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Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire [00:00:05]:
Welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire. One of the big issues that we hear about relating to career education in particular is the lack of ability of schools, primarily high schools, to direct students or make them aware of their opportunities in careers outside the traditional field. Four year path and student preparation and their experiences with prior learning has become a huge issue affecting post secondary career education. And today for our guest we have Dr. Joseph Goins. He is the CEO of an organization called Pathway to Careers, which helps students connect students future careers during their instruction period. And it's something that I think is, it's very innovative, it's long overdue.
Jason Altmire [00:01:00]:
And Dr. Goins, we're glad to have you with us.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:01:04]:
Jason, I appreciate the opportunity, always a pleasure. And I get excited when we get a chance to connect students to their future. And it's kind of been our passion. You know, one of the things we believe is that when education becomes relevant, learners become engaged. And one of the ways to make students more engaged is to connect them to a future version of themselves via a career. So we get very passionate about that work.
Jason Altmire [00:01:30]:
And that has been one of the issues with education over the past several decades. It's not a new issue. Often our school system is designed to help students learn, of course, but then when you think about job opportunities, they're teaching them skills and directing them to jobs that were there in the past, maybe 10 years ago, not the jobs that are going to be there when they graduate or even 10 years in the future. And I think that's something we're starting to do a lot better job of. But maybe we can start by talking about your observations on that question and what led you to founding Pathway to Careers.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:02:10]:
One of the things that we thought about when we were looking at Pathway to Careers, we really started the organization by doing research that impacted policy that led to better practice in the classroom. So one of the things you've got to do is just follow the research. Research kind of tells us what we should be doing. You know, I asked this question in a lot of presentations, Jason. The number one question students ask in math is when am I ever going to use this? Right? And I chuckle because they've been asking that for 100 years. And when I look at things like that, I'm like, it's 2025. I think we owe these students an answer to that question. Why is this relevant to me? And what we wanted to tackle was how do you take something as complicated as that question and, and marry that with careers? So we took an academic subject like math and said, we're going to show the relevancy, but we're going to teach math through the lens of showing them how math is relevant in these high wage, high growth careers that could affect their future.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:03:13]:
So, so it's kind of a, a simple idea that's way overdue, as you said at the beginning of this is like, how do we help students see and think through that and answer that question they've been asking? And I think we've been on that journey from day one, started thinking about career connected learning as soon as our organization started. And, and it's been a good journey and to help students. You know, one of the things I say is the future of education will be more relevant and engaging as schools connect classroom instruction to the real world. And that's what we're trying to do.
Jason Altmire [00:03:50]:
So I have found that question to be very interesting. Even back to my days, many years ago, even in high school, I was asking that same question. Why. Why is al, algebra and calculus and math generally, why is that relevant? And I think today people would ask that even more given the technology and the access to ways to solve problems that didn't exist back when we were in school. So is your goal to help students understand how in fact math is relevant, or is it to help the schools work with the students in a way that they're not doing things related to math and other subjects that are in fact unrelated to the career that they want to pursue?
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:04:39]:
Great question. And the first part of that answer, I'll say both. You know, one of our goals is how do we expose students to career opportunities all the time? You know, one of our models is education that leads to employment that benefits your local economy. I really call it the E model. How do we do education that leads to employment, preferably high wage, high growth employment. How do we paint a picture of that? But then how do we benefit your local economy? And then the last piece of that puzzle is how do we do it for the students that need it the most? So what research tells us is underrepresented students or underserved students, they don't have access to career modeling at all. So they're not getting awareness. And one of the things we want to do is whether it's through math or whether it's through career aware models, how do we create these opportunities for students to see and visualize that? And so we did it in math.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:05:35]:
I'll give you an example. We put 650 careers inside of a math curriculum. So think of every day you're going to math, and now you're going to see a different career. Tomorrow it could be a different career. And it's how do we ignite that spark of learning but also expose them to careers while we do it simultaneously? And I think it's both. Too often we think of career education in high schools right now as an event. And an event doesn't have what I call stickiness. If you want something to stick, I got to do it more than once.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:06:08]:
I got to expose a student to these opportunities. And what we want to do is create a lot of stickiness. So when you're doing math, you're going to see a career every day. But we also have career exploration. We map the labor market data to every individual school district to where they themselves as adults can be, thinking about what program of studies should we be offered, where are the jobs going to be, are we being a good steward? And so our whole model is wrapped up around unpacking that story for the whole ecosystem within a school district.
