The country finds itself debating what happens to young people after 12th grade. Is college worth it? Should high schoolers skip it for an apprenticeship? Is college still the ticket to the middle class or a debt trap dressed up as opportunity?
A new report from the American Academy of Arts & Sciences characterizes our times as “a moment of great national debate about the journeys people make after they receive their high school diploma.” What makes this contribution to that debate worth taking seriously isn’t that it settles the argument, but who is making it, and how.
Thriving After High School: Community, School, Service, and Work is the product of the Academy’s Commission on Opportunities After High School. Thirty leaders from K-12 and higher education, business, service, and philanthropy worked together for two years.
It’s worth pausing to consider where this cross-partisan report comes from, because that context changes how it should be read.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is one of the country’s oldest and most rarefied institutions. John Adams and a small circle of the nation’s founders founded it in 1780. Today, it includes roughly 4500 Fellows chosen by nomination and election. Its focus is on the humanities, the sciences, and elevated scholarly inquiry. Historically, it hasn’t spent much time on questions like return on investment (ROI) or job placement rates.
That the Academy convened a two-year, cross-sector Commission explicitly to ask whether America’s postsecondary systems deliver real economic opportunity, and did so in the plain, practical language of workforce readiness, is itself a signal worth noting.
When an institution built to honor scholarly excellence turns to ROI, it suggests that higher education’s broader recalibration toward taking workforce outcomes seriously, without abandoning academic purpose, isn’t only a response to political pressure from the right. Institutions are absorbing it with little incentive to chase a trend. That’s a healthier sign for the field, and for students, than if the argument were coming only from the usual ed reformers.
The report’s own data should unsettle anyone still picturing college as 18-year-olds moving into a dorm. Drawing on federal enrollment data and a recent survey of new-majority learners, it finds that nearly 70 percent of today’s undergraduates work while studying, 40 percent are over 22, and almost a third receive Pell Grants. Roughly three in ten are the first in their family to attend college. Community college students make up 39 percent of all undergraduates, and only 28 percent of those institutions offer on-campus housing.
The Commission’s plea to design post-high-school pathways for real learners, not the one in the brochure, is important. The panel also underscores that, in a country as large and varied as ours, we cannot responsibly offer young people one respected door (the four-year college diploma) to adulthood.
It’s no small thing that a cross-partisan commission all sign onto the same finding: apprenticeships, community college, military service, service-year programs, short-term credentials, and four-year degrees all deserve to be treated as legitimate, well-supported routes after high school rather than consolation prizes.
That’s a certain sign that the idea that I call opportunity pluralism has moved from the margins toward the mainstream.
Cochair Nancy Cantor, the president of Hunter College, echoed this point directly, saying that while a bachelor’s degree still opens real doors, higher education can no longer act as though it is the only door worth entering.
The specific recommendations back this up. For example:
- On data, the panel is correct that families deserve real transparency about what a given program of study actually leads to, and that federal earnings data should be more available to states and institutions trying to build that transparency.
- On reengagement with former students, the report focuses on an important issue. More than 43 million Americans have some college credit and no degree, and states from Mississippi to Michigan are experimenting seriously with bringing them back.
- On durable skills, the report grounds an often-vague concept in a specific, learnable list, including communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and adaptability. It also insists that these skills get named, taught, and measured rather than left to develop by accident.
The report also embraces a shift worth naming in its own right. That’s the move away from measuring learning by seat time and credit hours, the more than century-old Carnegie Unit, toward measuring it by demonstrated competency. It calls for competency-based transcripts, in both K-12 and college, that document what a learner can do rather than which courses they completed.
That’s not a retreat from academic rigor. The report is explicit that a widening gap between inflated grades and declining performance on national assessments is a problem that it’s trying to solve. For example, skills-based hiring, now encouraged by more than half of the states, only helps learners if the credentials indicate what the holder of them actually knows.
This is less a break from traditional academic achievement than a defense of it. The point is making sure a credential means what it claims, at a moment when it is easier than ever to simulate demonstrating a skill without possessing it.
And the report’s suggestion, based on multiple pathways, that credit transfer, direct admission, and stackable credentials all need to work together, not as competing reforms but as connected on-ramps, is significant. It does little good to build doors if nobody helps a learner find the knob.
None of this is small, but it is the kind of unglamorous, coalition-built infrastructure work that rarely makes headlines. But it determines whether good ideas become standard practice.
The commission deserves real credit for building consensus across sectors that too often talk past each other. And it merits applause for grounding that consensus in what students themselves said in listening sessions rather than in what policymakers assumed they wanted.
