(Illustration by Ibrahim Rayintakath)
Most students will spend more time at work than in any other activity after graduation. If we want public education to prepare students for human thriving—the vision Kent McGuire and Matt Wilka propose in “A Democratic Vision for Public Schools”—we must prepare them to make meaningful contributions through their work and to pursue careers that leverage—and continue to advance—their full potential.
McGuire and Wilka rightly challenge a system that presently defines success through narrow, self-referential metrics: test scores, grades, graduation rates. They ask us to consider goals more longitudinally, across a lifetime. That longitudinal view necessarily includes career success—and this shouldn't be controversial. Four in five high school students say the main reasons to go to college are to get a good job and make more money. For students and their families, thriving isn't abstract.
Yet today, schools struggle to deliver on this promise. Although K-12 systems still define success by college enrollment, data suggests only 23 percent of high school graduates will finish college and get a job requiring their degree. We spend billions annually on high school career and technical education (CTE) training through the Perkins Act, yet only 18 percent of the CTE credentials students earn are actually in demand. The result: Over 7,000 CTE students per year earn Beef Quality Assurance certification, at best preparing them for low-wage, dangerous jobs in meat packing with little prospect for advancement. Meanwhile, credentials that unlock good jobs go undersupplied.
These failures compound over time. More than half of Americans are stuck, working below their potential: 37 million in low-wage work, 31 million college graduates in jobs that don’t require a degree, 17 million who earned degrees but hit a career wall, and 13 million who couldn’t regain their footing after employment gaps—often women who took time away to care for family. This isn’t just individual disappointment. It undermines the American promise of upward mobility and erodes the economic competitiveness on which our shared prosperity depends.
New Imperatives for What Students Must Learn
Ensuring that students succeed means rethinking what we teach them—and how deeply we teach it. Three imperatives stand out: (1) doubling down on liberal arts fundamentals, (2) expanding the definition of foundational skills, and (3) raising the bar on proficiency. Together, these redefine what it means to be prepared for work and for citizenship in a changing economy.
Doubling down on liberal arts fundamentals. It has become popular sport to ridicule the worth of the liberal arts. Yet claims that liberal arts have no economic value are belied by employers themselves. Skills like communication and collaboration rank among those most sought in job postings and prove the most durable over the course of a career. These are meta-skills—the skills to acquire new skills, assuring human agility in a dynamic economy, especially amidst the portent of artificial intelligence disruption. Burning Glass Institute analysis indicates that core liberal arts capabilities comprise an increasing share of work activity as people advance into positions of greater responsibility.
These are not only the skills of employability; they are the skills of democratic life. The liberal arts cultivate judgment, dialogue, interpretation, and shared problem-solving: capacities essential both for functioning workplaces and for functioning republics. Reorienting education toward careers and toward democracy is not a trade-off. It is the same project.
Expanding what counts as foundational skills. When Burning Glass and American Student Assistance studied skills that span high-value work across domains, we found a portfolio wider than just the three Rs. It increasingly includes digital and data skills, and the business skills to apply them to real-world problems. For example, project management and data analysis are essential in careers from finance to nursing and propel people up the ladder. Yet in our survey of middle- and high-school teachers, many failed to recognize this broader portfolio: While 81 percent saw communications skills as essential, less than half said the same of data analysis. Worse, teachers themselves don’t believe we teach these skills well today; teachers in high-poverty classrooms are significantly more likely to rate them as important yet significantly less likely to believe that their schools teach them effectively.
Raising the bar on proficiency. Today, many students fail even basic benchmarks, with continued declines in achievement. Twelfth- graders score at a 33-year low in reading and a 20-year low in math. A third lack basic reading skills. The arrival of AI creates a new urgency. As AI automates tasks formerly done by entry-level college graduates, students must graduate with capabilities they would normally develop after several years in the workforce. Our research shows that in fields offering strong prospects for upward mobility, early rungs of the career ladder, where young people learn their trade, are being automated. As AI raises the bar on proficiency, students will need to be able to start their careers in the middle, rather than at the beginning—starting day one of their first job at a skill level previously expected after several years in the workforce.
