—starting in K-12. 

These schools aren’t anomalies. Career-connected learning can take root in any community—red or blue, urban or rural, coastal or heartland—willing to come together to design learning that responds to the demands and opportunities of the 21st century. Our students are spelling out what they want from school today. It’s up to educators to  listen to them and create schools that make their 15,000 hours count. 

Natalie Watts loves her computer science classes at Campbell High School. The junior has studied everything from coding robots to creating online computer games and was initially attracted to the career track because of the technological skills she could gain and the high-paying jobs that could follow. 

But when Watts recently participated in a presentation highlighting Campbell’s STEM programs, she received an unexpected question from the audience: Is being in the program “like going to an all-boys school?”

In the 2022-23 school year, 70% of students in Campbell’s information technology classes were boys. The school had a similar gender gap in its architecture and science programs. 

Watts has always felt supported and welcomed by her male peers and teachers, but she also wants more girls to see computer science and engineering as a part of their futures. 

Campbell is one of 46 Hawaii public high schools enrolling students in career and technical education courses, which provide hands-on learning, internships and training to prepare students for life after graduation. Students usually enroll in a single CTE program throughout high school, taking multiple classes related to careers in fields such as nursing, teaching and engineering. 

The number of students enrolled in CTE pathways has exploded in Hawaii in recent years, amid debates about how to help students secure high-paying jobs after graduation and combat the state’s high cost of living. Nearly two-thirds of the class of 2023 participated in a high school CTE program. 

But the programs  across the state. 

In the 2022-23 school year, boys made up nearly 75% of Hawaii CTE programs focused on STEM and information technology, and roughly 70% of programs focused on manufacturing. On the other hand, girls made up three-quarters of health care programs like nursing. 

Researchers say these patterns reflect and reinforce larger trends in the state’s workforce, where men dominate lucrative careers such as engineering and computer science. Statewide, women make 86 cents for every dollar men earn, in part because of which careers they pursue,  from the University of Hawaii. 

Federal legislation requires states to track gender enrollment in these programs and dedicate funds to address enrollment disparities that help perpetuate longstanding  and shut women out of higher-paying opportunities. But many states — including Hawaii — have made little progress in closing the gender gap over the past five years. 

Hawaii has slightly better success than mainland districts in getting boys interested in careers in education — and has equal participation in some career tracks like business and hospitality — but the state is lagging behind the national average when it comes to enrolling girls in fields most likely to lead to high-paying jobs in the future.

The Hawaii Department of Education declined multiple interview requests for this story, but individual principals say they are exploring a range of strategies to address the problem, from career fairs highlighting women in STEM to presentations encouraging middle schoolers to keep their minds open about future jobs. Outside organizations and employers have also stepped in to help schools close gender gaps.

But efforts vary by school, and some CTE coordinators say the state isn’t doing enough to help schools create gender-balanced programs.

“There’s no real systematic approach,” said Jeremy Seitz, who leads the engineering CTE program at Farrington High School. 

Federal Funds And Few Plans 

Eden Ledward is the face of the University of Hawaii’s CTE carpentry program. A minute-long video on the university’s website shows Ledward building houses, studying construction plans and operating a handsaw as she explains how CTE classes help her pursue her passion for building.  

“My classmates and instructors are solid, and we get real experience doing real work,” she says to the camera. 

The promotional video is the product of federal funds Hawaii receives annually to support CTE programs at the high school and college level under the Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act. Of the $7 million the federal government provided Hawaii for its CTE programs in 2024, the state was required to set aside $60,000 to address gender disparities.

Many of these dollars have gone toward creating promotional videos posted on the . The videos feature students who are pursuing CTE programs that have traditionally been dominated by a single gender, such as construction or nursing, said Warren Kawano, career pathways and strategy director at the organization .

UH isn’t required to report on the outcomes of specific gender equality initiatives using Perkins funds, and it’s difficult to measure the impact of these marketing campaigns, Kawano said. But he hopes the videos help broaden students’ understanding of the careers they can pursue. 

“If you’re interested, there’s a place for you,” he said.  

The state Department of Education gets about $1.4 million a year of the state’s Perkins funding. In the past, department spokesperson Kimi Takazawa said, schools have used some of the federal funds to purchase safety gear for girls in CTE programs, bring in female guest speakers to speak about their experiences in STEM fields, and more.

But the department could not say how much money was spent on initiatives around gender equality and doesn’t track in detail how schools use the funds. 

Schools receive Perkins funds based on the number of students enrolled in their CTE programs, said Waiākea High School Principal Kelcy Koga, but staff have a lot of flexibility in how the funds can be used. Waiākea has used the money on everything from hiring CTE staff to running a daylong program teaching elementary and middle school girls about robotics and engineering.

