JFF, a national nonprofit driving transformation in the American workforce and education systems, released a comprehensive report that examines the disconnect between high school, college, and career preparation, and recommends how policymakers and practitioners can create more effective pathways to postsecondary education and employment for young adults, particularly students from low-income backgrounds.
In The Big Blur: An Argument for Erasing the Boundaries Between High School, College, and Careers—and Creating One New System That Works for Everyone, JFF argues that it’s time to radically restructure “grades 11–14″—the last two years of high school and the first two years of college—and design a new model that eliminates the traditional dividing lines between the systems.
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“As we work to broaden college access and expand workforce opportunity, we can’t be hidebound by traditional thinking on the high school-to-college-to-career transition. Instead, we should recognize that young people today need a multiplicity of pathways from education into careers—not just the options created more than a century ago,” said JFF Vice President Joel Vargas, a lead author of the report. “This paper offers provocative ideas about how we can design and scale new pathways to social and economic mobility for every young person by teaching students about the worlds of college and work much earlier in their educational journeys.”
JFF is presenting its new vision of the transition from high school to higher education and careers at a time when colleges and universities are confronting declining enrollment among recent high school graduates. At the same time, there are approximately 4.6 million so-called opportunity youth—people between the ages of 16 and 24 who are neither in school nor employed—suggesting the need for new models that can reach a wider range of young adults and prepare them for postsecondary education and the workforce.
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Drawing on a broad evidence base of diverse programs and models such as early college high schools, dual enrollment programs, youth apprenticeship, and high-performing high schools focused on career readiness, the report makes the case for an entirely new type of institution—neither high school nor college—designed specifically to better meet the needs of young people after 10th grade by integrating work-based learning and postsecondary courses by age 16.
To advance its ambitious new vision, JFF makes bold recommendations to reinvent incentives, governance, staffing, and the alignment between education systems and labor markets. The organization also recommends incremental steps that education and workforce policymakers can take in this direction, such as aligning high school credit with certificates and degrees, synchronizing the schedules of community colleges and nearby high schools to make it easier for students to participate in dual enrollment programs, and expanding the use of guided pathways into the later grades of high school.
Authored by a team of education and workforce development experts at JFF, the report is based on a comprehensive research effort that included 50 interviews with local, regional, state, and national policymakers, as well as education system leaders, practitioners, funders, and leaders in the nonprofit and startup sectors.
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