Rethinking Curriculum and Instruction for the Age of AI
These three imperatives define what students must learn. But a second question follows: How must curriculum itself evolve when the nature of work is changing so rapidly? The rise of artificial intelligence does not replace these priorities. It intensifies and reshapes them. To prepare students for thriving careers, we must now reconsider not only which skills matter, but how technological change reorganizes the value of those skills across disciplines.
Today’s public school curriculum is largely an artifact of the Cold War space race, prioritizing subjects like trigonometry, physics, and foreign language—plus the organizational skills to support widescale industrial mobilization. We now face a new technological transformation, but discussions among educators often focus narrowly on AI’s classroom role as an instructional tool. That misses the point. AI doesn’t just change how we teach; it changes what students need to know. By reshaping how we work, AI elevates some capabilities while reducing the importance of others.
Reorienting education toward careers and toward democracy is not a trade-off. It is the same project.
Our analysis across 20 state curricula reveals that the curricular implications are nuanced. AI impacts skills in every subject, yet none of the 140 learning objectives we studied will disappear—many will simply need rethinking. Take, for example, research readiness: Source validity assessment and evidence evaluation become more critical, while report writing and research planning may require less emphasis. These shifts aren’t marginal. They reshape what we consider to be foundational to modern education and work.
This pattern reflects a deeper dynamic. The interplay of AI automation and augmentation creates a new set of power skills for the 21st century. AI makes certain capabilities like writing and data analysis simultaneously more efficient and more effective, transforming them into force multipliers in the workplace. But they require a different pedagogy. Similarly, contrary to widely held belief, skills like coding and design aren’t eliminated by AI but, rather, democratized through it. This puts competency in these skills within reach for far more people, while they also become essential to far more careers. Computational thinking—the ability to incorporate coding into one’s work—becomes a capability many more professionals will need.
A New Architecture for Schooling
Preparing students to thrive in their careers also challenges us to rearchitect the structure and format of schooling itself to make career planning and preparation more central. This includes:
Career guidance grounded in labor market reality. Every student needs visibility into post-completion opportunities and better tools for decision-making—including considering options that don’t involve college. Yet we force students into a false binary: “academic” education versus “career” education, asking them to choose with remarkably little guidance about long-term implications. All students need both. While employers unquestionably value foundational skills, they also badly need workers who show up job-ready. Many careers offering the highest rates of economic mobility require that students build applied skills beforehand.
Some starting jobs are “launchpads”—they increase by fourfold the chances that graduates will become top earners by age 40. By focusing exclusively on channeling students to college, our current guidance system misses opportunities to prepare students for these jobs—let alone to help them distinguish these launchpads from dead ends.
Meaningful work-based learning for every student. Experimentation is natural to human development, yet students get little opportunity for iterative refinement of career goals and preferences, leaving them to make major decisions in the abstract. Work-based learning lets students try on different careers before committing. In our current high-stakes system, by the time a student realizes a career is wrong for them, it’s often too late.
In our research on post-secondary career success, internships play a singularly important role: A single internship halves the risk of underemployment. A forthcoming Burning Glass Institute study shows that internship participation rates are the biggest factor distinguishing colleges whose graduates outperform their peers in long-term career outcomes. What would it take to ensure that every student gets at least one meaningful work-based learning experience?
But the value of work-based learning is evident across the full educational lifecycle, writ large, even if it is structured differently at each stage to reflect developmentally appropriate forms of engagement with real work. In secondary school, work-based learning is primarily about exploration and informed choice, such as short-term job shadowing, employer-connected projects, or part-time industry experiences that help students understand career pathways before committing to them. In post-secondary education, the emphasis shifts to launch. Internships, clinical placements, and apprenticeships provide sustained, skill-building experience that enables students to translate academic preparation into career entry with momentum.