State leaders have said that equity and access in these programs is paramount, but there are few details on how they will achieve that. When the state submitted a comprehensive plan in 2020 to the federal government outlining how it would improve equity and enrollment in its CTE programs, there was not a single mention of how Hawaii would close its gender gap in the 157-page document.

That doesn’t mean that the state disregarded the issue completely, Kawano said, since the $60,000 designated for gender equality is only a small portion of the funding Hawaii uses for CTE. It’s up to the education department and individual schools, he said, to determine how to achieve greater equality in their CTE programs. 

Since the plan’s implementation, the state has made some progress, but the change hasn’t been the same across all programs. The proportion of girls enrolled in STEM programs rose from 20% to 27% between 2020 and 2022, but the percentage of boys participating in the health science career track stayed roughly the same, at 25%. 

‘Highly Segregated By Gender’

Hawaii is not alone in this.

A 2024 analysis from the U.S. Department of Education found that high school girls earned roughly the same number of CTE credits in architecture and construction in 2019 as they did in 1990. At the same time, the gap between the number of boys and girls in CTE health care programs grew as female students enrolled in classes at higher rates.   

“These results underscore the need for continued leadership in this space and an urgent, strategic focus on better engaging females in career pathways that lead to good jobs,” U.S. DOE Assistant Secretary for Career, Technical and Adult Education Amy Loyd wrote last year. “CTE programs in some career clusters remain highly segregated by gender, as do the occupations for which they prepare students.”

A number of factors can explain states’ ongoing challenges in achieving gender equality in career-based learning, said Emily Passias, deputy executive director of the national advocacy group Advance CTE. Gender gaps may persist as students gravitate toward the same classes as their friends, she said, or feel family pressure to pursue traditional careers. Sometimes, she added, CTE programs like welding may not have equipment specially fitted for girls, further enforcing gender stereotypes. 

“Those are things that signal to young people, I’m welcome or not welcome here,” she said.  

Some schools have shown that it’s possible to address gender segregation in CTE. 

Roughly half of students in STEM programs in the District of Columbia were girls in the 2021-22 school year, compared to the national average of 30%. The district said its success comes from teaching girls about careers in STEM from a young age and hosting career fairs and guest speakers emphasizing the importance of gender diversity in fields such as health care and engineering. 

But efforts in Hawaii are mostly piecemeal.

When Jeremy Seitz began teaching engineering and design technology classes at Farrington High School in 2008, all his students were boys. Roughly a quarter of students in the school’s engineering program are now girls. 

Making engineering classes a more welcoming place for girls has taken time, Seitz said. Growing up in Kalihi, he said, students have few opportunities to explore career options, and girls are often expected to stay home and take care of their younger siblings. 

The school brings in female engineers as guest speakers, Seitz said, and high school girls visit nearby middle schools to give lessons and show younger students what it’s like to study construction and architecture. 

Watts, the junior studying computer science at Campbell High School, is working with classmates on events that encourage girls to sign up for STEM programs. 

“If you want to do it, you should do it,” Watts tells younger students. “Don’t let male domination keep you from doing what you want to do.” 

‘You Just Have To Keep Trying’

There’s been little statewide effort to make sure all programs are taking similar steps. The state education department has occasionally completed equity audits of schools’ CTE programs, Seitz said, but he hasn’t seen any action taken based on that data.   

The CTE program at Waipahu High School, formerly under the leadership of Superintendent Keith Hayashi, is considered one of the trailblazers in providing career-based learning to all students during their four years on campus. Over 90% of Waipahu’s graduating class of 2023 participated in CTE, and the school opened a  hosting the culinary and natural resources programs just over a year ago. 

“It’s an opportunity for us in the department to lead change not only in Hawaii but, I believe, across the country,” Hayashi said at the learning center’s grand opening in December 2023. 

Even the state’s premier CTE school has significant gender gaps in its health care and engineering programs. Only 15% of students in the industrial and engineering technology program are girls. Meanwhile, only a quarter of students are boys in the health and science program.  

Waipahu High School Principal Zachary Sheets said achieving gender equality in CTE is a top priority. He tries to make sure there’s equal gender representation in the presentations and promotional materials the school gives to students choosing their CTE programs and has added career tracks like kinesiology to try to make the health care program appealing to more boys. 

“Don’t limit yourself,” Sheets said he tells students. “If you really have a passion about it, we want you to pursue that.” 

Sheets is optimistic that efforts by feeder schools to provide career education to younger students will help close some gender gaps at the high school level.

An equal number of boys and girls are enrolled in classes such as woodworking and aquaponics at nearby Waikele Elementary, said Michelle Tavares-Yamada, the school’s academy pathway director.

Younger kids aren’t always aware of gender stereotypes around certain jobs, she said, and the school capitalizes on this by encouraging students to explore their interests.

“I think our students see that, so they don’t think about those gender inequities,” she said. 

With limited statewide guidance, some community groups and local employers are also stepping in to help schools close their gender gaps. 