Jason Altmire [00:06:42]:
So you're not just telling the students. The reason math in this example is important is because it helps you solve problems, it helps you think in a way that's going to help you later in life. You're directly tying applying it to the workforce to careers that are applicable to that skill.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:07:02]:
Absolutely. And one of the reasons I get excited and by the way, this has been a hard journey. I mean, I present this to school districts all across the country. And getting change in public education is very hard to get people to shift and change. And I say this a lot is, you know, I will go into a meeting and people will say, well, we did a math adoption five years ago, or we have a high quality instructional review board. And you know, I have to catch myself because I always want to ask, well, how's that been working out for you? Right. I mean, we do these processes over and over and over. Right.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:07:37]:
And what I think for a long time, we think it's about the math. Like, if we write a perfect math problem in a textbook, a student's going to be able to figure it out. And the truth is we're not really changing behavior to really fundamentally change education. We have to make it engaging and relevant and you have to do something different. And so we're coming in as a change agent and saying, we're going to tackle this problem, but you're going to have to change how you do it by putting these careers in education. Not only we saw in one of the states, we Worked. We saw about a 13% improvement in test scores in one semester. And I catch myself saying this a lot.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:08:16]:
We didn't write a better math problem. If it was about a better math problem, those other people should have solved it because they've been doing it for 30 years. But what we did do is get students engaged to where they want to learn. And that excites me. But the other thing, and I think you'll find this interesting, Jason, in the same study, we saw 60% of the students wanting to pursue a CTE career. Now, remember, this is through an algebra class, a geometry class. So they're learning math, and all of a sudden they're seeing a career, whether it be an electrician, and they're going, hey, wait a minute. I did not know an electrician made $90,000 a year and only requires an industry certificate.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:08:57]:
So what we're getting are some of those outcome areas that tell me, wow, this is really a special curriculum because we're improving the academics, but now we're getting these side things going on, like students going, I'll pursue CTE. One state, we saw a 40% increase in students, wanted to pursue STEM as a career. And again, this is not from. We didn't bring a robot into a classroom. We basically said, here's a math curriculum, but let's teach it relevantly. And you can get more than one outcome. And that's what I get. It's that education, employment, economic output that we're thinking about.
Jason Altmire [00:09:37]:
Again, the entity that you founded, Pathway to Careers, is what you're speaking of in working with clients. So how does an organization, is it a school district? You mentioned states a few times. Who. Who are you working with? And how would an entity find Pathway to Careers if they were interested in your work first?
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:09:58]:
We've been fortunate. We won, Jason. We won a couple of federal grants several years ago. And to this topic, one of them was to reimagine academic learning through the lens of a career. When we won that grant, it was the highest rated grant in the country. We've had partners like CMU University, Carnegie Mellon University, University of Louisville come alongside and look at our work and saying, is this the better and a best way to teach students? So we've got a lot of research that's kind of backed it up, which has allowed us to develop state partnerships. So we have four or five states we are deeply in partnership with, but we work directly with school districts, and we work with service agencies across the country. And so a strong lens into our work across the Country.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:10:46]:
And anybody can find anything about us by just going to ptc.org which is Pathway to Careers â p2c.org â and get started in learning about it. We've got a lot of information about our research and our state partnerships on there as well.
Jason Altmire [00:10:59]:
So you start by, I'm assuming, going into a school district, working with states, but going into the district and doing sort of a forensic analysis of what are you doing now, what are the results associated with your current way of doing things, and then recommending alternative ways of presenting that information to students. Is that how it works?
