College Alternatives Risk Tracking Poor Students Away From Opportunity

For Shavar Jeffries, the central risk in the current debate is not that students might learn trades, earn certificates, or prepare for specific careers. It is that “college alternatives” are often presented to the students with the least inherited advantage, while affluent families continue to treat college as the default route into opportunity.

Jeffries distinguished between legitimate concern about debt and what he considers a dangerous message when directed at poor students, Black students, Latino students, rural students, and other students with the most to lose. People arguing for college alternatives may be well-meaning, he said, but “good intentions don’t determine outcomes.”

His concern is historical as much as practical. Communities living with intergenerational poverty need more from the education system, not less. They need educators who believe more in them, not less. Wealthy families, he argued, are not generally asking whether their children should skip college for plumbing or construction programs. So when low-income communities receive the message that college may not be right for them, Jeffries hears an old pattern: some groups are directed toward work with their hands, while others are expected to enter the white-collar economy.

That warning reframed the panel’s answer to whether college is still worth aiming for. Ted Mitchell opened by saying the group would not center the narrow return-on-investment debate, not because ROI is unimportant, but because too much of the discussion has collapsed into one outcome measured in several ways. On the basic question — whether college is worth it — Mitchell, Jeffries, and Aneesh Sohoni all answered yes.

For Jeffries, KIPP’s North Star remains “unequivocally” college because, in his view, a degree opens the most opportunities across domains: economic outcomes, access to the white-collar economy, social capital, and even life expectancy. He cited an annual earnings gap of about $32,000 between college graduates and those without a degree, translating to roughly $1 million in additional lifetime earnings.

Sohoni added a related figure that he attributed to the Georgetown Center for Education and the Workforce: a 75% wage premium for college graduates over people with only a high school diploma. He framed the sharper question as access. More than 90% of students from affluent communities attend college, he said, while the figure is below 50% for students from low-income communities. The debate therefore cannot be separated from who is being encouraged toward college and who is being steered away.

Jeffries acknowledged why families question college. Even if net cost has declined over roughly the last decade, he said, college remains too expensive. Sticker prices are still high. Working families and working-poor families encounter a system that appears to reward inherited advantage: legacy preferences, tutoring and test preparation, admissions relationships, development-office influence, and family wealth. In that environment, skepticism about access is unsurprising.

But to Jeffries, those inequities are reasons to reform access, not to redirect disadvantaged students away from college. The students KIPP serves, he said, are “brilliant young people from low-income communities,” disproportionately students of color, and they need “even more credentials” to get a foot in the door, not fewer.

The scale of the two organizations onstage underscored why this question is not abstract for them. KIPP serves 122,000 students in 279 schools across about 30 cities, a footprint Mitchell compared to the 17th-largest school district in the country, between Baltimore and Philadelphia. Teach For America, founded in 1990, has brought more than 70,000 recent college graduates into teaching in high-need schools. Mitchell emphasized that TFA’s influence extends beyond classrooms because its alumni carry the experience into later roles — including the founding of KIPP by two TFA alumni.

Those organizational histories matter because both KIPP and Teach For America were built around college as an organizing aspiration. The question was whether that aspiration still holds in an economy preoccupied with alternative pathways, credentials, and artificial intelligence. For Jeffries and Sohoni, the answer was yes — but with a more precise formulation. College is not the destination by itself. Sohoni described it as “a journey, a place in your journey to a broader destination”: economic mobility, a life with possibility, and the capacity to choose among futures.

Shavar Jeffries did not dismiss trades or career and technical education. He objected to “or” framings — college or career, academic learning or job preparation — that tend to be applied unequally. KIPP’s position, he said, is college and career. Students should have career awareness, career knowledge, skills, and even certifications, but as part of a BA and college-going pathway rather than as a substitute for it.

That distinction carried much of the argument. Purpose, portability, and completion were not separate add-ons to the college question; they were ways of avoiding the same failure. A student who gains a certificate but loses access to a degree pathway has not gained optionality. A student who enrolls in college but cannot finish has not received the promised mobility. A student who is rushed into a corporate pipeline before exploring other forms of contribution may have a credential and a job, but not necessarily an education that expands judgment and agency.

Aneesh Sohoni made the same distinction in different terms. The phrase “college and career,” he said, carries an assumption: students have been prepared for multiple pathways. The risk is tracking, where some students are prepared for college and others are prepared only for a narrower route.

Mitchell agreed that much of the recent career conversation has effectively meant “or,” and that “we know who the ‘or’ is for.” For educators committed to the flourishing of every young person regardless of zip code, allowing that distinction to harden would perpetuate inequities that have lasted for generations.