Since 2018, the Chamber of Commerce Hawaii has led a pilot program targeting middle and high school girls who are interested in careers in STEM. The program, taking place in the Castle, Campbell and Waipahu complexes, connects schools with female leaders in the field and hosts activities and panels teaching girls about engineering at partner campuses. 

Kathleen Chu, who helps lead the initiative and works at the local engineering firm Bowers + Kubota, said young girls aren’t always aware that engineering is a high-paying career path. When talking to girls about their CTE options, she shares the challenges of working in a male-dominated field but also emphasizes that women can bring leadership skills and new perspectives to the job. 

“You can’t give up,” said Chu, adding that she doesn’t want girls to disregard a career in engineering because they struggle with math or haven’t seen many women at a construction site before. “You just have to keep trying.” 

In the three school complexes hosting the pilot program, the percentage of girls in engineering CTE programs has increased from 17% to 26% over the last five years. The Chamber of Commerce is trying to expand the program and identify new schools as future partners, said Lord Ryan Lizardo, vice president of education. 

Even with these partnerships and guest speakers, it’s still difficult to encourage students to pursue programs where they’ll be in the minority, said Tracie Koide, a teacher at Campbell High School. Teachers try to create welcoming environments for all students, regardless of their gender, she added, but many kids want to enroll in the same programs as their friends.

Looking Ahead

Hawaii has the opportunity to ramp up its efforts to achieve greater gender equality this year, as the state prepares to submit a new CTE plan to the federal government. 

The  offers few details on how schools will address gender gaps, but the public will have the opportunity to provide feedback on the document beginning next month.

For now, said UH research economist Rachel Inafuku, differences in career preparation for boys and girls can contribute to gender gaps already existing in the workplace. 

Nearly 80% of Hawaii’s elementary and middle school teachers are female and earn a median income of $63,000. Electrical engineers, 90% of whom are male, have a median income of more than $100,000. 

At the Chamber of Commerce, Lizardo said he’d like to see more professional development for teachers when it comes to helping students make informed decisions about CTE. It’s important for schools to be honest about gender inequalities in the workforce, he added, but students should also have as much information as possible when deciding what CTE programs to pursue so they’re not swayed by their families or friends.  

David Sun-Miyashiro, executive director of HawaiiKidsCAN, said the state should take a closer look at the way schools are marketing and administering CTE programs with clear differences in enrollment for boys and girls. CTE programs should open up new opportunities for students, he added, rather than confining them to the limited representation they currently see in the workforce.   

“I think we need to have those really honest and sometimes tough conversations,” he said. 

This story is a collaboration between  and , with support from Ascendium Education Group.

Civil Beat’s education reporting is supported by a grant from Chamberlin Family Philanthropy.

He won one of 20 available slots in a new —  just one of three at Accenture — in a city of 20,000 public high school students. 

Three years later, Brown-Weaver, now 19, has become a full-time employee, earning more than $20 an hour as a package app developer at Accenture.

But a good friend who missed out on the apprenticeships is struggling. 

“Because of the luck of the draw that I had (I’m working) … in the field that I want to be in,” Brown-Weaver told a recent .

His friend, he said, “works part time at Target, making minimum wage.”

“It’s sad to see that I simply just got lucky that day,” Brown-Weaver said.

Providing high school students like Brown-Weaver a chance to try out possible careers has become a growing focus for families, public officials, schools and even businesses the last several years. 

But all work opportunities aren’t created equal. 

There’s a hierarchy of experiences that rise in commitment, intensity and benefit for students and providers —  with career days and job fairs at the low end. At the top end are internships, where students work with adults; and apprenticeships, longer programs where students are paid to work and earn career credentials.

Schools and communities routinely boast of making great efforts to better connect students with real work opportunities, but the reality is these efforts rarely go beyond career exposure events like career days or job shadows.

“The ultimate internship…a paid experience…we still have a long way to go to provide more opportunity for young people to experience those,” said Julie Lammers, senior vice president of American Student Assistance, a non-profit connecting students to career training.

The best estimates available suggest five percent of students or less have the chance for the gold standard of work experiences —  apprenticeships or internships. 

At the request of ����Ӱ��, the U.S. Department of Labor compiled data showing a little over 10,000 16- to 18-year-olds started apprenticeships nationally last year — less than a tenth of a percent of the more than 13 million students that age. That’s including 18-year-olds who started apprenticeships after graduating high school.

It’s a dramatic difference from European countries such as Switzerland, where more than half of students use apprenticeships to start a career or as a stepping stone to university. Apprenticeships in Switzerland have the attention of Linda McMahon, the new appointee for U.S. secretary of education, who on the day her appointment was announced. 

There are more internships than apprenticeships for high schoolers, but still not many. A 2018 survey of more than 800 students by American Student Assistance, a non-profit that works with students on career choices, showed while 79 percent were interested in trying a work experience, only 2 percent completed an internship in high school.