A report this ambitious will inevitably leave some things underdeveloped. That’s not because the Commission missed them, but because consensus documents tend to smooth the sharpest edges. Three of those are worth naming.
The first is artificial intelligence, and specifically what it is doing to the first rung of the career ladder. The report treats AI almost entirely as a skills-and-literacy challenge. Learners need durable skills that hold up as AI reshapes jobs, and schools should teach digital and AI literacy so graduates can use these tools responsibly.
That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. It assumes the entry-level job a graduate is preparing for will still be there in roughly its current form. The evidence increasingly suggests otherwise.
Employers are using AI to absorb work that used to belong to first-year analysts, paralegals, and junior coders. These are the jobs that have historically taught new graduates how to actually do the thing they studied. Artificial intelligence is not simply replacing work. It’s reorganizing expertise, changing which tasks are considered basic enough to automate and which require the judgment only experience builds.
A report focused on preparing learners to enter the workforce needs to reckon more directly with the possibility that the workforce’s entry points are themselves changing, not just that the skills needed to walk through them are changing. Durable skills and AI literacy help someone survive inside a job. They do less to address whether the on-ramp to a job exists at all.
The second is a problem Ohio just spent two years learning the hard way. It found that the state’s high schools let students earn hundreds of industry-recognized credentials of wildly uneven value. So, Ohio had to go back and build the data infrastructure to determine which credentials actually led anywhere, which employers respected, and which were essentially worthless.
That same problem is now surfacing in postsecondary and workforce training, and the report doesn’t quite catch it. It calls for validating durable skills through stackable, industry-recognized credentials and for far better data transparency. Both reflect the right instinct.
But neither means much without knowing, before a student enrolls, which credentials are actually worth earning. So while the report is right that we need better information and better validation, it says less about building that data infrastructure to produce those answers on the front end.
The third issue, more briefly, is civic life. The report gestures toward it. It notes, correctly, that education sits at the fulcrum of democratic and economic goals. And it points to the Academy’s own work on civic education and community engagement. But in a document this focused on labor market outcomes, civic formation reads as an afterthought rather than a strategy.
High schools sit at the hinge between civic formation and adult opportunity. A fuller treatment of that hinge—how service-year programs, dual enrollment, and community-based learning double as civic education, not just workforce preparation—would have strengthened the report’s argument that thriving means more than earning power. Cochair Bridget Terry Long made a similar case for why these matter, tying durable skills directly to the strength of local economies and the health of democratic life, and arguing that preparing learners is not merely about their first paycheck but a lifetime of resilience.
None of these mar the report, which the Academy itself is careful to describe not as a side in the ongoing debates but as, in its own words, “a document of deliberation, consensus, and best practices across the country.” (Italics in original report.)
That description is accurate. It’s also exactly why the report matters. Documents like this tend to have short half-lives. They are praised at release, cited for a season, then shelved while underlying problems fester. Thriving After High School deserves a longer life than that, because it gets the foundational premise right: American learners need multiple, well-supported, clearly marked paths after high school, not a single default like college with a few tolerated exceptions.
What would extending that consensus look like? Here are three places to start.
First, state and system leaders should treat its online resource—the map of promising practices, the pathway guide, the full recommendations—as a floor, not a finish line. Try pulling two or three programs that fit their own labor market and asking what it would take to fund them at scale, not just admire them from a distance. As cochair Harrison Keller put it, “We don’t need to reinvent the wheel”; working partnerships already exist in scattered communities. The task is making them visible enough for others to emulate.
Next, governors and legislators working on credentialing and Workforce Pell implementation should recognize this as the same problem Ohio just fixed in its high schools, now showing up in postsecondary and workforce training—and build the data infrastructure to know which credentials are actually worth earning before students pay for them, not after.
Finally, employers, especially those adopting AI tools, should be asked directly by workforce boards and higher education partners what their entry-level hiring will look like in three years. That way, advising and curriculum decisions are built around where the first rung will actually be, not where it used to be.
Commissioners and Academy staff should consider a follow-up product, a short one, devoted to AI’s effect on entry-level hiring, given how quickly this is moving relative to the report’s two-year gestation. And education and civic organizations should press the report’s authors to say more, in the future, about how the same cross-sector infrastructure it recommends for workforce coordination could be built for civic formation, rather than leaving that thread as a footnote to the economic one.
The Commission spent two years building something rare: agreement, across sectors and ideologies, on what young Americans need after high school. That’s worth cheering without qualification. The next two years should be spent building the parts of the system—AI’s effect on entry-level work, whether we can tell good credentials from bad before students pay for them, and civic infrastructure—areas that this consensus, for all its strengths, has yet to reach.