The alternative is not to reject credentials but to make them portable, stackable, and connected to degrees. Mitchell described career and technical education as too often a “dead end” or “cul-de-sac”: a student leaves the academic track to earn a certificate, then must return to the beginning if the labor market changes and more education is required. He pointed to credit for prior learning as one way to connect the systems. Military learning is an example. If a teenager leaves high school, earns a GED, joins the Army, becomes a medic, and later wants to become a nurse, Mitchell asked, should that person really have to take anatomy from scratch? His answer was no: the prior learning should count for college credit, reducing time, cost, and the indignity of pretending acquired knowledge does not exist.

Sohoni added stackable credentials as another version of the same idea. Many people already stack formal and informal credentials, whether they recognize it or not. The policy question is how to make that structure available to all students without turning it into another bureaucratic obstacle.

Jeffries added a further condition: credentials must be flexible because the labor market is changing quickly. A few years earlier, he said, many people might have pointed to coding certificates; in his view, that example no longer carries the same value. Flexibility and optionality are essential. Programs should be judged by data on whether students get jobs, whether those jobs pay above median wage, and whether the outcome can be sustained over time.

Aneesh Sohoni argued that students are not only asking what college will pay. They are also asking what kind of life it will help them build. Teach For America sees this directly because it recruits college graduates and prospective corps members. Mitchell, in making the point that TFA is one of the great recruiters in the American college experience, referred to 15,000 applications for 1,200 spaces; Sohoni clarified that about 2,400 corps members would enter that year.

For Sohoni, the pressure on college students is not mainly skepticism about college versus certificates. The bigger headwind is what he called “corporate career funneling.” Corporations arrive on campus early, sometimes effectively paying for privileged access to students. Freshmen worry about whether they will get into a selective finance club, because they believe the club determines the internship, the internship determines the first job, and the first job determines whether the rest of life succeeds or fails. Sohoni said he was exaggerating “just slightly”; Mitchell responded, “Not a whole lot.”

The problem is not that students should avoid career planning. It is that college is supposed to create room for exploration, and early funneling can narrow that space before students understand who they want to become. Sohoni’s call to parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and higher education leaders was to create space for young people to explore identity and purpose. Students, he said, are starting to push back against campus recruiting practices that make them feel locked in too early.

This concern shaped Sohoni’s response to a federal accountability measure Mitchell said would take effect the next day. Mitchell described it onstage as a rule that would evaluate programs and colleges by comparing graduates’ average earnings with a formula meant to assess whether students can repay debt. His shorthand was that, under that rule, “the only thing that counts is student earnings.”

Sohoni did not reject earnings data. Earnings are an indicator, he said, but not the indicator. When he worked at One Million Degrees, which supports community college students on pathways to upward mobility, he came to define agency as both access and access to knowledge and information. Students often lacked clear information about how different pathways would support their goals. Earnings data can help inform decisions.

But as a full theory of higher education, income alone is insufficient. Sohoni said students already face intense anxiety about future careers and finances. Some students from higher-income backgrounds worry that joining Teach For America will mean not earning what their parents did or maintaining the same family lifestyle. Students from low-income backgrounds worry they will not be able to build generational wealth. Those anxieties are real, but students also want purpose. Sohoni cited Deloitte research finding that nine out of 10 Gen Z students on college campuses view living into their purpose as essential to job satisfaction and wellbeing.

Shavar Jeffries connected purpose to the fuller meaning of education. KIPP’s students want to discover who they are, what is possible for them, and what purpose they can live into. That process requires courage and the ability to stand in one’s identity amid economic pressures and social molds. For the communities KIPP serves, the economic imperative remains urgent. Education must be a pathway to opportunity. But Jeffries warned against reducing education to instrumental goals alone.

Mitchell said some colleges are responding by moving career advising earlier and integrating it into the undergraduate experience. Instead of a career center students discover in junior or senior year, some institutions are putting career counseling into orientation, pairing academic advisors with career coaches, and using alumni or other professionals to help students explore. Mitchell framed this not as forcing earlier decisions, but as giving students earlier tools for exploration.

Ted Mitchell’s critique of higher education was internal and blunt. The mistrust problem, he said, is often discussed through culture-war coverage, but much of it is “the plumbing”: admissions, pricing, aid letters, completion, and the basic experience of navigating college.

The numbers he cited were severe. Every student who arrives at a college wants a degree, he said, but only 60% leave with one. That means higher education begins by alienating 40% of the people it serves. For those who do not complete, the degree premium Jeffries described does not materialize; many leave with debt and no degree.

Mitchell also criticized opaque admissions and pricing. Colleges tell applicants not to worry about the sticker price because most students do not pay it. But for first-generation students — especially those whose first language is not English — that can sound like another hidden game. The student is being told the published price is not the real price, without being given a transparent way to understand the real one.

Financial aid letters were, for Mitchell, a particularly stark example. He said 40% of offer letters from colleges do not differentiate between a grant and a loan. A student may sign forms believing they have received a $10,000 scholarship only to later discover they borrowed $10,000. Mitchell said he would not accept that lack of clarity on a credit card.