Though the percentage of employers offering high school internships has, ASA estimates only four to five percent of students actually are participating in internships.

‘That’s still a very small number of young people,” Lammers said. “Those organizations may only be offering one or two opportunities, so the volume is still not there.”

Lammers said schools are instead adding “things that expose young people to work, but are not necessarily training them in specific skills.”

ASA’s recent survey found that close to half of employers offer mentorships, job shadowing, open houses and field trip visits — all valuable experiences for students but that barely scratch the surface of providing  the skills and training needed for the world of work.

Noel Ginsburg, co-chairman of the U.S. Department of Labor’s said schools and businesses can’t stop at just exposing students to careers.

“It’s not a bad thing,” he said. “It’s just not enough.”

“It’s a lack of understanding what quality actually means when a school says, ‘We have these partnerships with XYZ company, and they come in, they’re helping us in class, and sometimes they’ll donate old whatever (equipment to train with),” Ginsburg said. “That’s not what apprenticeship is…but that’s historically what it has been for them.”

Experts have agreed on a rough hierarchy of work experiences for several years, often distinguishing between those where students “learn about work” and those where they “learn how to work.”

As a co-written by Advance CTE, the national association of state directors of career technical education, notes, “Work-based learning includes a continuum of experiences ranging from less intensive opportunities such as career awareness and career exploration to more intensive opportunities such as career preparation and career training.”

The Advance CTE hierarchy below is similar to those created in 2009 like, a Bay Area non-profit that has worked on career efforts in California and New York. It’s also similar to those used by nonprofits like Brookings, ExcelInED, ASA or adopted by states such as , , , or , sometimes labeling the top level as career immersion, development or participation.

Some take that hierarchy even farther. As officials in Indiana started developing plans for a statewide expansion of high school apprenticeships they ranked student work experiences with full registered apprenticeships at the top, pre-apprenticeships and other apprenticeships a level below, internships below those and work opportunities that teach students general employability skills a step lower.

The trouble is that while low-level career experiences like job fairs take just a few hours of time for students and businesses, apprenticeships and internships require much more effort from both sides. 

CityWorks DC, the program that organized Brown-Weaver’s apprenticeship, would like to expand to many more students, but is growing slowly.

“We definitely need more opportunities and hope to offer more, but one reason there are so few are the systemic barriers that make what we do very resource intensive and challenging,” said Lateefah Durant, CityWorks’ vice president of innovation.

She said it can be hard to find students that can commit to working several hours a week and fit that within their high school class schedules. It’s also hard to find companies willing to take on high school students and train them.

In 2019, the program’s first year, one of nine companies that took on apprentices backed out. And one of the other Accenture apprentices alongside Brown-Weaver had trouble meeting standards and was dropped.

ASA’s 2023 survey highlighted several common challenges businesses see as they start high school internships, including finding appropriate work for them, devoting staff to training them, scheduling around class schedules and whether students have transportation to work.

Companies are less likely to view high school apprenticeships as a key part of building a workforce than just as a way to give back to the community. Using apprenticeships and internships as a real talent strategy, as they are in Europe, is key to them ever becoming widely available, experts say.

Those findings are in keeping with challenges experts have pointed to as holding growth of internships and apprenticeships back.

Transportation is a big problem for lower-income students, who often need to improve their career chances the most but rarely have their own car. And class schedules, along with extracurricular activities, can be a big hurdle too since they can limit the time a student can spend in a workplace each day.

Indiana is among states trying to overcome these issues. Transportation costs could be covered by new Career Savings Accounts – state grants to students for training expenses. And the state is considering more flexible class schedules, so students can work at an apprenticeship a few days each week.

In many cases, with few companies stepping up to take on interns or apprenticeships, students are placed instead in government offices or with nonprofits that advocate for work opportunities. The D.C. program has apprentices with the Department of Labor and with New America, a left-leaning think tank that is part of the national Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship.

Indiana also placed early apprentices with Ascend Indiana, a non-profit that helped create them.

Schools and communities also lean on experiences that partly simulate or mirror work experience. These can include students doing exploratory summer internships with industry associations or schools that partner with companies so students earn money by doing a project, such as a small coding or marketing task, through school for the company.

Though there’s no consensus on where these fall on the continuum of work experiences, ASA’s Lammers said they can be worthwhile, if students are working on real-world problems for employers that intend to use the work product.

“If it is high- intensity project based learning, where young people are still exposed to a career…and are able to understand that it’s not just sort of an academic exercise… there is huge value in that,” she said. “It might not just be the nine-to- five paid experience that we sort of see in an internship, and that might be okay.”

Others look to third parties that the field is calling “intermediaries” to navigate some of the complex legal, liability and training issues, as well as to recruit, select and train students, along with training company staff in how to work with teenagers.