The value of work-based learning persists into the workplace itself. In fact, the underpinning of career advancement is skill acquisition. In that context, work-based learning represents a key mechanism for mobility. Worker training, employer-supported reskilling, and learn-while-you-work transition programs allow people to adapt to technological change or move into new roles without stepping away from employment.
Seen this way, meaningful work-based learning is not a single intervention but a structured progression—exploration, launch, and mobility—supporting career development across the lifespan.
From launching careers to sustaining them. Such changes could improve markedly how effectively students launch into careers—a good start. However, on average, Americans make 12 transitions over the course of their professional lives. Each is an opportunity to move up or get stuck. Ensuring that public schools cultivate skills to navigate those transitions would be significant progress. But the greatest transformation required for thriving careers is restructuring our education system to enable learning beyond our first two decades, to reconceive public education as a resource available across the arc of a career. This is hardly a fanciful idea. In an era of declining fertility, lengthening lifespans, and the ongoing technological reinvention of work, a growing number of educators and social scientists argue that human capital must be developed across the life course, not concentrated in the first two decades.
That would be a major departure from the system we have today, which offers few viable paths for returning to school and building new skills over time. Traditional universities are organized around degrees that take too long to earn for on-demand learning. Community colleges would be a natural infrastructure, but the significant majority of funding and programming focuses on transfer degrees—at least in theory, preparing young adults for four-year universities—rather than the workforce training these institutions that is most needed. Our workforce system itself is too underfunded to be viable. Despite a graduate glut, the US government spends 54 times more on funding college degrees through the federal Pell grant program alone than it does on training through the Workforce Investment and Opportunity Act, the primary source of funding to our workforce system.
Some might mistake this as a call to refashion public schooling as vocational preparation. Educators often bristle at the suggestion that they bear responsibility for ensuring that students make a good start, arguing that education prepares students for the twentieth job, not the first. But our research shows that the first job often determines access to the twentieth. More than half of all graduates start in jobs that don’t require their degree; 44 percent remain underemployed a decade later.
Toward a New Vision of Education for Thriving Lives
Teaching applied skills and investing time in career exploration isn’t just about tactical training. Through these activities, students develop a set of capabilities for navigating transitions: learning to seek out opportunity, evaluate decisions, identify and acquire the skills needed to enable new directions, and to experiment and iterate over time. These are meta-skills for lifelong growth.
In the bestselling 2017 book Janesville: An American Story, Amy Goldstein describes workers upended by the closing of a GM plant in Wisconsin flooding the local community college and training programs. They knew they needed to reskill, but their learning skills were decades out of date, and they had little guidance on how to make reskilling choices. For many, the attempt became an expensive lesson in frustration. With the coming wave of AI-driven disruption, we cannot afford failed attempts at second chances.
Ultimately, the combination of more rigorous education in core foundations, greater opportunity to build applied skills, and new focus on career awareness and experimentation represents a framework for enduring purpose, versatility, and growth. It also represents a basis for cultivating civic agency. Learning to navigate institutions, collaborate across differences, and make informed decisions about one’s future are not only career competencies but also the foundations of democratic participation.
What emerges is not a shift away from education’s traditional purposes but a deeper fulfillment of them. Preparing students for work, for citizenship, and for lifelong growth are not competing aims but rather mutually reinforcing. The same meta-skills that enable people to adapt across careers enable them to deliberate, participate, and lead in civic life. The same liberal arts capacities that sustain democratic culture also power innovation in the economy. And the same commitment to learning across a lifetime that supports career mobility sustains human flourishing more broadly. The central task then is to move beyond false choices: between liberal arts and technical training, between career readiness and civic formation, between economic productivity and human development. The future demands their integration.
Discourse about aligning education with the future of work often centers on “how” questions. It’s time we addressed the “what” questions. What capabilities do students need to thrive in this century versus the last? What investments raise the bar for everyone, enabling students to outperform AI? What skills enable students to acquire new skills throughout their working lives? What structures can extend public education’s promise to support a lifetime of growth and of thriving? Without a new vision, we will continue producing students primed not to succeed in their working lives, but to be replaced.
Read more stories by Matt Sigelman.