We Need New Systems to Support Agile, Lifelong Learning

In today’s ever-evolving economy, learners and workers must engage in ongoing and iterative learning experiences to ensure that they have the most in-demand skills and are prepared for quality jobs that lead to opportunities for economic advancement. That’s largely due to the rise of artificial intelligence and other technological advances, which are eliminating some jobs, creating others, and generally spawning unrelenting change in the nature of work.  

This country’s fragmented K-12, postsecondary, and workforce development systems often aren’t aligned to employers’ needs and are incapable of providing the dynamic education and training opportunities workers and learners require.  

At Jobs for the Future (JFF), we’ve long recognized that established systems are inadequate, and as an alternative, we’ve supported the development of stronger education-to-employment pathways that offer more rational and effective connections between the knowledge, expertise, and skills people acquire in high schools, colleges, or training programs and the skills and credentials that are valued in the labor market.  

The premise of the pathways approach is that improving career outcomes for workers and learners is a matter of improving the alignment and efficiency of connections within and across segments of the education and training ecosystem in accordance with employer expectations about the skills people need to succeed in quality jobs. Such connections are missing from the current K-12, postsecondary, and workforce development systems, meaning youth and adult learners must navigate transitions throughout this fragmented ecosystem on their own—a challenge that’s especially difficult for people from communities that are underserved by existing systems, including people of color and people from low-income backgrounds.  

But pathways are often implemented in ways that are too linear and present learners with a series of false choices, including between learning and earning, between academic knowledge and technical skills, between credentials and degrees, and between work and learning experiences that reflect their personal interests and aspirations and established paths that are expected to reliably lead to stable careers and economic security.   

Linear pathways that lead directly from learning to a lifelong career run counter to today’s reality. With an ever-changing economy and a workforce made up of people who are living and working longer, systems must provide ongoing learning experiences covering a wide array of subjects so people can continually prepare for new jobs and acquire durable bodies of skills and knowledge that they can build upon and transfer from job to job and industry to industry.  

At JFF, we still embrace the pathways metaphor and strategies, but we believe that it’s important to implement them with an approach that facilitates smooth lateral and vertical transitions to other training and education opportunities that lead to new skills, knowledge, credentials, and degrees. There are tools available now that education and workforce leaders can use to do that better, such as stackable credentials and transfer and articulation policies for postsecondary credit. But we also need new strategies altogether to create less linear, non-terminal, and more agile, continuous learning institutions, systems, and ecosystems that provide learners with equitable routes to gain the skills, knowledge, and on-the-job experience necessary to prepare for quality jobs and careers that lead to economic advancement. 

The Goal: Eliminating Inequities 

We need more than incremental improvements to systems that were designed with the assumption that not everyone will pursue careers requiring cutting-edge technical skills, in-depth knowledge and expertise, or metacognition. Our current systems erect many barriers to opportunity based on race, ethnicity, and/or socioeconomic status. We need education and training models and strategies that expand access and opportunity and eliminate systemic inequities.   

Pathways ecosystems have improved the likelihood that people of color and learners from low-income backgrounds will have opportunities to reach advanced levels of educational attainment and land quality jobs. But they’ve had limited success because they’re working within inequitable systems. So it shouldn’t be surprising that the Community College Research Center found that the community college Guided Pathways movement—an attempt to provide students with course options and support systems that create coherent and efficient routes to degrees and credentials—has not been “sufficient to close equity gaps between racial [and] ethnic groups,” despite producing otherwise promising outcomes.  

Nor should we be surprised by first-person anecdotes revealing that, starting in high school, participants in career-focused programs tend to be grouped by race, gender, and socioeconomic status—with engineering pathways disproportionately populated by students who are male and white or of Asian heritage or descent. And despite compelling evidence that young adults who are disconnected from education, training, or work can get back on track to completing postsecondary degrees if they participate in accelerated, high-support pathways, we shouldn’t be surprised that those types of programs—and the members of that demographic cohort—are still largely on the margins of “mainstream” education systems, which often still require such students to engage in credit recovery and remedial instruction when it’s clear that they’re ready to accelerate their attainment with the right support. 

We believe that pervasive features of current systems often end up limiting learners’ access to certain learning opportunities based on their demographic and socioeconomic background—a process that puts students of color and those from low-income backgrounds at a disadvantage. Here are more detailed discussions of three of those features: 

Advancement and credentialing are based on time spent in a classroom, not on demonstrations of skills and knowledge.

Current systems require learners to move through time-consuming and costly sequences of courses and grade levels to earn diplomas and degrees, and the skills and knowledge people gain in this process may only be loosely connected to career preparation and access. This can be an arduous if not unrealistic process for learners who can’t afford to spend time and money on an endeavor whose outcome is uncertain.  

Yes, it is true that bachelor’s degree holders on average earn significantly more over a lifetime than non-degree holders, but there’s wide variation in wage outcomes by college major and too few students have access to career navigation tools and resources that enable them to make informed choices about their futures. Four in 10 students who start college never finish, and six in 10 Black students never do.  