In Boston, the city’s Public Industry Council helps run paid summer internships for high schoolers, while also running staff training sessions to make sure students and companies benefit. CareerWise acts as an intermediary on some levels. Genesys Works, a non-profit, fills that role in eight regions — Houston, Minneapolis-St. Paul, San Francisco, Chicago, New York City, Tulsa and Washington, D.C., with Jacksonville coming next year.

Genesys gives students eight-week of unpaid training in the summer after 11th grade before placing them in paid internships for 20 hours a week as seniors. Students are paid employees of Genesys, not the companies, but they work in the offices of companies like Accenture, Medtronic or Target, the latter in corporate offices, not stocking shelves or working a register like Brown-Weaver’s friend.

“We’re going to our corporate partners saying, like, what are the roles, entry level roles in your corporate offices that you are filling over and over again?” said Mandy Hildenbrand, chief services officer of Genesys. “Let’s talk about how we can be a pipeline for that.”

For many apprenticeship advocates, some of the barriers are more about attitudes than real problems. 

“Culturally, U.S. companies haven’t traditionally viewed themselves as a training ground or an extension of the classroom,” said Ginsburg, founder of CareerWise, the nation’s largest youth apprenticeship program. “There’s a big difference between having an intern look over your shoulder and actually expecting real work from an apprentice.”

He said businesses should recognize that while they won’t see immediate returns, they will if they are patient and take the time to train students well.

“It’s hard,” he said, “before it gets easy.”

In this politically charged era, there’s one thing both parties agree on: the benefits of high school career pathways. 

With strong bipartisan support, career and technical education programs are poised to be a centerpiece of education policy over the next few years — both federally and in California. That’s good news for students taking agriscience, cabinetry, game design and other hands-on courses that may lead to high-paying careers.

Education advocates hail this as a boon for high schools. Students enrolled in career training courses tend to have . And business leaders say that strong career education can boost a local economy.

But there are still many unknowns, and some education experts worry that an expansion of career education will come at the expense of college-preparation programs, or lead to a return to “tracking,” in which schools steer certain students — often low-income students — toward careers that tend to pay less than those that require college degrees.

“This could be a great opportunity for career and technical education, but we have to do it right,” said Andy Rotherham, co-founder of Bellwether, a nonprofit educational consulting organization. “There’s a lot at stake.”

Funding is a primary question mark. While Republicans strongly support career education, it’s unclear if that enthusiasm will translate to more money — especially if Congress eliminates the Department of Education, as President-elect Trump has vowed to do. 

Career education classes can be some of the most expensive programs in a school district. Supplies, up-to-date equipment, teacher training, smaller class sizes, operation costs and students’ certification exams can cost millions, and the costs only increase over time. Schools spend 20%-40% more to educate students in career programs than they spend on those who aren’t, .

Most federal funding for career education comes from a 1960s law meant to improve career education. But that funding has not kept up with the escalating costs. Last year Congress allotted $1.4 billion, which was distributed to states through grants. California received $142 million, and supplemented that with an additional $1 billion.

“It’s wonderful to see this bipartisan support, but we’d like it to lead to continued investment,” said Alisha Hyslop, chief policy, research and content officer at the Association for Career and Technical Education, an advocacy group. 

Career education and tracking

Career and technical education has waxed and waned since its inception in the early 20th century as a way to prepare students, usually from working-class or immigrant families, for jobs in skilled trades.

For decades, most high schools in the U.S. had some form of vocational education. Those programs came under scrutiny in the 1980s and ’90s as some complained about tracking practices that left many students without the option to attend a 4-year college because they hadn’t taken the required coursework.

Partly in response to that criticism, former President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind Act in the early 2000s encouraged schools to promote college for all students. As a result, many schools cut back their career education offerings and added more advanced academic classes.

Then the 2008 financial crisis hit. High unemployment coupled with the soaring cost of college led schools to revive their career training programs, but with less tracking. Schools started encouraging all students to take career education classes, and the classes themselves were updated. Welding and auto shop were joined by computer science, graphic design, environmental studies, health care and other fields. In California, students are encouraged to take a career pathway as well as the required classes for admission to public 4-year colleges, although last year only about 11% of students completed both, according to .

Welders vs. philosophers

Career and technical education is a focal point of , the conservative policy roadmap written by the Heritage Foundation as well as the Republican party education platform and President-elect Trump’s nominee for education secretary, Linda McMahon. McMahon headed a pro-Trump political action group called America First Action, whose policies include an  in K-12 schools. The Republican platform reads, “(We) will emphasize education to prepare students for great jobs and careers, supporting … schools that offer meaningful work experience.”

Sen. Marco Rubio, Trump’s nominee for Secretary of State, put it more succinctly: “Welders make more money than philosophers. We need more welders and less philosophers,” .

