A Decade of Early College and Career Pathways

We know from robust research that demographics play a large role in the destiny of too many students and that economic mobility is significantly more difficult to achieve for students from high-poverty neighborhoods and rural communities. We also know that high school or even college graduation is only part of the puzzle – that students do better in school and life when they have access to career exploration and navigation, strong college and career advising, and meaningful work-based learning in the form of internships, apprenticeships, and pathways to certification in their field of interest. For over a decade, Empower Schools has supported the pioneers of “remixing” high school, college, and career to help students persist in college, graduate with relevant credentials, and achieve family-sustaining wages. Our systemic approach helps students access fulfilling careers through Early College and Career Pathways.

The Promise of Our Founding

As chairman of the Board of Higher Education for Massachusetts, our co-founder Chris Gabrieli has been one of the early champions of early college. Empower Schools incubated the Massachusetts Alliance for Early College (MA4EC) to scale the model through coalition-led advocacy and codification of best practices. MA4EC takes a strategic approach, focusing on the college itself and the college for career. As they describe it, in Early College, high school students take strategically-sequenced, real college classes with strong career orientations during their regular high school day at no cost to themselves or their families. Through collective impact, policy, and advocacy, including student policy fellowships, capacity-building and learning communities, and cutting-edge innovation, MA4EC is working to close the college success equity gap across the state.  MA4EC’s work is already bearing fruit; their latest report, MA4EC, indicates that 41% of Early College students from the pooled classes entered and remained in college, compared to 24% of their matched peers. 

How Policy Change Happens

Throughout our organization’s history, we’ve taken two distinct yet cyclical approaches to partnerships at the district and state levels.

• • • Empowered Partnerships are sustainable partnerships that enable transformative district schools where educators have the flexibility and accountability to make decisions that are right for their students, community, and staff. By working with community champions to strategize, incubate, and launch formal agreements, we create enabling conditions that allow educators to customize their schools to meet student needs, unlocking transformational outcomes through fundamentally different structures. We work with the community to analyze the needs and create innovations that will bring the best results. 

• • • Policy and Thought Leadership is how we affect systemic change. We champion state-level policy change, host professional convenings, and provide support and advice to education leaders. We partner with education leaders and local champions to propose, interpret, leverage, and change education policy to catalyze structural shifts.

The innovations supported by Empower Schools have profoundly impacted the communities they serve, creating this powerful feedback loop that enhances continual improvement and innovation. We’ve worked directly with districts, industry partners, and higher education institutions in Texas, Colorado, California, Louisiana, and Indiana to create new models for career-connected high schools. We’ve created governance structures that embed industry partners in the design and implementation of career pathways, we’ve supported the launch of regional intermediaries that coordinate internships and work-based learning opportunities across industries, and we’ve helped school districts and institutions of higher education design integrated models for dual enrollment, early college, and 13th and 14th-grade models that allow students to remain in high school while accumulating significant college credits and career experiences. 

Leveraging our lessons learned and deep partnerships with communities, we’ve also influenced how state actors incentivize and support the scale of these models. We’ve advised and supported State Education Agencies to allocate funds in new and different ways, deploying ESSER and Title I funds to competitive innovation grants that support career-connected high schools. These grants have allocated more than $100M and counting, offering much-needed start-up capital and technical assistance to support schools and districts to expand access to postsecondary opportunities, especially for students who have been historically underestimated and underserved. 

This work’s impact goes beyond our Zone partners’ classrooms, influencing state-level policies to support better and sustain postsecondary pathways that blend college and career. Our advocacy efforts have facilitated significant enhancements in educational delivery and outcomes by restructuring financial and structural frameworks at the state level. Our collective efforts have reached 1.5 million students, a testament to our strategies’ effectiveness and the hard work of our dedicated partners.

What’s Next For Early College and Career Pathways

Today, our work is national, with potential future Empowered Partnerships being established from California to South Carolina and many states in between. We embed Early College and Career Pathways into our powerful systemic innovations like Innovation Schools and Rural Innovation. We are incredibly hopeful about an exciting pilot we are helping to launch as part of our rural collaborative Rural Alliance Zone-32 in Randolph County. We are partnering with RAZ-32, Randolph Eastern, Reid Health, and Ivy Tech to launch a first of its kind nursing youth apprenticeship. High School students will have the opportunity to earn an associates degree in nursing and during their senior year will receive 3 days of on- the -the job, paid training.  This partnership will enable students to progress faster to a degree with applied learning and earlier access to employment opportunities. It also helps meet a critical need in the regional economy for more clinicians with high-value, transferable skills in the workforce.  We’re thrilled to have garnered funding from Siegel Family Endowment and the Walton Family Foundation’s Learning Landscapes challenge. This challenge supports innovative K-12 models that integrate physical, digital, and social infrastructure to design sustainable, scalable solutions for addressing access and opportunity barriers for our most underserved students. Our project is announced and framed as:

Rural Alliance Zone 32 (RAZ-32) works to address the intersecting challenges of poor health outcomes, healthcare workforce shortages, and limited career access to ensure that East Central Indiana students — especially low-income and Hispanic students — can thrive and contribute to the region’s economic and cultural vitality.

Follow us, to work together to tackle the next decade of Early College and Career Pathways, Innovation Schools, and Rural Innovation.