Scaling Skills-Based Pathways
Every learner deserves a clear path to a good job and a better life.
We design and scale skills-based pathways so learners can access affordable, stackable opportunities that lead to meaningful careers and upward mobility.
WHAT LEARNERS NEED
Learners need affordable, faster, and more flexible pathways that connect education to economic mobility, but too often, these pathways are designed without fully reflecting their realities and goals.
Starting as early as high school and continuing through postsecondary education and into careers, effective pathways must be built with learners, not just for them, to ensure access to in-demand skills, real-world experience, and good jobs.
WHAT CHANGES FOR LEARNERS
Learners no longer have to guess the return on their education.
Clear link between education and earnings
Flexible pathways that adapt to learners’ lives
Paid, real-world experience built into learning
WHAT WE DO
Through a human-centered design approach grounded in learner voice and experience, Education Design Lab partners with K-12 systems, colleges, employers, and workforce leaders to co-design short-term, stackable, employer-validated pathways that connect learners to in-demand skills, real-world experience, and economic mobility.
The Lab advances this work through a set of integrated programs that design, validate, and scale skills-based pathways.
Micro-Pathways
Short, stackable pathways tied to industry-recognized credentials and designed to lead to jobs at or above local median wages.
Early Pathways
Career-connected pathway models embedded in dual enrollment so learners can begin building momentum earlier.
Work-based Learning
Earn-and-learn models that widen access to applied experience, including emerging models that integrate AI training.
Workforce Pell Design
Support for program redesign, data capacity, and institutional change that prepares colleges to unlock short-term Pell opportunities.
Skills Visibility
Tools and frameworks that help make learners’ skills more visible, trusted, and useful to employers.
Apprenticeships
EXPLORE RELATED PROJECTS
IMPACT
We don’t just design programs — we design for system-level impact.
We change systems by centering New Majority Learners in a collaborative process that results in a ripple effect of transformation across multiple levels, from individual programs and colleges, to regions and state systems.
We measure progress through four elements of change that signal system transformation:
Connect learners and employers through formal, ongoing structures that integrate their voices into the pathway design and decision-making process.
Build institutional capacity for data-informed continuous improvement, regularly using learner data to inform decisions, adopt/adapt pathways, and improve learner outcomes over time.
Enable clearer, more navigable pathways with defined entry, exit, and completion requirements; stackable credentials; and alignment to workforce funding, where applicable, through updated institutional policies and program design practices.
Shift mindsets across institutions and employers to prioritize opportunity and economic mobility as the primary outcomes of learning.