Career education has also been a priority for Democrats. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom, State Superintendent of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond and the Legislature have all promoted career education. In 2022 Newsom created the Golden State Pathways program, a $470 million investment in high school career education, and followed up a year later with the , outlining a long-term vision. Newsom described it as “a game changer for thousands of students.”

In California, the goal is to , and tie pathways — sequences of two or three classes — to the local job market. For example, a  at a high school near the Port of Long Beach includes classes in global logistics and international business. A pathway at Hollywood High trains students for jobs in the entertainment industry. 

More ties to business?

But some educators worry about the fate of career education if the Department of Education, which administers the Perkins Act, is eliminated. Project 2025 suggests moving it to the Department of Labor, where it would likely have stronger ties to business and fewer ties to education organizations. That could impact whether pathway programs continue to have academic components, or include college preparation classes.

“Businesses love CTE because it socializes one of their big costs. Taxpayers are paying to train their workers,” said David Stern, education professor emeritus at UC Berkeley who’s an expert on career education. 

Hyslop shares that concern. 

“Certainly CTE has connections to the economy, but at its heart it’s an education program. It’s about preparing students for their future, whatever that future may be,” she said.

A broader question may be whether the push for career education is part of a backlash against college generally. College enrollment  for a decade, coinciding with a .

Meanwhile, Trump has proposed big cuts to higher education, and has often expressed disdain for what he described as colleges’ leftward tilt. Project 2025 calls for the government to place trade schools on equal footing with 4-year colleges.

“This new interest in CTE captures the anti-elitist sentiment of the time,” Stern said. He added that preparation for college does not have to conflict with preparation for careers, and some programs, such as the , prepare students for both. 

Rotherham agreed. “On the right, there’s definitely antagonism toward college,” he said.

But they both said regardless of the politics behind it, a national focus on career education could be transformative — if it doesn’t railroad students away from college opportunities. Ideally, students can gain career experience in high school, while also learning poetry and civics and other important academic subjects, Rotherham said.

“Power is having choices,” Rotherham said. “That’s what we want for kids. The option to change their mind if they want.”

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Stein, who will be the state’s first Jewish governor, has singled out improving the state’s schools as his top priority as he switches roles from attorney general. He will succeed current Democratic governor Roy Cooper, who could not seek re-election as his term expired. 

Though his win was anticipated by experts as the Robinson campaign crumbled in the wake of multiple scandals over the last few weeks, the vote was historic for North Carolina, which typically sees wins below a 4-point margin. Stein claimed a .

In September, as polls began showing favor for Stein, reported Robinson called himself a “Black Nazi” and said “slavery is not bad” on a porn site. His staffers quit and donations dried up. Former endorser President Donald Trump distanced himself.

Addressing supporters on election night after the race was called, moderate Stein rejected “hate” and re-emphasized his commitment to working across party lines for progress. 

“We have big challenges ahead, but we have even bigger dreams to realize,” . “…We must reject the politics of division, fear and hate that keep us from finding common ground. We will go further when we go together. Not as Democrats, not as Republicans, not as independents, but as North Carolinians.”

For schools, Stein campaigned on plans to improve youth mental health by recruiting counselors, nurses and social workers; increasing teacher pay; expanding career and vocational education; and providing universal school meals. Stein was endorsed by the state’s teachers union. 

Robinson, in contrast, threatened to reject billions of federal funding for education and campaigned on expanding the voucher system that allows families to attend private schools with public funding. 

Robinson’s flare for hateful, anti-LGBTQ and misogynistic rhetoric, condemned by the NAACP, would have also likely fueled disrespect for educators, whom he called “,” and distrust for the department of education, which he had said he wanted to get rid of entirely. 

While electing Stein, voters split their ballots to support Trump, but also elected a Democratic schools chief, overlooking party affinities in the interest of their childrens’ education. Democrat Mo Green, a large-district superintendent, claimed victory early Wednesday morning for state superintendent, earning more votes than right-wing homeschooling advocate and January 6 insurrectionist . 

Governor-elect Stein grew up in Chapel Hill, a college town, before studying history, law and government. He taught English and economics in Zimbabwe and served as a state senator for seven years before becoming attorney general in 2017. 

Stein has also promised to protect abortion rights, in a state where Republican lawmakers are discussing restricting access with a 6-week ban. 

A critical seat in the state legislature also flipped Democrat this Election Day, , . The body may now be forced to negotiate more with Stein. 

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California announced today which schools will share a windfall to bolster career paths for students – but delays and mishaps have meant that thousands of students missed the opportunity to participate.

An estimated 300 K-12 schools will share $450 million to set up internships, boost dual-enrollment programs at community colleges and take other steps to connect students to high-paying jobs in health care, technology, the arts and other fields. 

