Pathways | End of Year Reflections

Hello colleagues,

I hope you’re winding down toward a good holiday break. I will be doing my best to truly log off after a very busy year: In January I stepped in to lead the Pathways strategy as an interim director, in addition to my usual gig as director of our Postsecondary Success strategy. I’ll admit: I was a little worried about heading up two strategies. But the Pathways team is pretty extraordinary, and they welcomed me, got me up to speed, and, together, we created a plan for the future of our work.

In the new year we’ll share more about the investments we’re making to build on what we’ve learned. We’ll also have a new director—after receiving over 1,500 applications, we’re deep in the process of finding a stellar new leader. But today I want to reflect on the past 12 months.

We started the year in Texas with our CEO Mark. Our Houston trip showcased some of the foundational components of our strategy: high-quality dual enrollment, college- and career-centric advising, and what it looks like when educators across sectors collaborate to build strong pathways.

Dual enrollment was a theme throughout the year. We leaned hard on CCRC’s terms “programs of privilege” and “random acts of dual enrollment” to guide our work and investments away from those traps and toward high-quality, equitably accessed dual enrollment.

• Mark got to see a shining example in Houston: San Jacinto College and C.E. King High School working hand-in-hand to connect underrepresented students to high-value nursing careers.
  
  
• We published our dual enrollment learning deck, a distillation of what we’ve gleaned from partners like the Community College Research Center (CCRC), Career Ladders Project, and the Public Policy Institute of California.
  
  
• CCRC released exciting new qualitative research on what dual enrollment students want and new quantitative research on what happens to dual enrollment students after high school.

As for advising, I think one of the Texas students who Mark spoke with put it perfectly: “OneGoal really opened up the opportunity to learn more about what you as a person want to do with your future.” Learning more about yourself and using that knowledge to explore your options for the future—shouldn’t all students have that?

• We love the OneGoal model (integrating college and career advising into students’ daily schedules, delivered by teachers trained to become OneGoal leaders) but we know that the reality for many students is their support is coming from an overcommitted counselor assigned to 400 or more students.
  
  
• One potential contributor to the solution is tech. The Hybrid Advising Co-op, made up of orgs like Let’s Get Ready, KIPP, and College Advising Corps, explored how to integrate AI in student support tools to deliver timely and personalized student interactions.
  
  
• They learned that it takes tech, behavioral science insights, and a holistic understanding of student needs to make hybrid advising work—dig in with recorded webinars.

We also got to learn from so many real-world examples of strong pathways programs. We define pathways by the student experience: both by what we know is missing for too many students and by what we believe the ideal experience looks like.

• AccelerateED, now in its fourth year, has expanded from 12 sites to over 20, all working to create programs that help students get a head start on education after high school.
  
  
• Students participating in Accelerate ED programs in Illinois, Ohio, and Massachusetts all told their stories.
  
  
• Intermediaries, a term we use to describe the orgs that make the necessary connections across education, community, and the workforce to build pathways programs, shared their perspectives in a podcast series.

These examples reflect our view on where we can be most effective as a foundation moving forward. We believe that dual enrollment and advising are key to students making the upward transitions from high school to college and on to a career. The best pathways programs build on those foundation components and include exposure to work and opportunities to build social capital.

And the truly exemplary programs? They make sure that all students have access to these game-changing experiences. And that means going the extra mile to connect Black, Latino, and Indigenous students, and students from low-income backgrounds—the students that are too often furthest from these opportunities—with high-quality options that make them excited for the future.

It’s not just building great options for a few students—that’s not our vision. We want to see a world where every student has the guidance and support they need to find a purposeful path toward an education and career they desire.

I look forward to sharing more about how we think we can build toward that vision in the new year.

Thanks for reading.

Patrick Methvin
Director of Education, Pathways and Postsecondary Success Strategies