Pathways | September Newsletter 2025

Dear colleagues,

In last month’s Postsecondary Success newsletter, my colleague Patrick Methvin reflected on the long arc of the Guided Pathways movement, from its bold beginnings to the hard-earned progress now playing out in colleges and universities across the country. As Patrick noted, the release of the Community College Research Center’s (CCRC) new book More Essential Than Ever: Community College Pathways to Educational and Career Success captures this arc through the lens of more than 100 institutions across the country, highlighting what happens when colleges don't just remove barriers to completion, but also strengthen pathways to students’ post-graduation goals.

The pairing of the book’s insights and Patrick’s reflections, especially at the start of another school year, sparked something for me. Guided Pathways helped redefine what it meant to support students through their postsecondary journey, but today, we have an opportunity to go even further.

When I talk about pathways, I’m not just thinking about the moment a student chooses a degree or credential. I’m thinking about a lifelong journey, one where learners move in and out of education and work, where skills are accumulated in the classroom and in the workplace, and where opportunity doesn’t depend on a linear, one-size-fits-all trajectory.

Our job isn’t just to build systems that help learners choose the right path once. In this rapidly-changing world of education and work, it’s to help them navigate forward at every stage, with clarity, support, and tools that recognize their prior learning and accelerate their next move. When I talk about pathways, I envision an always-on, tech-enabled advising experience that connects students with the right resources, the right information to help them plan toward their individual goals, and the right caring adult to support them through their most complex challenges. This experience includes prior learning, credit for course equivalencies, and clear next steps for success – whether in high school, dual enrollment settings, in college, or after graduation. Advancements in technology, and especially AI, make this vision more of a reality than ever before.

This shift demands that we stop equating upward mobility with a single credential. While a college degree remains one of the most powerful tools for unlocking long-term success, we must also recognize that credential attainment should be focused on what moves a learner toward their goals, in alignment with what the labor market actually demands. In this new vision of pathways, learners are empowered to make informed choices, and institutions are challenged to be more responsive. That’s how we unlock systems that are truly adaptive and built for the futures students want.

Guided Pathways may have started as a framework for helping students navigate college, but its core promise of clear, supported journeys toward opportunity is just as powerful when applied to a lifetime of learning. That means our collective approach at the Gates Foundation, across both our Postsecondary and Pathways work, must create fundamentally more connected and navigable journeys for students. The systems we have today were built for another time, but if we commit to it, we can design new systems from the ground up that put student experience and success at the center.

Now is the time to build on that foundation and create those systems that truly guide learners through every turn in their journey, no matter where they start or where they’re headed.

Warmly,
Cheryl Hyman
Director, Pathways