The announcement comes after a tumultuous few months for the Golden State Pathways program, which is part of California’s broader effort to  at high schools and community colleges. Alongside other investments, the program is intended to ultimately make career training available to every student.

Initially  in 2022, the Golden State Pathways Program was supposed to roll out the following year, with schools applying for grants and the state Education Department announcing winners in January 2024.

But in spring 2023, a brewing state budget deficit led some legislators to  and sending the money elsewhere. After protests from school districts and career education advocates, the program survived  — then faced more delays when the state pushed back the application deadline.

In May, the Education Department announced that 302 school school districts won grant money, but , some of those grants were for far different amounts than what the schools had applied for. 

In July, the state abruptly revoked the entire roster of grant recipients, saying it needed to review the applications again given that school districts had flooded it with appeals.

“The California Department of Education takes Golden State Pathways, as well as all of California’s investments in workforce-ready educational opportunities, very seriously, and we are committed to ensuring that these funds get to local educational agencies as quickly as possible. We recognize the impact that this (delay) has had on districts, and every effort is underway to ensure that funds are distributed as swiftly as possible,” Elizabeth Sanders, spokesperson for the Education Department, said in an email this week, adding that the agency is working to “ensure that all communication moving forward is clear, responsive, and collaborative.”

School districts and career education advocates were irate. The delay meant they could not move forward with plans for this fall, even though many had already committed to programs. In early September, a group of 20 school districts and nonprofits  to state officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom, imploring them to speed up the process.

“We respectfully ask that you do everything in your power to get promised Golden State Pathways grant dollars flowing, sent, and received to the hundreds of local education agencies that have planned, staffed and set expectations for this funding across California communities,” they wrote. “Time is of the essence for the communities that depend on them.”

The delays were especially painful for districts that have been scrambling to help students recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Since campuses reopened, they’ve grappled with ,  and an uptick in student misbehavior. Many students, meanwhile, have struggled with . 

Career pathways have offered some hope. Students who participate in them  higher graduation rates, higher rates of college enrollment and higher earnings later in life, according to research compiled by Policy Analysis for California Education, a nonprofit think tank.

By improving career paths for students, the state also hopes to spur its own economy by providing skilled workers for growing industries such as health care, technology and climate-related fields.

Students missing out

But the delays and uncertainty have forced schools and organizations to freeze hiring and planning.

“We’re in a holding pattern and the school year has already begun. We’re missing an opportunity to reach more students and help more school districts with their goals,” said Kirk Anne Taylor, executive director of Climate Action Pathways for Schools, a nonprofit that provides paid internships for high school students to work on environmental projects in their schools and communities.

Porterville Unified in Tulare County is among the districts that risked postponing its career pathways expansion plans. The district was hoping to use Golden State Pathways grant money this year to expand its climate internship program, where students create energy audits of school buildings and recommend ways to save gas and electricity. Over the past three years, the students’ audits have  more than $830,000 in energy costs. Students have also worked on green schoolyard projects and a switch to electric buses.

Taylor’s organization ended up finding another funding source for Porterville’s program, but other districts weren’t so lucky, she said.

“It’s a great program in Porterville and we’re eager to move forward … there and elsewhere,” Taylor said. 

In Los Angeles, a nonprofit called UNITE-LA connects schools with local businesses, setting up internships, job shadowing opportunities, mock interviews, professional speakers and other avenues for students to gain career experience. Due to the delays, plans to expand its programs at dozens of Los Angeles County high schools have been scuttled for a year.

Career education “really has the power to transform students’ lives,” said Carrie Lemmon, UNITE-LA senior vice president of systems change strategy. “So many students are struggling right now. We’re grateful for the grants, but every year we wait to implement these reforms, we’re losing more students.”

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The Alabama state superintendent said Thursday afternoon that a diploma pathway focused on career readiness should not be used to remove lower achieving students from another diploma pathway.

Speaking to members of the Alabama State Board of Education during a work session, Eric Mackey told board members that students should not be forced to work toward a career-pathway focused diploma known as Diploma B just because they have lower ACT scores than others.

“There will be no ‘If your ACT score is 22 you’re on Option A, and if it’s 21 you’re on Option B,’” Mackey said. “And if anybody tries to do that, the furor of the state superintendent will come down on them, because that is not the purpose.”

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The remarks came in a discussion over the diploma options of “A” and “B,” with “B” meeting a career-focused option required by the Legislature.

sponsored by Sen. Donnie Chesteen, R-Geneva, the chair of the Senate Education Policy Committee, was part of a package of bills focused on workforce development in the 2024 regular legislative session. The legislation requires the board to create a diploma under the law’s goal of facilitating “the development of a career pathways diploma at the K-12 level that would enhance career and technical education opportunities for high school students who plan to enter the workforce immediately after graduation.”

Mackey said that diplomas issued by the schools will not note whether they are the “A” or “B” option. Both diplomas require 24 credits.

