The rise of artificial intelligence and other technology has traditional high schools scrambling to keep up — with states doing an uneven job of encouraging schools to embed critical thinking skills, and offer students access to internships and college courses, according to a new report.

Today’s world, the nonprofit XQ Institute argues in its new report , “requires an entirely new kind of educational experience — one that traditional high schools were never designed to deliver,” the report found. 

“We live in an age of self-driving taxis, blockchain, and renewed interest in space exploration. The public launch of ChatGPT placed a powerful form of generative artificial intelligence (AI) within the reach of every American,” the report continued. “(The) stage is shifting rapidly. Our young people are growing up at a time when the economy and workforce are in constant flux. And high schools must keep pace.”

Schools not only need to emphasize work and early college experiences, XQ found, but also teach interpersonal and thinking skills as much as academics.

“What do we need to know when we leave our high school doors?” asked XQ CEO Russlynn Ali. Math, English and science are still important, she said.

“But layered on top of that, we need to be critical thinkers,” Ali said. “We need to be able to collaborate. We need adaptability. We need these skills that will help us succeed in life, no matter what direction we choose after we leave high school.”

XQ wants states to encourage schools to follow the lead of Purdue Polytechnic High School in Indianapolis or the Museum High School in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where students learn academics and interpersonal skills through projects, not lectures. Another standout: Oakland, California’s Latitude High School, where every 10th grader follows an adult through a work day to learn about the job, 11th graders have month-long internships and seniors can choose to do a longer one.

The new report takes a different approach from XQ’s previous work, which has centered on schools.

“States have more responsibility and authority over their schools than certainly in recent memory, if not in my lifetime,” Ali said. “They must be the locus of change.”

States are mixed however, XQ reports in the new study, in how they are succeeding in meeting 10 goals XQ considers key to school innovation. XQ met with school leaders across the country to create the goals — and then researched how much progress each state and Washington, D.C., has made toward them:

• 46 states have met the goal of offering work experience, such as internships, as credit toward high school diplomas.
• 38 states give every student a chance to earn college credit before graduating, by taking Advance Placement, International Baccalaureate or college classes.
• 32 states give schools the ability to award students class credit under a mastery or competency system showing they know the material, instead of just attending a class. 
• 32 states have identified key skills students need to learn for the future, including non-academic skills XQ has made a major part of its work, such as teamwork, critical thinking and problem solving. States often created a “Portrait of a Graduate” spelling these out.
• Just 10 states — Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Rhode Island, Utah and Washington — met six of the goals; and no state met all 10, though 31 met at least four. Two states — Alaska and Florida — met only two of the goals.
• Two of XQ’s goals — finding ways to measure how well students have learned interpersonal and thinking skills, then showing those on report cards  — haven’t been realized by any state.

XQ plans to track changes and update the report every two years for the next decade.

“I think of these as a start, definitely not a finish line,” Ali said.

To highlight the 10 policy goals and encourage states to adopt them, XQ is planning to visit schools and policymakers in 25 communities, likely over the next two years. Details of that tour, which starts March 4 in Indianapolis and stops in Columbus, Ohio, the week after, are still being developed.

XQ, a nonprofit and affiliate of investing and philanthropic firm Emerson Collective, was co-founded by Ali and Laurene Powell Jobs. Powell Jobs is Emerson’s founder and president, and wife of the late Apple founder Steve Jobs.

XQ has been refining its vision for redesigning high schools since launching in 2015 with a well-publicized campaign to identify and support innovative “Super Schools” across the country. It gave a total of $102 million in 2016 to 18 schools — including the schools mentioned above — before expanding its work to 28 states.

XQ’s vision has its , who say it and who are to prepare students. But school districts and several states, including Indiana, Rhode Island and Utah, agree with the approach and are open in their support.

Utah’s state superintendent Molly Hart said the state rarely adopts any national approach, but there is great overlap in what XQ promotes and the state’s push to redesign high schools, including the support of mastery teaching approaches and requiring students to earn a meaningful professional credential before graduating.

”We align closely when you look at some of the goals and policy actions that XQ does,” she said. “We have a lot of similarities in what we’re looking at.”

The report, and shorter reports XQ released for individual states, also highlight policy changes and efforts already in place that XQ considers “beacons” for change. Among them:

• Indiana: For giving schools increasing flexibility in giving students class credit for showing proficiency in a subject, rather than just sitting through a class all semester or year. 

• Rhode Island: For changing diploma requirements so that all students, beginning in 2028, must take the courses in math, foreign language and even art that qualify them to attend college.
  