As Michael Collins, vice president of JFF’s Center for Racial Economic Equity, points out, even the fruits of success are rationed inequitably. “White high school graduates’ annual earnings of $35,000 are higher than [those of] Black associate’s degree holders,” he wrote in an essay on LinkedIn, citing data from the National Center for Education Statistics. From this perspective, it’s hard not to wonder if we have designed a system that weeds out and sorts people rather than maximizing talent and opportunity. 

We ask learners to take on the burden of financing the costs of postsecondary education as an individual responsibility (that yields an individual benefit), even though that learning contributes to the health of the economy in general through decreases in the need for downstream social services and increases in the tax base.

The prospect of taking on debt is a deterrent for many prospective college students, and it can become a lifelong burden with no return on investment for those who take it on and don’t complete a credential. Although financial aid is available through state and federal programs (such as Pell Grants), the system requires learners to navigate bureaucratic mazes and fill out opaque forms like FAFSA and essentially “prove their poverty” in order to verify that they’re eligible for assistance. It’s no wonder that many learners from low-income backgrounds fail to start or finish the process. 

We categorize modes of learning and place more value on some than others. Integrating them would increase access to higher levels of learning for more people.

For example, conceptual and theoretical coursework is typically separated from applied learning. And academic knowledge is differentiated from technical skills. Classroom-based learning in the abstract is often deemed more valuable than the skills, knowledge, and insights that people can acquire in the workplace and through other life experiences. In fact, classroom instruction can be enhanced by work-based learning in which learners have hands-on opportunities to apply abstract concepts as they complete tasks in real-world workplaces. Creating stronger connections between classroom instruction and work-based learning would reduce the need for people to choose between learning or working—decisions that often play out predictably based on learners’ ability to forgo earning money so they can spend time in class. 

Envisioning a More Equitable System 

One way to envision a more equitable system is to hypothesize about a fundamentally different set of systemic features. Here are some examples: 

If systems were in place to recognize everything learners know and everything they can do—regardless of whether they acquired their skills, knowledge, or expertise in school, on the job, or elsewhere—and enabled programming, experiences, and pedagogy designed to build upon their existing capabilities and acquire new ones, learners would not be forced to endure long “seat-time” requirements that too often reward stamina and compliance over mastery. This model would give learners access to a wider array of enriching learning experiences that reflect their interests and needs and complement their formal schooling.  

Moreover, the unhelpful boundaries between secondary education, postsecondary education, and work should be blurred and made less linear to enable new learning models designed to help learners build competence and a gain sense of autonomy that will help them succeed in quality jobs that offer opportunities for economic advancement (this is the model proposed in JFF’s Big Blur report). Programs that, for example, integrate learning and working—including but not limited to apprenticeship—could and should proliferate.  

With such a model in place, the costs and risks of postsecondary education would decrease because it would be a public responsibility to create transparent and affordable—if not cost-free to a first degree—on-ramps to work and learning experiences that support the transfer of skills and knowledge from one program to another. This would create more options for people to get quality jobs and stabilize their financial circumstances in the short term and then pursue additional education and training as needed or desired in the future—thus decreasing the likelihood that they will hit career dead ends as the economy evolves and demand for their current skills and expertise wanes. 

The burden of navigating educational choices and receiving supports would be shifted from individual learners to systems. A wide array of organizations and professionals could mobilize to support learners in their acquisition of skills and knowledge, not only by, say, developing curricula or implementing new pedagogical models, but also by offering wraparound supports to help students meet their basic needs so they can focus on learning, or by serving as mentors and providing networks of social and professional connections that they can tap to advance their careers.  

To reiterate and summarize, a new agile learning system would enable and embody the following:  

• Non-linear and non-terminal learning and credentialing options. They’d be non-linear because they’d be are designed based on the assumption that people must continually acquire and enhance skills and knowledge throughout their lives, and not “finish” their education and training at the end of one program. And they’d be non-terminal because all learning could be transferred to and validated in future learning opportunities. 

• Training and education providers, employers, and governments that recognize, validate, augment, and enhance ongoing attainment of skills and knowledge via flexible teaching and credentialing models. 

• A diverse array of systems that include burden-free support structures and are built on equitable universal design principles. 

• Education and training providers that create professional networks by design for all learners.  

Where Do We Go From Here?  

JFF is fully aware of and committed to the need to make the best of the suboptimal realities of the current systems learners must navigate. At the same time, we believe that strategies that operate only within the constraints of those systems have limited potential to advance learning and equity. So we’re seeking ways to leverage some of the most innovative efforts that have been undertaken within current education and workforce systems—including those built on the pathways model and others—and try to use them as building blocks for more transformative changes to the work and learning ecosystem.  