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:11:22]:
That is. And that first tool in that process you're talking about is what we call Labor Market Navigator. So we come in and we'll map all of the labor market data to an individual school district. And part of that is to help the educators that are running the school district or a community. What should we be doing? What does our community need to be thinking about? Where are the jobs going to be? Are we offering the right program of studies? And then from there we actually pull that same data over into the student interface so the students will get the same data. We're just going to present it to them differently. And so everything is centered on that labor market data. You know, the interesting thing, even in our math curriculum, we'll pull labor market data.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:12:05]:
So they're learning math, and we have on the screen, this is how much money you make in this job. This is what the job market is. I always say, you know, there's this big buzzword, we gotta make everybody career ready. But really to make, to become career ready, you gotta become career wise. We have to help students understand the market, and then we have to help you get career engaged. So I always say career ready really is about career wise. Can I train you on the market? I saw a report by the center for workforce that said 76% of college graduates would change their major if anybody had told them how much money they were going to make. And these are college graduates.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:12:47]:
So we're just trying to back that all the way up into the system and saying, let's show you now. Let's get you wise to what the market's doing now. Let's get you career engaged. And so we really start with the district and we can pull it all the way through to that end user.
Jason Altmire [00:13:03]:
And how do you break out of the cycle of a school district? Let's say a principal or a teacher telling you, this has worked fine. We're just going to keep doing it the way we've always done it there's no problem associated with this. Why are you even here? I mean, how do you deal with that?
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:13:22]:
Honestly, I think that's the number one challenge we have is the change element to a school district. I mean, number one, if we can start with the ones that are ready to make the change, it's a lot easier. Right. And there's a big movement right now to merge into what I call career connected learning to where I think schools are starting to think about it. A lot of it's being driven by your business community. Research says close to 80% of businesses are unhappy with the workforce that they're getting from education. So you have a lot of synergy on the topic right now in finding those places where you can go in easily. But I tell you what, Jason, I go into some of these presentations and I put their test scores up on a screen and sometimes you have to almost hold a mirror up to the process and just say, I get it.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:14:15]:
I mean, I'm battling an adoption process in a state right now and I had to go before a high quality instructional review board. And the first question I asked the board was, you did this five years ago. I mean, help me understand. Your test scores went down over the last five years and at some point you have to almost hold a mirror up and say, this isn't working and how do we come alongside and give you a different model? But it is by far the hardest part of the change. We started by thinking about the evolution of schools and there's really only been three, maybe four major shifts in public education to where you fundamentally are trying to shift public education to do some things differently. Hopefully we're on the verge of that shift now with the technology and that I think it has to. Education has to evolve quicker to prepare students for the future.
Jason Altmire [00:15:13]:
I was playing around on your website with the labor market navigator that you referenced, which is allowing people to see where are the job openings, what are the fastest growing professions in a region? And maybe talk a little bit more about that tool, but in particular, I realize it varies by region, but what have you found to be the best opportunities for students? The fastest growing jobs, the fastest growing professions, but also the opportunities that exist for students who are looking to expand their career in the future.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:15:53]:
Great question. And to unpack that a little bit, number one, the highest paying pretty much anywhere in the country is probably going to be anything in the STEM related field. I've only seen that. I look at regions across the country. STEM is by far going to be the highest pain and I think there's a race. How do we get more kids into stem? How do we get underrepresented populations in the stem? And so STEM is there. You might not have the volume of opportunities from a job market. If I were to unpack the job market as far as in how many jobs I worked in a state and this is true story.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:16:34]:
So what our system can do, what we can help people do. We were hired by a state to look at their Perkins 5, which is high wage, high growth jobs. And I told the person at the time, I said, are you ready for the, the heated fight that's going to occur? And she said, why? And I said, well you're spending 64% of your money on culinary arts. And I love culinary arts. Nothing wrong with culinary arts. But there's no way the job market is going to demand high wage from culinary arts. And as we went into the local communities to do presentations, it turned out they had 4,000 jobs in the healthcare industry and very few of the schools had healthcare pathways. They all had culinary arts.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:17:18]:
And to make that shift is really hard, right? You've got to go to your parents, got to go to community and say the job market isn't here. We have a ton of high paying jobs in the healthcare industry, but we don't have enough pathways in our high schools to support that initiative. Now that took a year to make that shift within that state to go around the community and say you have 4,000 open jobs right now in the healthcare industry and all of them pay high paying jobs and we've got to close that gap. So healthcare would be another area that I see across the country that has a lot of opportunities. And like you said, it's going to vary. I can go to a certain state, I know I've been to a certain state and see manufacturing very high. And so it's going to vary from state to state. But the two consistent things I see are STEM is always going to be the highest paying, always going to have a lot of opportunities in healthcare pathway currently, and then from there I probably start going after manufacturing clusters.
