Partnerships are integral to delivering high-quality college and career pathways systems that are built to withstand economic and political change.

Successful partnerships in pathways systems require shared goals, clear roles and responsibilities across these partners, and systems and processes that facilitate new kinds of engagement and leadership,  especially from the private sector.

Over the past two years of collaboration, leaders and participants in the Launch initiative learned a great deal about the conditions that must be in place to advance high-quality,  equitable, and sustainable pathways systems. The conditions are related to a framework of five levers that are critical for driving lasting systems change: policy, funding, partnerships, data, and equity.  

This third blog in the series elevates three state-level examples featured in Conditions For Sustainable and Equitable Pathways Systems of how state CTE leaders are leveraging partnerships to build college and career pathways for scale and sustainability. 

Massachusetts

Massachusetts’ Connecting Activities (CA) is a Department of Elementary and Secondary Education initiative that leverages a statewide infrastructure to support college and career readiness for all learners by advancing cross-sector ownership for the locally delivered program. The CA line item has been in the state budget since 1998, first incubated during the school-to-work era. 

A self-described “state-funded intermediary system,” CA enables the 16 local MassHire workforce boards to recruit employers, prepare and place learners in brokered work-based learning (WBL) opportunities, and structure those experiences through the use of the Massachusetts Work-Based Learning Plan. In 2023, more than 4,000 Massachusetts employers provided WBL experiences for more than 12,000 learners through the CA initiative. The return on investment from CA is very high: All told, employer-paid wages for placements with WBL plans and/or classroom and workshop instruction represented an investment of approximately $18,935,000 in WBL, more than two-and-a-half times the state’s most recent investment in the program.

Washington

Career Connect Washington (CCW) was established in 2019 through the state’s Workforce  Education Investment Act. Since its launch, CCW has developed partnerships to increase coordination among the public and private sectors, creating an equitable career-connected learning system that benefits Washington’s learners and employers. Key to CCW’s success has been its unique and multilayered public-private partnership model. At the state level, CCW is led by a team of four public and private entities: Washington’s Employment and Security Department; the Washington Roundtable; the Washington STEM Association; and the lead implementation partner,  the Washington Student Achievement Council. 

Across the state, nine regional networks serve as convening points for leaders from K–12 systems,  apprenticeship programs, higher education institutions, and private sector partners to cooperate to scale career-connected learning and meet regional workforce demand. Each of these nine areas also has a career-connected learning coordinator, funded through CCW, to provide additional capacity to support implementation of career-connected learning activities. 

In CCW’s first five years, its dynamic partnerships have led to the creation of more than 115 Career Launch programs, enabled nearly 10,000 young people to complete earn-and-learn programs, and attracted more than $30 million in federal grants to further scale and build a statewide system of career pathways.  

Rhode Island

In 2017, Rhode Island launched PrepareRI, an umbrella organization uniting multiple state and local agencies for career pathways systems, including the Governor’s Office, Rhode Island Department of Education, Governor’s Workforce Board, Office of the Postsecondary Commissioner, and Rhode Island Commerce Corporation. This effort stands as a very strong example of clear governance and roles supporting shared accountability. During their planning, the convening authority, partners, and cross-sector agencies identified their roles and responsibilities for service delivery to expand access for learners. In 2022, the PrepareRI 2.0 Action Plan was adopted by the Rhode Island Board of Education as the state’s preK–20 strategic plan for education. Rhode Island is now once again in the process of updating its state PrepareRI plan to align to the governor’s 2030 plan.

A key initiative of PrepareRI is the PrepareRI Internship Program, which places 300–500 high school juniors into paid internships each summer. The program is funded by both the Governor’s Workforce Board and the Partnership for Rhode Island (a nonprofit CEO roundtable) and is managed by Skills for Rhode Island’s Future (a statewide workforce intermediary organization), demonstrating the role of industry champions. The number of interns participating in a PrepareRI summer high school internship program has increased from 162 in 2018 to 348 in 2023. 

Dive into additional state examples and the conditions that enable accessible and sustainable high-quality pathways systems at scale across the five levers of policy, funding, partnerships, data, and equity in the first publication from the Launch initiative Conditions For Sustainable and Equitable Pathways Systems.