For example, one innovation that attempts to embed burden-free support structures and implement universal design principles is an initiative that the Foundation for California Community Colleges launched to support students’ basic needs. Part of the idea is to create structures that normalize the process of finding and accessing public financial supports and thereby eliminate any stigmatization of students taking advantage of benefits they’re eligible for, such as tax credits and food assistance programs. To build on programs like that, we wonder if it would be possible to accomplish the same goal on a broader scale by imagining and adopting universal design strategies that minimize or eliminate means testing as a way to verify that people qualify for such benefits.  

Another example is a systems change pilot that grew out of pathways work: A cross-agency and practitioner group in Ohio is testing how to use the K-12 system’s post-grade-12 enrollment funding (typically used for high school credit recovery) to provide supportive resources for students transitioning into and through the critical first year of postsecondary education, thus helping to blur that boundary and relieving students of the burden of navigating that divide—and paying for any services they use on their own. This could serve as an example of how JFF’s Big Blur vision and policy framework can serve as a portal through which pathways efforts can take accelerated steps toward system transformation by creating financing models that shift burdens from learners to systems.  

In another initiative in California, eight schools in the California Community College System are assessing the efficacy of non-linear learning and credentialing models in a pilot of direct assessment competency-based education (CBE). As described in a recent JFF blog, direct assessment CBE offers a personalized learning experience that “emphasizes students’ mastery of subject matter, including skills and expertise they’ve acquired at work and in other activities outside of school. And it enables educators to grant credit on a flexible schedule so students can start and complete courses at any time of year rather than being required to attend class for a certain number of hours and complete assignments on a fixed schedule.” The work is still in early stages, but it’s already evident that implementing such a program will require a substantial shift in mindsets and practices on the part of educators and institutions, and that the new model may bump up against rules and regulations of financial aid and other systems built around seat-time assumptions (aka Carnegie Units). Such work could conceivably bridge to school-level and systems change efforts in K-12 education to dismantle the Carnegie Unit.   

To stretch the possibilities further for validating and augmenting non-linear skill attainment and credentialing models, the Boys and Girls Clubs of America is seeking ways to capture—and ensure that employers and others recognize—the significant learning that many youth and young adults gain from the programs they participate in and the relationships they build at the organization’s many clubs across the country. Boys and Girls Clubs and other community organizations where youth and young adults gather voluntarily arguably sometimes have more favorable conditions for learning both interpersonal and technical skills than schools and other settings where participation is compulsory. What would it look like to activate and leverage the assets of such organizations in the learning ecosystem?  

Finally, recognizing that social and professional networks are critical to accessing career and educational opportunities, we believe it’s essential to promote initiatives that connect young adults to professionals in their chosen fields who can help open doors to quality jobs and learning experiences. Many innovative networking initiatives are built to address the fact that one’s social capital is often bounded by one’s socio-economic status, race, ethnicity, gender, and other factors. For example, in addition to offering job training for young adults, YearUp helps participants build social capital through mentoring programs, networking events, and alumni networks. And Braven’s strategies to prepare young adults who are first-generation college students, students of color, and learners from low-income backgrounds for quality first jobs include programs through which participants can connect with employers and begin to build networks.  

K-12 education systems are expected to deliver strong learning outcomes for students. How much greater would their impact be if learning institutions were held accountable for ensuring that learners have professional networks, as private nonprofits like Braven and YearUp are doing?  

What Will It Take? 

Pilots and new models, and even the policy shifts that support them, will need to be complemented by a new infrastructure that facilitates a more fluid flow of information, such as transcript data, measures of program quality, student assessments, and other metrics. JFF is leading efforts to achieve that goal, including one initiative to promote interoperability among the emerging array of digital learning and employment record systems and another in which we’re designing and testing frameworks that can be used to assess the quality of the nearly 1 million postsecondary education and training programs that issue credentials.  

 Like any endeavor worth pursuing, this is an ambitious, if not audacious, vision. As such, perhaps the biggest challenge will lie in shifting anachronistic narratives and assumptions about what learning looks like. And a trick will be finding ways to build demand for new models and approaches. Doing that will require an intentional effort to avoid inadvertently marginalizing them by describing them as “alternatives” to established systems that have normalized and ossified structures and hierarchies that have long produced and perpetuated inequitable outcomes.  

Over the past decade, we have seen significant narrative change and mindset shifts related to the need to better connect learning and work. But much remains to be done if we are to eliminate dead ends and false choices and bring about the dramatic systems transformation required to achieve JFF’s North Star goal of doubling the number of people currently facing systemic barriers to advancement who work in quality jobs by 2033.  

Join Us!

We can’t do this alone, and we welcome new ideas. Share your thoughts, reactions, and insights related to any of the topics we discuss in this blog. Are you doing work that could be a building block for the blurred systems we envision? Are there any other efforts that we should we be aware of? Do you have any advice to share?  

Click here to respond to any of those questions and sign up to receive updates about our work. And if you do, be on the lookout for an invitation to discuss these topics further in an online meeting this fall.