For generations, higher education has served as one of the most reliable pathways to economic mobility. A college degree signaled higher earnings, broader networks, refined skills and career flexibility, but it also comes with tough questions:

• What will it cost?
• What skills will I gain?
• How will those skills help me achieve career success?

Higher education’s challenge is no longer proving that learning matters. It is making the connection between education, skills, career preparation, and opportunity visible. Institutions that do this will earn the trust of the next generation of learners.

Public confidence in higher education has significantly declined over the past decade. A Gallup-Lumina survey found that only 38% of U.S. adults had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in higher education in 2023, down from 57% in 2015.  Students continue to see value in education, but they are also asking: What will it cost? What will I learn? Where will it lead?

Decades of rising tuition have shaped perceptions of value and trust. As a result, institutions are judged not only on cost, but on outcomes.

When students ask, “Why college,” it is no longer enough to respond that it is simply “worth it.” They want to understand how a degree connects to skills, work experience, professional networks, and long-term economic opportunity. A clearer path from education to employment and transparent information to support decision-making is essential to student success.

Students are entering a world with more educational and career options than any previous generation.  Community colleges, credentials, apprenticeships, military service, direct-to-work opportunities, industry certifications, and four-year degrees can all lead to economic mobility.

Students need transparent information about cost, aid, outcomes, labor market demand, and career pathways before making life-shaping decisions. The goal is to help students choose pathways that are best aligned with their goals, aspirations, and circumstances. Institutions that embrace transparency and support optionality will be more trusted than institutions that continue to assume college is the default answer.

Institutions have made progress in reducing some barriers to entry through simplified applications and more transparent admission processes. But access cannot stop at admission.

Students need clear information about program fit, cost and potential outcomes. Recent FAFSA data is instructive. NCAN reported that 59% of high school seniors in the class of 2026 completed the FAFSA by late June, surpassing the previous record of 54% set by the class of 2018.  Students are not simply completing paperwork. They are assessing whether college is financially sustainable and if the return justifies the investment.

The issues are not contained inside the four walls of higher education. There is an urgent gap in the space between education and employment.

A 2024 Strada Institute and Burning Glass Institute report found that 52% of recent four-year college graduates were underemployed one year after graduation, which means they were working in jobs that do not typically require a bachelor’s degree. Nearly half remained underemployed a decade later.  This does not mean that higher education is failing. It means that the path from education to employment remains poorly connected. What we lack is a learning-to-earning infrastructure and the systems that connect aspirations, education, skills, and experiences to employment. Career exploration is often disconnected from academic planning. Work experiences are often undocumented or unverifiable. Students complete projects, jobs, internships, service experiences, or applied learning opportunities without a reliable way to document and communicate what they learned.

The future of student success will depend less on improving isolated services, and more on building the infrastructure that connects learning to earning.

Work-based learning (WBL) is one of the most powerful bridges between education and employment, but we often define it too narrowly.

In most fields, full apprenticeships or internships are the gold standard for hands-on, in-depth work experience, and access should be expanded. But they are expensive to scale, unevenly distributed, unavailable in many regions and often inaccessible to students balancing work, family responsibilities, transportation barriers or other constraints.

While not every student can access traditional internships or apprenticeships, it is essential that every student has access to multiple career-connected learning opportunities. These experiences help students build skills, develop confidence, understand the workplace, and demonstrate workplace readiness. Those experiences should look different depending on the stage of a learner’s journey. For high school students, WBL may include projects, job shadowing, mentorships, and industry simulations.  For college students, it may involve micro-internships, applied research, service learning, apprenticeships, entrepreneurship projects, or paid internships.

Just as importantly, these experiences must not disappear once completed. Students should be able to document the skills they demonstrated and communicate that evidence to potential employers.

If higher education is serious about rebuilding trust, career development cannot remain a collection of disconnected services.

Students need better ways to explore careers, build skills, and document their capabilities. Institutions need greater visibility into student progress, and employers need better signals of student capability. This is why a Learning-to-Earning Infrastructure matters. It connects aspiration to informed choice, coursework to skills, experience to evidence, and education to opportunity.

Addressing these challenges requires new approaches that help learners navigate increasingly complex education and career decisions. Futurenav was designed with this goal in mind.  It helps learners make the path from education to employment more transparent and personalized by helping them explore careers, understand the skills those careers require, connect their education and experiences to their goals, and build a clearer record of what they know and can do. In the coming year, we will also be adding a WBL Layer to Futurenav, to improve that Learning-to-Earning bridge.

The next generation of student success will not be defined only by enrollment, retention, and graduation. Those outcomes remain essential, but they are not enough. The institutions that earn trust over the next decade will be the ones that help students navigate the full journey from learning to earning.

Higher education is approaching an inflection point.

I believe deeply in the promise of higher education. But preserving that promise requires honesty. Students are not rejecting education. They are rejecting ambiguity. They want clarity about cost, outcomes, and opportunity. Higher education does not need to become job training, nor should it abandon its broader mission of intellectual growth and discovery. But institutions must take greater responsibility for helping students navigate the transition from education to employment.

That path from learning to earning must be clearer, more affordable, more transparent, and more connected to the lives students are trying to build.