  “Our kids were not even taking the classes to be able to apply to those schools,” said state education commissioner Angelica Infante-Green. “Once they got there, they were in remedial courses because we weren’t preparing them for college level achievement.”  

• Texas: For allowing students to earn 12 hours of college credit in high school, either through college, AP or International Baccalaureate classes.

• Colorado: For encouraging the growth of CareerWise high school apprenticeships, the largest youth apprenticeship program in the country. Colorado also broke career preparation into three categories — Learning ABOUT Work, Learning THROUGH Work, and Learning AT Work.  

• Utah: For giving schools grants to train teachers how to educate students using a mastery/competency approach; and how to rate student progress. Utah also backed some schools in trying out vastly different report cards – keeping the traditional A-F grade scale, but also giving students a new Mastery Learning Record that shows their progress on durable skills.

Ali said XQ also wanted to highlight two goals that haven’t been met yet, but that she considers vital — developing tests to measure how well students have learned key non-academic skills and then changing student report cards to rate students on those skills.

Ali said the standardized tests states use to measure student skills in math, English and science offer some sense of what students know, but are outdated. There’s no clear way yet to assess how well students have mastered durable skills to prove to colleges or employers they have those skills. And Ali said that schools tend to prioritize learning the state measures and judges them on, so schools won’t teach them vigorously until they are part of report cards and school ratings.

But XQ recognized 12 states for trying to develop those tests and report cards, six of them for participating in a pilot project with the Educational Testing Service, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the Mastery Transcript Consortium (now part of ETS). The Skills for the Future project has been working to create tests on durable skills, starting with three — collaboration, communication and critical thinking.

XQ is not part of this effort, but partners with Carnegie on some related work, and says it enthusiastically backs it.

The Skills for the Future team, which includes Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Nevada, Rhode Island and Wisconsin, is still working on creating new tests but recently broke down each of those three skills into smaller skills as one step toward creating tests.

Communication, for example, is broken down into segments — presentation skills, making messages more clear, adapting messages for different audiences or comprehending communication of others — that are then broken down further into sub-skills.

Infante-Green said measuring these skills will be a “game changer.”

“I think it will give employers things that they have been looking for, as well as change how we teach, what we teach, and how we incorporate (those skills) into the academic field,” she said. “It’s important. It won’t be one or the other, it’ll be both.”

Ali also stressed that just passing policy changes won’t be enough. Schools, teachers and parents need to also be on board.

“It’s not a checklist,” Ali said. “It has to be implemented in a way that is sustained and empowering and supportive of what needs to happen in the classroom.”

Disclosure: XQ provides financial support to The 74.

This summer, Lodi, California, high schoolers will again head to local wineries to learn the business through a combination of hands-on internships and college classes. The first-of-its-kind initiative is the result of a growing partnership among the district, Delta College, the Lodi Winegrape Commission and the nonprofit San Joaquin A+. 

The 74 recently partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute for an inside look at the “Growing Futures” Initiative and how it aims to promote a more inclusive agriculture industry. 

In the replay below, you’ll hear from experts Stuart Spencer, Executive Director of the Lodi Winegrape Commission, Kai Kung, CEO of San Joaquin A+, Kathy Stonum, Winemaker at Stonum Vineyards and Francesca Stonum, Operations Manager at Stonum Vineyards.

Some of our recent coverage of trends in career preparation:

• How a California Wine Region Is ‘Growing Futures’ By Turning Vineyards Into State-of-the-Art Classrooms

• Why Wait to Graduate? Georgia Apprentices Start Training as Sophomores

• How Rhode Island Is Tapping Career & Technical Ed to Help Every Student Succeed

• LISTEN — Beyond ‘College or Bust’: Apprenticeship as a Path to Opportunity

• Who You Know: Social Capital is Key for First-Gen Students’ Career Success

Apprenticeships are booming as high schools and private industry recognize the need for training students for roles in the workforce of the future and for offering career pathways that don’t necessarily rely on a bachelor’s degree.

The 74 recently partnered with the Progressive Policy Institute on a new installment of the “New Skills for a New Economy” webinar series, which focused on solutions needed to ensure the U.S. education and workforce systems adapt to meet current workforce needs.

