The Edge: Will the First National Pathways Summit Deliver Results?

Organizers hope their diverse coalition dedicated to smoother transitions from school to college to career can help create a new educational system. ADVERTISEMENT [The Edge Logo]( Did someone forward you this newsletter? [Sign up free]( to receive your own copy. You can now read The Chronicle on [Apple News]( [Flipboard]( and [Google News](. Hi. I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle covering innovation in and around higher ed. This week I share details on a forthcoming national summit with big ambitions for smoothing pathways from school to college to career. And I share fresh insights on community-college students’ attitudes toward digital courseware and some updates on ways to make completion grants more effective. Also, an announcement: Beginning in March, The Edge will publish fortnightly. If you receive it via email on Wednesdays, you’ll still get my reporting on the people and ideas reshaping the sector — every other week. If you are not yet receiving this free newsletter directly to your inbox, this is a great time to [subscribe](. Know someone else who’d appreciate these takes on key questions in higher ed? Please pass the link to them. ADVERTISEMENT SUBSCRIBE TO THE CHRONICLE Enjoying the newsletter? [Subscribe today]( for unlimited access to essential news, analysis, and advice. A new move to ease transitions from school to college to career. It’s not every day an education goal comes along that brings together Democrats and Republicans, labor organizations and business interests, educators and students, higher ed and K-12. That’s one reason I’m looking forward to March 16, the day when folks representing this diversity of perspectives will gather in Washington for the first [National Pathways Summit]( to work with advocates on developing smoother connections between school, college, and careers. The invitation-only event has lofty goals — “to advance a clear vision for a new educational system that will incorporate a fundamental shift in the paradigm that has long guided U.S. education” — but that sort of rhetoric is hardly unusual, and it’s not the reason I’m paying attention. Nor is it because the goal is so surprising either. Frankly, smoother pathways is an idea that is already pretty popular in concept; it’s just a lot tougher to actually achieve. I’m interested because the organizers and participants include serious people with some specific ideas for progressing on the goal: As one of those organizers, Stanley Litow, explained: The idea is to focus on approaches — like promoting experiential education at the high-school and college level — “that seem to have the greatest ability to unite.” Litow was formerly a top executive at IBM and head of its foundation, where he helped design the first [Pathways in Technology Early College High School, known as P-TECH]( in Brooklyn. (There are now about 400 versions of these well-regarded schools in 14 states and 29 countries.) He also served as a State University of New York trustee, and is now a visiting professor of the practice in the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University and chair of the National Pathways Initiative, the entity behind the summit. I spoke with Litow last week, and while I still have plenty of skepticism about how yet another education summit — or the broader initiative — will really make a difference, there’s no doubting his enthusiasm. Litow highlighted ideas like refashioning the $1-billion Federal Work-Study program into a more deliberate career-training vehicle — “We could put it on steroids” — and making Pell Grants available for P-TECH-style early-college programs that would begin at grade nine and end with an associate’s degree, to improve purpose-minded college enrollment and completion. He also urged expanding support for formal apprenticeship programs and getting students into them earlier, noting that in the United States, the average age of people in apprenticeships is 28, while in Europe, where they are more common, it’s 18. All of those programs would require a lot more government spending, but Litow argues that tying initiatives like these to the nation’s economic-growth agenda could generate the same kind of bipartisan political support that produced the CHIPS and Infrastructure Acts. The summit has attracted some big-name speakers: governors from both parties, Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona, corporate and education leaders, plus several real live students. With those varied perspectives, Litow said, “maybe you get past the silos” and toward a common agenda for action. A year ago I highlighted how even [White House summits aren’t necessarily the be-all and end-all]( yet I still wonder if this one, taking place in a D.C. hotel, will generate the buzz to propel this new Pathways agenda forward. Several other members of President Biden’s Cabinet have also been asked to participate, but as of this newsletter, they’re only listed as “invited” [on the agenda](. None of that seemed to faze Litow. The summit has “a clear, big-tent set of organizations behind it,” he said. If it was a White House event, “you run the risk of not making it bipartisan.” The neutral setting may lack the pomp, but it has its own advantages, Litow added. “If you want to unite, you have to build that into the strategy.” Of course, such unity can be harder to achieve once you get past the goals and into the nitty-gritty of building consensus around specific policies, such as requiring students to develop a high-school plan “that aligns with tentative career interests” before they enroll in ninth grade, and dozens of others detailed in the Summit’s [policy platform and agenda](. I’ll be there in March and will keep you posted on how it’s all shaking out. Community college students are more wary of digital course materials than their instructors. Nearly three-quarters of community-college instructors surveyed this fall said they “strongly” or “somewhat” agree that they’ll be using more digital materials in future courses (and 84 percent of administrators echoed that sentiment), but students weren’t as enthusiastic. Only 53 percent of students agreed with those sentiments, according to a report on the survey, [“Digital]( [Transformation of the Community College”]( published this month. Twice as many students as instructors said they didn’t want more digital materials. The survey, which included responses from about 1,200 faculty and administrators and nearly twice as many students, is part of the continuing Digital Learning Pulse Survey series. I reported in December on some of its previous findings on [how colleges were responding to enrollment worries](. More on completion grants. This month I wrote about a research study [that found completion grants had not improved graduation rates for recipients at 11 universities.]( Since then, [“Completion Grants: A Practitioner’s Guide,”]( has been published by three organizations to highlight ways to make such micro-grants more effective. The guide recommends approaches like looking beyond standard financial-aid data to identify potential recipients, awarding the money before the start of the semester, and telling recipients exactly what the grants are about. Some institutions included in the research study have since changed how they award completion grants, and several have seen positive outcomes. Implementation makes a difference, said one of the study’s authors, Christel Perkins, an assistant vice president at the Association of Public & Land-Grant Universities, which assisted in the study. During the period analyzed by the research study, Perkins noted, several institutions were awarding the grants after semesters had started, which could have been too late to help students. In fact, the impact of differences in implementation was a focus of [a paper in 2021]( by some of the same authors of the more-recent research study. The research study published in December did not include Georgia State University, which pioneered the use of completion or retention grants, but it did include several members of the University Innovation Alliance. My previous newsletter included general comments on approaches to offering the grants from Timothy Renick, the executive director of Georgia State’s National Institute for Student Success, and Bridget Burns, the UIA’s chief executive. But because of an error on my part, that newsletter did not afford Renick or Burns the opportunity to comment specifically on the December study. When I went back to them, Burns responded in an email: “We should exercise caution before making wide-sweeping generalizations or dismissing any intervention based upon one single study, especially when there is variation in implementation.” Renick did not follow up on the study itself but reiterated, also in an email, that other analyses, including some by outside parties, had found “large positive impacts” for recipients of Georgia State’s [Panther Retention Grants](. Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@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](. If you want to follow me on Twitter (yeah, for now at least, I’m still there), [@GoldieStandard]( is my handle. NEWSLETTER [Sign Up for the Teaching Newsletter]( Find insights to improve teaching and learning across your campus. Delivered on Thursdays. 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