Jason Altmire [00:18:20]:
It's interesting what you said about culinary arts and it reminded me of really the next question I was going to ask you about what if a student doesn't have an aptitude for math? Because your whole business model is kind of founded on helping students understand how math can positively translate into a future career. So what if a student doesn't have, just for whatever reason isn't good at math, they don't have the aptitude for It. But when you mention culinary arts, we represent a number of culinary arts programs. And I would put cosmetology and other fields like that. Those are fields of passion. Those are people who I think understand they're not going into it for the money. They're going into it because they love it, they want to do it, they see it as their future career. And the difference between pursuing one of those careers or being redirected into a healthcare career, which was my career before what, they're very different.
Jason Altmire [00:19:29]:
And the mindset and the career path and the background that stimulates your interest, all of those lead you in different directions. So how do you adjust for that? It's not all about how much money you can make or what's the highest paying career, but what's the best fit for that individual.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:19:49]:
Yeah. And by the way, we do a lot of career inventory assessments. So one of the things we do is I always try to find what motivates you personally, what is that motivation factor. And then we try to combine that with what I call the external realities. How do we make you wise on both, what motivates you, what makes you passionate. And we can do that through interest and values kind of modeling. What's your interest, what's your values? What do you value in that? And we do a lot of those assessments to promote that. But the other thing I think we can do is cross pollinate a lot of these ideas.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:20:25]:
A lot of these ideas are about entrepreneurship. You know, what does it look like if I were to go in one of these fields? Right. And so a lot of the times it's more than just say, hey, you're not just going to go into the culinary arts for a specific reason, but you might want to own your own business. You might want to. So I think there's a lot more we can unpack with those careers to make them more attractive. Right. To make them more sellable in the long run. Like, how do we do that? And that's where I think we could do a lot.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:21:01]:
And one of the things we do, even in our math, we never ever put somebody in just a math lesson, for example, that is about one career. Every day there's a different career to keep them thinking both critically and about opportunities. Right. And that's what you want to see. One of our surveys we did, I think this was with 6,000 students. We ask students, they're going through an algebra curriculum, and you would not normally think this is an outcome, but we're presented a different career every day, and 91% of the kids say they want to learn more about the career. And that's what you're doing. You're opening, I always say we're just flying open doors of opportunity.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:21:45]:
How do we show you what these look like? So I think for some of those, I think it's just crosspiling in. Fascinating. Like, what else can you do with this? Right? What does it look like? Maybe you want to start your own business. And I think there's a lot more ways to unpack those careers that can be a benefit to themselves and their local economy.
Jason Altmire [00:22:08]:
If somebody wanted to learn more about the Labor Market Navigator, because I, I would encourage people to just go on there and, and peruse it and, and plug in your own area, your geographic region. You can search by a number of factors. It's very interesting. How would they find that navigator again?
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:22:28]:
On p2c.org underneath solutions, we have Labor Market Navigator, but we also have some sites up there that they can look at and we can make sure that that's available to anybody interested. But even filling out a form, we have, again, we have six state partnerships and so we can model within those states and even within some local communities how we've done that work.
Jason Altmire [00:22:53]:
Our guest today has been Dr. Joseph Goins. He is the founder and CEO of Pathway 2 Careers. And that is also where you can find that Labor Market Navigator that we talked about. Dr. Goins, thank you for being with us.
Dr. Joseph Goins [00:23:08]:
Thank you very much for the opportunity. Appreciate it. Jason.
Jason Altmire [00:23:14]:
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter @CECUED. That's C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.