In the replay below, you’ll hear from experts, you’ll hear from experts Vanessa Bennett of Jobs for the Future; Lateefah Durant of CityWorks D.C.; Jess Kostelnik, senior policy adviser to Colorado Gov. Jared Polis; and Seth Lentz, executive director of the Workforce Development Board of South Central Wisconsin. Watch the full conversation:

Some of our recent coverage of trends in career preparation:

• Indianapolis High School Carves Time Away from Class for Internships for All
  
• Why Wait to Graduate? Georgia Apprentices Start Training as Sophomores
  
• How Rhode Island Is Tapping Career & Technical Ed to Help Every Student Succeed
  
• LISTEN — Beyond ‘College or Bust’: Apprenticeship as a Path to Opportunity
  
• Who You Know: Social Capital is Key for First-Gen Students’ Career Success

The report by , an organization that connects first-generation college graduates with careers, tracks the experiences of young job seekers, revealing that not all networks are the same. 

It’s particularly crucial to have a network that includes senior professionals, said Sheila Sarem, Basta’s founder. These people unlock resources for first-generation job seekers, like getting a referral or bypassing the typical application. A candidate with a referral was four times more likely to be hired, according to the report.

“The importance of peer and near-peer networks — those networks do matter for a ton for different reasons … [but] the best and fastest and most effective way to [get a job quickly] is to have senior professionals in your network and in your corner,” Sarem said.

First-generation, low-income and underrepresented students have limited access to this type of high-impact social capital, according to the nonpartisan think tank .

“Young people from the top socioeconomic quartile report nearly double the rate of non-family adults accessible to them compared to young people from the bottom quartile,” says a July 2020 institute report. “This gap should be troubling to anyone trying to support students’ success not only in school, but also in accessing high-quality jobs down the line.”

Another major takeaway from the Basta report: Exposure to a broad array of careers counts heavily when trying to land a job, seemingly more important “than just about every other factor we can isolate, including GPA, college major, and having had prior internships.”

The report’s findings were gathered through a career navigation survey software that Basta created in 2020, . More than 10,000 people have used the tool to learn about their strengths, career goals and job search strategies. The majority of Seekr participants are first-generation college students.

Specifically for the report, the data was collected from 3,195 young adults between July 2020 and December 2021. Some 57% were low-income Pell Grant recipients, 62% were first-generation college students, 17% were Black, 21% were Latino, 12% were East Asian or Asian American, 12% were South Asian or Indian American and 6% white. The respondents leaned slightly female — 51% versus 46% who identified as male.

Basta found that most survey participants had a network consisting of personal connections — neighbors, family and friends — and this group asked for career help less often.

Participants with more professional connections asked for help the most, but the ones who sought help most often and converted that assist most successfully were those whose professional networks included senior professionals — professors, managers, mentors. 

Sarem said these findings, plus other Seekr results, help institutions become smarter about how they serve various populations, like first-generation students, and professionals and investors learn more about elevating these critical networks for young people.

Created in 2016, Basta has served more than 9,000 young people and had $3.9 million in annual revenue, according to its most recent 2021 .

“If we believe first-generation college students have everything it takes to succeed in the world of work and we really believe that employers do want to hire across lines of difference, then what’s the problem?” Sarem said. “We built our program model to create some connective tissue across those two audiences.”

A 2023 Center for First-Generation Student Success found that even after earning their bachelor’s degree, first-generation college graduates were less likely to land a job that required it than their peers. One year after getting their bachelor’s in the 2015-16 academic year, 44% of first-generation college graduates had a job that called for the degree versus 52% of graduates who were not the first in their family to finish college.

Basta also offers a free, four- to six-month fellowship program that includes career education and coaching in preparation for a student’s first job out of college. Roughly 81% of fellows secure full-time jobs with an average salary of $62,700, according to Basta. 

Hadler Raymond entered the Basta fellowship in 2020 while attending New York City’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He credits the fellowship for him landing a job at Bloomberg after his 2021 graduation.

Raymond said he would meet with a career success manager once a week to craft resumes and learn transferable skills for future jobs.

“Basta fosters a very strong community,” he said. “Everyone being first-generation is something that helps with that, because everyone could relate to that struggle of having to figure things out by yourself, because your parents can’t necessarily help you with it. The Basta community itself was the perfect network.”

The report, Sachem says, affirms how important social capital is while adding nuance and understanding to what it looks like in practice for first-generation students like Raymond.

“I think over the last four years, there’s just been questions about, like, ‘What does this mean? Do we keep investing in this?’ ” she said. “Well, this is a really important moment to show exactly how critically important the social capital concepts are, when we’re trying to drive economic mobility, which is what education is really designed for — to create more opportunity for more people.”

Disclosure: The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York, Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Philanthropies and Heckscher Foundation for Children provide financial support to Basta and The 74.