For too long, learners and their families have been told they have to choose between the ‘college track’ or the ‘career track’. But in a world where a doctor needs to understand robotics, a mechanic needs to understand aspects of electrical engineering, and everyone needs transferable, career-ready skills like adaptability and collaboration to be successful in an ever-evolving economy, that ‘or’ simply doesn’t make sense.

To truly protect the ‘and’ and make it the norm, we have to stop building walls between disciplines and systems and start building connections.

Over my last two blogs, I’ve explored why it is so important we find the right balance between “college” and “career” readiness and identified some critical policy levers that push states and districts in the right direction to do so. However, policy can only go so far. We have the opportunity to directly tackle the ongoing barriers to fully embracing college and career readiness for all learners—including the ongoing siloing of academics and hands-on learning, a lack of comprehensive advising throughout our education systems, and misconceptions about Career Technical Education (CTE). Let’s dive into each of these.

Integrating CTE & Core Academics

The power of integrating academics and CTE cannot be understated. Imagine the shift if a Health Science teacher and a Biology teacher co-designed a lesson delivered across both classrooms, bringing relevance to CTE learners and non-CTE learners alike. That doesn’t just change the instruction; it changes the entire narrative of what rigor looks like.

Back in 2011, when I was at my previous organization, we partnered with Advance CTE (then NASDCTEc—IYKYK!) on a project that did exactly this. We brought math and CTE instructors together to “unpack” their worlds. It took two days of deep, sometimes difficult, conversation to build the trust and common language needed to bridge agriculture, healthcare, and construction with high school math. But those teachers left with more than just a lesson plan. They left with a new perspective on what’s possible when we stop working in isolation.

This kind of collaboration shouldn’t be the exception—it must be the norm. I’m not underestimating what it takes, but if we are serious about ensuring every learner can draw connections across disciplines and navigate their next step with confidence, this is the way forward. I’m incredibly excited about Advance CTE’s recent landscape analysis and supporting resources and planned efforts to drive this conversation to the next level and support state and local leaders. 

While our paper offers a host of promising state practices, I want to point out two that don’t just push on the CTE system to reinforce academics but expect a level of “two-way” integration, with core academics embedding technical instruction as well.

•  The New York State Education Department allows for “integrated” and “specialized” courses that combine CTE content with academic standards, which must be co-developed by core academic and CTE educators. 
• The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI) organized Careers in the Classroom, a community of practice, co-led by DPI’s offices of CTE, Teaching & Learning, and Literacy & Mathematics. Sixteen interdisciplinary district teams joined to create a vision and goals for career-connected learning.

Comprehensive Advising Structures and Career Development Opportunities 

Even with the right policies and signals from state agencies that support college and career readiness for all, there has to be the right commitment, structures, and supports at the learner level to make this a reality. We can design the best pathways in the world, but for a learner to actually become college and career ready, they need to know how to best navigate the systems seamlessly, which requires high-quality career advising starting in middle grade, at a minimum. Learners need intentional exposure to all 14 Career Clusters, strategic guidance on course-taking, and real-world experiential learning opportunities long before they graduate.

The reality, however, is that our advising and counseling systems are severely under-resourced—and our advising structures are often disconnected. When a system is stretched this thin, it is very difficult for school counselors and career advising professionals to have the time, tools, and language to provide a full picture of the curricular and experiential steps a learner needs to take to reach their goals. 

A system of comprehensive advising must also extend to ensuring every learner, not just those in CTE programs, can access experiences across the full spectrum of career development, from career exploration to experiential learning and training. 

However, we are seeing a renewed commitment to overcoming these hurdles. There is a growing movement to move past “triage” and toward systems where every learner has the right information at the right time. This looks like:

• Investing in dedicated career coaching and advising positions (like in Arkansas);
• Being intentional about the design and implementation of individual career and academic plans; and
• Distributing advising responsibilities across a school building, such as Boston, Massachusetts, and Maryland. Through the New Skills ready network initiative, Boston became an implementation model for the state by piloting a whole-school advising approach that introduces the MyCAP framework as early as sixth grade. Maryland is leveraging its new Six-Year Plan implementation to bring local CTE, advising, special education, and academic leaders together to develop cohesive strategies for supporting all learners in their college and career planning. 

Changing the Narrative

Finally, to achieve the true mindset shift, we must address the perpetual challenge of misconceptions of and negative perceptions about CTE. While there is a lot to be excited about in terms of learners’ and families’ interest in a broader range of postsecondary pathways and a growing desire for more hands-on and applied learning in secondary education, it is still way too common to hear people talk about CTE as for those kids who don’t (or can’t) go to college. 

Recent research from Advance CTE highlights the persistent “or” mentality. When asked who CTE is for, the results show a stark divide: less than 20% of adults believe CTE is for “college-bound” and “high-achieving” students, which 65% believe it is for students who want a job immediately after graduating high school. At the same time, there is a growing body of research that suggests increasingly negative perceptions about college, due to a mix of cost and shifts in culture. This false dichotomy has to be addressed head-on.

‘Understanding and Shifting Perceptions of Career Technical Education’ (Advance CTE, 2025)

We need policymakers, local leaders, practitioners, and partners to move beyond perceptions and focus on what is best for each individual learner. Advance CTE has been doing message testing and perceptions research for over a decade and, consistently, has seen that learners and families want both CTE and college-prep opportunities open to them. How we talk about career, college, and CTE needs to be thoughtful and grounded in the reality of CTE’s positive impact on learners, rather than long-held stigmas, often formed by adults based on their decades-old high school experience. 

It is time to stop treating career and college as two separate destinations, but rather as the same journey, with every learner having a seamless route to economic success.

Access Advance CTE’s resources for more information and policy recommendations about these topics.

• Integrating Academic and Career Technical Education: A Choice Multiplier for College and Career Readiness 
• Connected Career Advising Explainer and Activity Toolkit
• Communications Toolbox