Nutrition science spent decades flip-flopping on eggs: cholesterol-laden killer, superfood, and now somewhere in between (depending, as it turns out, on your own biology). The lesson isn't that scientists are fickle. It's that as the evidence revealed more nuance, the perspective of the field evolved, too.

For years, questioning whether everyone should go to college was heretical, and the heresy often came with a personal edge. "Well, you went to college." "Where are your kids going?" Or as Arne Duncan put it on a panel I moderated this spring: "Where I worry on the alternative pathways is that it's almost always for 'other kids.'"

These are well-founded concerns.

Anyone who questions the one-path orthodoxy is fairly asked to answer for history, or the risk that rationing access might undermine aspiration in ways that magnify inequality. On many occasions, JFF’s Michael Collins has reminded me that while college may fall short of being the "great equalizer," it often creates the greatest lift for students who are least likely to attend. Matt Barnum recently cautioned us of the risk of a stampede to the trades, and Jack Kent Cooke Foundation scholars offer powerful reminders of just how much talent we are leaving on the table.

But treating college as though it is always the best first step after high school answers a complicated question with a generalization. Now, the costs of that shortcut are adding up.

The challenge stems from the fact that, as former Obama higher ed official Bob Shireman recently explained on Substack, averages often obscure enormous variation. Sure, averages are easy to embrace because they provide systems (like, say, K-12 education) with clear metrics to drive toward. But we tend to optimize for what we can count, and sometimes avoid what’s harder to measure. It is, for example, much easier to treat college and career readiness as though they are the same thing, or to look at institutions as a whole as opposed to specific programs (even within the same college).

Questioning our reliance on averages—while making the case for investment in systems that help students navigate the complexity—is, I’d argue, a different debate than the one Richard Vedder and Anthony Carnevale had 15 years ago. Honesty about what averages might obscure doesn't diminish the value of college, or organizations doing the still essential work of nurturing aspiration and making sure students who start actually finish. In fact, I’d make the case that access to better data and more information makes their work even more important.

The good news: We're beginning to see serious conversations about how to solve for the complexity that students actually face, informed by the realities of both stigma and tracking.

WSCUC recently released a Key Indicators Dashboard to compare programs based on a “Price-to-Earnings Premium.” In the Bay Area, a new nonprofit called Ridgeline was born from a recognition (at one of the nation's most successful college-prep charters) that the hard work of helping students navigate a multitude of options was more than any single school could take on. It's now working at a regional level to backward-map employer demand and deliver paid work experiences to students from schools across the region. The Pathways Impact Fund is making targeted investments to take similar efforts to scale—and the XQ Institute and Carnegie Foundation have teamed up to map policy actions and district practices that can undergird new approaches to high school. 

Last month, the Gates Foundation made waves when it announced that it was re-orienting its postsecondary strategy from “college completion" to a new North Star of helping 10 million more learners earn "credentials of value." The Strada-backed nonprofit CredLens is helping us to understand what such credentials are actually worth. 

As this infrastructure matures, education choices will become less binary, and more fluid (or in the words of Michael Collins “less deterministic, and more probabilistic”). Long lauded, stackable credentials may actually allow learners to bank progress across a career instead of betting everything on four or more uninterrupted years. Today, we treat someone as a failure if they take 10 years to finish a degree—largely because our systems weren't designed for that route. But what if they were? Imagine being 28 with a degree, zero debt, and a decade of work experience.

Earlier this month, Mike Petrilli, who spent a decade catching flak for arguing that college-for-all was failing too many students, asked a timely question: Has the push away from college gone too far? That’s an important question, too. 

Like the eggs, the answer won’t be all or nothing. But it starts with a willingness to avoid shying away from the hard questions, and the humility to be honest about what the data is telling us.

On August 13, the Washington State Board of Education adopted the FutureReady graduation requirement framework, replacing the career- and college-ready structure the board set in 2014. It keeps a 24-credit diploma, but reorganizes it into 15 core credits, five “personalized pathway” credits, and four electives. The FutureReady framework is particularly notable because it includes workforce-oriented “durable” skills alongside traditional credit requirements.

The distance between adoption and implementation is worth acknowledging, too. Rewriting degree pathways impacts course catalogs, counseling, transcripts, and admissions requirements. Washington’s changes will take effect with the class of 2032 to make sure the transition is completed with minimal disruption.

Washington is not alone in assembling a coursework-and-career-readiness diploma, though designs (and progress) differ by state.

While Washington, Indiana, New York, and Massachusetts have implemented large-scale changes to their graduation requirements, other states have taken a more incremental approach to career-oriented learning experiences.

Meta, the social media giant behind Facebook and Instagram, reached a landmark settlement with the attorneys general of 47 states, Washington, D.C., and other U.S. territories over the alleged addictive design of its platforms. The settlement is among the largest-ever struck by a U.S. company.

As part of the settlement, Meta has agreed to pay up to $17 billion in penalties for violating federal child privacy and states’ consumer protection laws. Meta will also make major changes to its platforms to protect its youngest users. This includes timed interruptions to “endless scroll,” a two-hour limit on daily usage, no access to appearance-enhancing filters, silencing notifications during school hours, and improving age verification tools and parental controls. 

The full monetary value of Meta’s payout is contingent on whether other social media platforms popular with kids and teens—namely TikTok, YouTube, and Snapchat—also settle and adopt similar protective measures. According to Meta Chief Legal Officer C.J. Mahoney, “This framework will only work if all our peers join us… Because teens move fluidly across dozens of apps, we need an industrywide solution.”

The settlement, approved by U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers, concludes a highly-publicized trial centered on allegations that Meta misrepresented the extent of the mental health risks its platforms posed to underage users.

Some attorneys general are not fully satisfied by this result, though. California AG Rob Bonta, who led the case, said the settlement constitutes “a floor conceptually, not a ceiling.” Florida AG James Uthmeier, who is pursuing a separate lawsuit against Meta, said the settlement failed to deliver penalties of scale: “A few weeks of revenue, that’s not enough here when you’re talking about a company of this size.” 

There are still a lot of unanswered questions about how the Meta settlement dollars will be used and distributed, and how soon. But, what we do know is that these dollars are likely to end up in state hands and be allocated to fund critical education and mental health programs and initiatives. Some industry veterans may remember that when Microsoft settled its class-action antitrust cases in the early 2000s, states utilized the resulting funds to pay for a variety of education technology initiatives.

The Whiteboard Notes team will closely track which states receive Meta settlement funds, how they plan to spend it, and what it all means for the broader education technology landscape. Reach out to us with questions.

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