Giving Compass' Take:

• More public-private partnerships are emerging in education systems to provide streamlined pathways to employment by teaching students important skillsets at the k-12 level. 

• How can schools keep these funding sources and partnerships sustainable? What are alternative options for schools that do not have the same access to partnerships? 

• Read about other ways to prepare students for the future of work: by building entrepreneurial skill sets. 

Almost two-thirds of the nation’s high school graduates enroll immediately in some form of post-secondary education. Why? Getting a better job is a “very important” reason for  86 percent of entering college freshman.

Two current studies spotlight this aspiration-to-experience rift. The first, by Strada Education Network and Gallup, is the nation’s largest collection of college consumer insights on post-secondary education’s efforts to prepare young people for the job market and workforce. The second, a series by Echelon Insights, is of millennials aged 18 to 35 speaking about their public school experience: both how their own education prepared them for college, work, and life, and how they expect schools to prepare their own children, now that so many millennials are parents themselves.

Both studies show that these college and school consumers experience buyer’s remorse — a sense of regret and disconnect between their post-secondary expectations and educational experiences.

Fortunately, changes are happening and some innovative public and private programs offer new ways to involve students in career pathways earlier in their schooling experience.

In Georgia, Junior Achievement, Fulton County Schools, and the Atlanta business community launched a public-private partnership in 2015 to create a new school curriculum model within a traditional district high school. 3-D Education “re-engineers high school education to be more relevant, experiential, and…connected to the…real world in order to more fully prepare today’s students for the demands of tomorrow’s economy. Today, “3DE” has expanded to six schools in four public school districts.

Programs like 3DE and others provide young people earlier in their schooling with new options to gain the knowledge and skills that will lead to success in the workforce and a lifetime of opportunity. And these models are replicable, sustainable, and workable in a multitude of school district, charter schools, and other public-private settings.

Read the full article about pathways to education and employment by Bruno V. Manno at Education Next