The Edge

I’m Scott Carlson, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering higher ed and where it’s going. This week I share my observations from a White House session on jobs, higher education, and creating pathways to careers.

Promoting Pathways

In an edition of the Daily Briefing last week, I promised that I’d share more thoughts in this space about college leadership — but you’ll have to wait until the next installment of The Edge for that column. That’s because something unexpected came up: Last Wednesday, I went to the White House to hear Biden administration officials talk about postsecondary training and degrees that lead to careers. The White House event kicked off the “Classroom to Career” Summit, an afternoon of panel discussions and networking at the Department of Education, and it drew a crowd of prominent higher-education administrators, nonprofit and association leaders, and policy wonks.

The Biden administration (and Vice President Kamala Harris during her run for the presidency) had been dinged for underselling its track record of the past four years, so the speeches and panel seemed designed to remind everyone of what had been accomplished, with a particular focus on community and technical colleges, blue-collar work, and non-college routes to a job, including apprenticeships. The panel of cabinet members — Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo, and Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su — sought to link the Biden administration’s educational initiatives to its work on infrastructure and its efforts to bring chip manufacturers to the United States.

“I never thought infrastructure could be so sexy, but it is!” said Secretary Cardona, who appeared cheerful onstage, near the end of his rocky tenure at the department. He explained that he learned to fix cars as a high-school tech student before becoming a teacher. “I graduated with options. But that shouldn’t be limited to students in technical high schools.”

First Lady Jill Biden, given her role as the nation’s best-known community-college professor, warmed up the crowd by talking about the classes she still teaches at Northern Virginia Community College and the value of two-year institutions to students who forgo a four-year degree.

“If we work together, we can build a future where more high-school students will graduate with credits and skills that they can apply to their future careers, where community college is free for every student in every state of America, and where all students have a clear pathway to jobs that pay well, right in the communities where they grew up.”

If you got a dollar every time someone at the event said “pathway,” you could make a significant dent in the national debt. The term is so often used that it has come to mean many different things, but at the White House event it referred to “career pathways,” largely vocational programs that have clearly established steps to prepare a person for a specific field, like nursing or welding. “Pathways” is the top-down language of technocratic policymaking, because it conceives of education as something to be tailored to in-demand job areas, streamlined, and scaled.

But most jobs don’t sit at the end of a pathway; rather, many occupations are highly granular, with a range of possible ways to get into them — ways that should play to a student’s strengths, not the set routes determined by an institution. And most students — particularly those navigating the choose-your-own-adventure of a four-year program — are not on a “pathway,” either.

But it was clear that the White House event wasn’t really aimed at exploring the value of four-year degrees. In his 15-minute speech, President Biden discussed manufacturing work, apprenticeships, and unions — and in at least four instances, emphasized that the associated jobs don’t require four-year degrees. Toward the end of his talk, he brought to the stage Maurice Bogard, who was working 12 to 16 hours a day — until he entered an apprenticeship program that opened the door to a job as a union-represented journeyman electrician. The president pointed out that investments in clean energy, factories, and infrastructure largely went to more red states than blue states, and he lamented the decades-long decline in American manufacturing.

“My administration buys American. We’re making sure the federal projects we’re building — roads, bridges, highways, and more — are made with American products built by American workers and creating good-paying American jobs, jobs that don’t require a four-year college degree, jobs you can raise a family on.”

An Overcorrection?

Clearly, the event had political ends: Democrats have long been associated with the college-for-all push and the elitist framing that often goes with it. Events like this seem like an effort to reconnect to a historically Democratic base of workers in manufacturing and the trades, which swung toward Donald Trump in this election. With questions swirling about colleges’ role in work-force development and the underemployment of graduates, these institutions have been targets of recent criticism from politicians and policymakers on both sides of the aisle.

But last week at the White House, the focus on skills, short-term certificates, non-college “pathways,” and blue-collar work — with the four-year degree framed as the opposite of that, maybe even a negative — felt both like an overcorrection and too little, too late. And I say that as someone who has written extensively (and favorably) about career-and-technical education, apprenticeships, blue-collar work, and practical skills.

Especially in the past 10 to 15 years, the emphasis on college outcomes has focused on whether a degree will get you a job. But authoritarian governments can exist in countries with robust job-training programs; educating a populace in a democracy has to prepare them to run a society and a government, too. Democrats lost not just because they couldn’t hone their message on the economy or jobs, but because a significant number of people in the country couldn’t discern truth from fiction on a variety of important national issues that divided them and led many of them to vote against their own interests. A disturbing number of prominent people in government and public life peddle conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods that would seem unthinkable in politics 25 years ago — and some of them nominated for cabinet posts.

The biggest disconnect here is that the four-year degree, if well-considered, does get you a good job — and in the effort to validate other “pathways,” we shouldn’t denigrate the college one. At the event, I talked to a representative from a prominent foundation supporting education who expressed some worry about all the talk about non-college pathways, pointing to studies that show the best life outcomes are most often connected to an undergraduate degree.

Ultimately, the pathways language is appealing to politicians, sector leaders, and others because, in a world of uncertainty, it conjures the image of a track that leads to something secure, while the trail blazed by many who receive four-year degrees has often been more circuitous.

Secretary Raimondo, in talking about her own children, made a compelling argument on the importance of articulating the purpose of an education: “They focus on school if they know why — why bother?” she said. “That’s the whole point of this: If the light at the end of the tunnel is obvious, clear, concrete, and within reach — and that is the job — then they are going to get through training.”

But someone’s why in life can be more than just a job. For many people, that why is connected to desires to serve the public, or grapple with an environmental or community problem, or to explore a personal conviction — and many of those roles are found in the granularity of the hidden job market (not just a prominent local employer) and often require the training found in an undergraduate program. Colleges could reverse their public-image challenges by helping students connect to these callings. (I’m not sure where Raimondo’s kids go to school, but I would bet they’re not on a non-college pathway.)

As one of the outgoing ceremonies of this administration, it captured a palpable nervous anticipation for what the next four years could bring for the nation’s schools and colleges — and even the Department of Education itself, which President Trump has proposed dismantling.

“This semester is coming to a close,” Ms. Biden said toward the end of her speech. “My students are starting to write their last assignments and they’re signing up for new classes or some are going to graduate. Joe and I are also preparing for what’s coming next.”

The president, standing off to the side, made the sign of a cross on his chest.

Want to read more?

Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at scott.carlson@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, find them here. To receive your own copy, free, register here. Follow me on LinkedIn.

My forthcoming book, Hacking College: Why the Major Doesn’t Matter — and What Really Does (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2025), is available for pre-order.