Relevance, Reach, and Readiness: Answering Uncertainty With Action

Young Americans are feeling uneasy about the future. Chronic absences are up since the pandemic, and too many students are disengaged, even when they show up to school. There is widespread anxiety that AI is rendering many tasks pointless and many career fields precarious.

Educators must answer those worries with engaging and relevant coursework that connects students to real-world opportunities, argued College Board CEO David Coleman.

“Today, our young people are more anxious than hopeful about their future,” Coleman said during the opening plenary of the 2025 College Board Forum in New York City. “This is a new phenomenon in this country.”

Waning confidence in the promise of social mobility and economic opportunity, combined with the deep uncertainty about how artificial intelligence will reshape employment, is driving many students to disengage at school or lose faith in the traditional college pathway as the best route to success. Coleman showed data indicating that only 35% of American adults believe a college education is very important, down from 75% in 2010.

“Our education and workforce sectors are disconnected, and confidence in higher education has cratered,” Coleman said. “These are the forces we confront. They are not new, but more intense than ever.”

A key strategy for combatting that malaise is for educators to demonstrate how classroom learning connects to compelling needs in the wider world. That’s the aim behind new Advanced Placement® courses that offer a combination of college credit and employer-endorsed credentials, giving students an early window into the working world and exposure to high-demand fields like cybersecurity and business and finance.

The push for greater student engagement is also driving the adoption of more project based learning in courses like AP® Seminar and AP African American Studies, where students select long-term research projects based on their own interests. “Nerdy passions get in-depth study in seminar,” Coleman said. “Bored kids become engaged.”

In a discussion with education leaders and employers, Coleman focused on the need for more coordination across sectors, so that students don’t lose momentum as they move from high school to college and in the transition to work.
“We need the full through-line,” said Lydia Logan, vice president for global education and workforce development at IBM. “We used to talk a lot about the bridge from high school to college. And now we need to think about the bridge from college to career.”

Logan cited the hundreds of thousands of unfilled cybersecurity jobs as a prime example of the disconnect between education and the workforce, where students aren’t getting the right credentials or the right guidance to take advantage of well-paying careers that are widely available.

Nancy Cantor, the president of Hunter College in New York City, said it’s important for higher education to show that a durable liberal arts education does not have to come at the expense of career readiness. Providing students with opportunities for more apprenticeships and internships, and hiring more professors with private-sector backgrounds, can help bridge the gap between a traditional college experience and valuable preparation for jobs, she said.

“Our students need the road to economic and social mobility,” Cantor said. “It is so critical that we not be in a monastery, and that we not totally be in the marketplace before our students are ready. What that means is that we bring the marketplace to our students.”

Falecia Williams, the president of Prince George’s Community College in Maryland, suggested that both K–12 and universities could look to the long-established practices of community colleges, which are used to working closely with employers to design programs that lead directly into promising jobs. Bringing industry partners into the curriculum-development process can help colleges stay relevant, she said.

In Yonkers Public Schools, just outside New York City, the goal is to harness the urgency of the moment to create more college and career options for students so that they can develop ambitious goals beyond high school, said Superintendent Aníbal Soler, Jr. “If there’s value in something, it will grow,” he said. “If there’s true urgency, the seats get created.”