by Luke Rhine, The Hechinger Report
June 29, 2026
For years, policymakers, educators and employers have debated whether career pathways — programs that connect high school students to postsecondary education and careers — actually work.
We’ve framed the conversation as apprenticeship versus college, workforce training versus liberal arts and careers versus academics.
While new findings from Rodel and RTI International — in one of the most detailed studies yet examining pathways-participating students’ outcomes after high school — are encouraging, they also expose how little we still understand.
We need more detailed information about what actually happens to pathways students after high school. We also need to understand how internships, apprenticeships and other immersive workplace learning experiences affect those outcomes. Without this evidence, we are often measuring indicators of success rather than success itself — the programs’ success rather than the students’.
Until we can answer these questions, we will continue debating whether career pathways work without knowing whether they are helping students achieve goals that are meaningful to them.
Related: A lot goes on in classrooms from kindergarten to high school. Keep up with our free weekly newsletter on K-12 education.
As a country, we have spent billions of dollars building career pathways, expanding dual enrollment, promoting apprenticeships and redesigning high schools around workforce alignment.
But we have invested far less in understanding whether students actually move into postsecondary programs and careers connected to what they studied in high school.
However, the new findings begin to give us a clearer picture of how students navigate life beyond high school, and that is important. The researchers followed more than 5,000 Delaware high school students across three graduating cohorts, representing more than half of Delaware’s school districts and charter schools in rural, suburban and urban communities.
Among Delaware students who completed a career pathway, 74 percent enrolled in postsecondary education within six months of graduation — well above the national average of 62 percent — and roughly 45 percent enrolled in a major aligned to their pathway; 55 percent were employed within six months, many while also attending college.
By 18 months, 69 percent were employed overall, and the share of students balancing both work and postsecondary education had grown from 35 percent to 48 percent.
Perhaps most striking: Only about 6 percent of pathways graduates were neither employed nor enrolled within six months, declining to roughly 2 percent by 18 months.
Related: Do career pathways work? Delaware offers early clues
These findings suggest that well-designed pathways can help students transition into postsecondary education and the workforce.
They also reinforce something practitioners have understood for years: Today’s students increasingly work while enrolled in college. And our federal and state accountability systems largely fail to capture this reality.
Under both the federal Strengthening Career & Technical Education for the 21st Century Act (known as the Perkins Act) and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, states typically report a broad “placement” measure, which is intended to show whether learners successfully transition into education or the workforce. But in practice, “placement” often combines the numbers of students entering employment, postsecondary education, military service and training into a single metric.
A student enrolled full-time in nursing is counted similarly to a student working part-time in retail. A student entering a registered apprenticeship may appear indistinguishable from a student taking unrelated coursework with no connection to their long-term career goals.
These are not the same outcomes. But our data systems often treat them as if they are.
The Perkins Act itself recognized this problem in 2018 by calling for the collection of more nuanced data on whether students enroll in postsecondary education, advanced training, military service or employment. But the caveat in the law — “to the extent such data are available” — reveals the real issue. In most states, the more detailed data simply does not exist.
The recent study, however, in addition to capturing more nuanced data on outcomes, hints at some meaningful distinctions.
In Delaware, for example, high school pathways in health care, education and the skilled trades showed particularly strong postsecondary alignment. Within 18 months of graduation, 58 percent of health care pathway students enrolled in aligned majors, compared with 44 percent of education pathway students and 48 percent of architecture and construction pathways grads.
Those numbers are not perfect. But they begin to answer a question most states have not yet asked: Are students pursuing futures connected to the pathways we created for them?
This type of data allows us to identify barriers and create solutions that better connect students to opportunities by showing how postsecondary and workforce systems — not just K-12 systems — shape student outcomes. For example, Delaware’s registered apprenticeship system currently has a waitlist for enrollment, which the state is seeking to address through its next budget. That may not affect every student pursuing the skilled trades, but it almost certainly influences how and when some young people transition into aligned careers.
The economy that students are entering has fundamentally changed. Young people are navigating a labor market in which education and employment increasingly overlap, skills matter as much as credentials and career progression is rarely linear. At the same time, employers continue to say they need workers with both skills and experience.
The future of career pathways cannot simply be about participation. It cannot simply be about whether students are “placed” somewhere after high school. If we want education and workforce systems to truly align, then we need to ask better questions and be accountable for what we find, so we can make sure students are navigating toward opportunity, mobility and long-term economic value.
Luke Rhine is vice president for postsecondary success at Rodel, whose mission is to strengthen Delaware’s public education and workforce systems by connecting partners to help advance and implement sustainable solutions.
Contact the opinion editor at opinion@hechingerreport.org.
This story about career pathways was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Sign up for Hechinger’s weekly newsletter.
This <a target=”_blank” href=” first appeared on <a target=”_blank” href=” Hechinger Report</a> and is republished here under a <a target=”_blank” href=” Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.<img src=” style=”width:1em;height:1em;margin-left:10px;”>
<img id=”republication-tracker-tool-source” src=” style=”width:1px;height:1px;”><script> PARSELY = { autotrack: false, onload: function() { PARSELY.beacon.trackPageView({ url: ” urlref: window.location.href }); } } </script> <script id=”parsely-cfg” src=”//cdn.parsely.com/keys/hechingerreport.org/p.js”></script>