But the superintendent said he was worried about returning to an old educational model where people sent students to vocational schools just to get them out of the building.

“I’m telling you, if anybody tries to go back to that, there will be fire raining down on them because that is not what this is about,” he said. “This is about giving students opportunities.”

Chesteen said in a Thursday afternoon phone call that he agreed with Mackey after the Reflector summarized what was said at the work session.

“I think it’s one thing to pass a piece of legislation. I think the most important piece to that is the implementation. How is it going to affect the students? And that’s what I want to monitor very carefully,” he said.

Chesteen said “we can’t use it for an easy pathway out for these kids that don’t score well,” and they need to have a career pathway after they graduate.

Diploma “A” requires four credits each in English Language Arts, Mathematics, Science and Social Studies. Diploma “B” requires four credits in English Language Arts and Social Studies, but two credits in Mathematics and Science. Option “B” also requires three credits in Career and Technical Education to complete a whole sequence.

“We’re going to have kids that score a 32 on the ACT, that want to be Option B because they like working with their hands, and they want to go into robotics or such thing, and we’re going to have kids with with a 20 ACT, that are strivers, they want to do the Option A,” Mackey said.

The Board intends to announce the intent to adopt the changes in the October meeting.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com. Follow Alabama Reflector on and .

Not long after new college students have finished choosing , they are asked to declare an academic major. For some students, this decision is easy, as their majors may have actually influenced their choice of college. Unfortunately, this decision is not always an easy one to make, and college students frequently change their minds.

Oklahoma colleges and universities are working to bridge gaps in the state’s health care workforce, particularly in rural areas, by incentivizing students to pursue careers in various health care professions.

Some students pursuing degrees in health professions will be eligible for tuition payments through a new partnership between Southwestern Oklahoma State University, or SWOSU, and Comanche County Memorial Hospital, while partnerships at other schools, like the University of Oklahoma’s College of Nursing, are also taking aim at meeting workforce needs.

Critical shortages can be found in nearly all of Oklahoma’s health care professions and those shortages are intensified in rural areas, according to the

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SWOSU students who are pursuing degrees in specified health care and administrative programs can receive tuition payments if they work at the Comanche County Memorial Hospital after graduation. Students will also receive hands-on experience at the hospital while in school.

“We will serve as one of SWOSU’s clinical sites for various health care related professions,” said Brent Smith, CEO of the hospital, in a statement. “We appreciate this collaborative effort and are eager to begin this program that will help meet the growing health care needs of our community.”

Joel Kendall, provost and vice president for academic affairs at SWOSU, said the partnership was modeled after a previous one between SWOSU and for nursing students.

“It’s just really important that we provide that workforce, for nursing and other allied health programs, especially in rural health,” he said. “In Oklahoma that’s critically needed right now, so partnerships like this are trying to address that.”

Kendall said around 1,500 SWOSU students could be eligible to participate in this new partnership. This includes specialties in nursing, radiologic technology, physical therapy assistant, surgical technology and health care administration among others.

He said the dollar amount for the tuition payments will be decided by Comanche County Memorial Hospital and may be dependent on how many graduates accept jobs at the hospital.

Melissa Craft, interim dean of University of Oklahoma’s College of Nursing, said OU is also working to meet workforce needs by expanding the number of students accepted into the school’s nursing program.

In a 2022 OU news release, the Oklahoma Nurses Association that the state had 712 nurses per 100,000 residents, which ranked Oklahoma 46th in the nation in terms of nurses per capita.

“Our qualifications for application and what would make someone an eligible student have always kept the same. What we changed was our ability to accept,” Craft said. “The goal is still that we accept all qualified applicants.”

Craft said “health care is needed everywhere,” not just in Oklahoma’s metro areas.

She said OU works with five regional sites in Oklahoma City, Tulsa, Lawton, Duncan and Norman to provide nursing students with hands-on learning experiences, like the SWOSU students.

But beyond the learning experience, Craft said partnering with regional hospitals helps the students find and build a community with those they work with and the patients they serve.

“Nursing is about relationships … we know that if we can partner with a facility and the nursing students, while they’re in school, can feel like they are a part of that community the chance that students will go to work there is really very, very high,” Craft said.

She said that OU graduates more nursing students than “anyone else” and while it’s an honor, “we graduate them for the workforce of Oklahoma.”

Craft said that in 2020, OU’s College of Nursing graduated 313 nurses. In 2024, that number has grown to 456 nurses.

She said that OU offers financial assistance to qualifying nursing students through various grants. The offers loan forgiveness to nurses who go on to educate the next generation of nurses after graduation. The Oklahoma Workforce Innovations and Nursing offers financial assistance to dozens of advanced practice nursing students per year.

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Oklahoma Voice maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Janelle Stecklein for questions: info@oklahomavoice.com. Follow Oklahoma Voice on and .