Shavar Jeffries’s wish list for college presidents began with access. Too many colleges, he said, brag about the number of students they exclude. He called that anti-democratic and inconsistent with the American dream. U.S. News & World Report rankings, he said, give disproportionate weight to selectivity — a polite term for exclusion. The institutions with the strongest economic-outcome data often tend to be the most selective and exclusive.

He then listed the admissions mechanisms he believes reproduce advantage: full-pay quotas, early decision, legacy preferences, standardized-test preparation, development-office preferences, board relationships, admissions-office relationships, and elite networks. His example of legacy preferences was personal. Jeffries is a proud Duke University alumnus, but Black students were not allowed to attend Duke before 1963. “Who’s gonna benefit from the legacy preference?” he asked.

His reform agenda extended beyond admissions. Colleges should be held accountable for completion rates and for the persistence supports students receive once enrolled. They should be accountable for economic outcomes. They should also become more portable and flexible for students who need to work while earning credits.

Mitchell said the American Council on Education had developed a way to rate colleges by matching access and earnings. The desirable position is the upper-right quadrant: high access and high earnings. Not one Ivy League institution is in that quadrant, he said. There are 470 schools that are. He singled out Colorado Mountain College as an example and argued that the country spends too much attention mapping higher education against “9 to 15 celebrity institutions.” The better question is which institutions take access seriously, support students through completion, and help them reach meaningful work afterward.

Aneesh Sohoni pushed the discussion beyond traditional-age residential undergraduates. K-12 trends, he said, will force colleges to rethink what incoming students need. He pointed to the National Assessment for Educational Progress as showing challenges as well as bright spots, then emphasized three qualitative patterns: fewer children are reading for fun, schools are assigning less homework, and chronic absenteeism has risen as students find school less engaging or relevant. These trends, he said, began before COVID with social media and smartphones, and were exacerbated by the pandemic.

For Sohoni, the implication was that colleges will enroll students who may not have received the K-12 education they deserved, or who arrive with different habits, preparation, and expectations. Higher education cannot simply assume the old academic baseline.

His second structural point was lifelong learning. Colleges cannot be designed only for 18-to-22-year-olds. Working adults will need to learn and relearn throughout life. The economy and society require institutions that can support people returning, reskilling, and changing direction.

Ted Mitchell reinforced that point with two audience quizzes. The average age of a college student in America, he said, is 26. The percentage of undergraduates who attend residential colleges where they can live on campus is 14. Those numbers undermine the image of college as mainly a four-year residential experience for teenagers living in dormitories.

That shift changes the policy question. Career advising at residential colleges may be useful, Mitchell said, but higher education must also ask what it is doing for the 28-year-old single mother who needs a degree and a return to work, or the 30-year-old returning veteran uninterested in dorm life. If the country has expanded what higher education is for, it also has to ask who higher education is for. Expansion does not solve the problem by itself; it multiplies the design challenges.

Antoine Joyce-Roach brought the strongest challenge from lived experience. He grew up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, in a welfare, single-parent household; became a teenage father at 18; and described himself as a strong student who nevertheless failed at college because he did not understand “the performance of college” — what it required to get through. After joining an after-school program, he eventually came to lead that national organization as a senior vice president. At 47, he returned to college and earned his degree. It was easier, he said, because he knew the world and could understand the concepts differently.

Roach now partners with KIPP, school districts, and colleges in Dallas and sees students who remind him of himself: young people who are told to go to college but are not yet ready to succeed there. The result can be failure, debt, and discouragement. His question was whether poor communities need a different script after high school, one that continues teaching students about the world so they understand what college is for.

Shavar Jeffries located the primary failure in K-12. If a student is not prepared for college after K-12, he said, K-12 has failed. He included himself in that diagnosis, noting that his own life changed when he received a scholarship to leave the traditional school system in Newark, New Jersey. College, he argued, is not inherently so complicated if students have been prepared.

For KIPP, preparation means more than coursework. Students need academic readiness, but they also need to understand the social and practical experience of college, especially if they are first-generation students. Jeffries described KIPP Forward, the organization’s matching and persistence strategy, which tries to pair students with colleges that invest in first-generation persistence. He acknowledged that the work is imperfect and that students still need resilience on many fronts. But he rejected the alternative: graduating students unprepared for college and, by extension, unprepared for a quality job or career.

The counseling ratio was central to his point. KIPP has about 70 seniors per college counselor, and about 90 juniors per counselor. The national average, he said, is about 278 students per counselor. When weak academic preparation is combined with poor investment in college matching, the outcomes Roach described become predictable.

Aneesh Sohoni added that the failure does not stop at high school. Colleges also fail students when student services are inadequate. At One Million Degrees, he said, there was a playbook for helping students navigate higher education, but it is not implemented consistently enough.

A practical audience question exposed the family-level version of the same tension. The questioner asked whether “college” included community colleges and what CTE meant. Sohoni clarified that CTE means career and technical education. The questioner then described a common parental view across income levels: perhaps a child would be better off going to trade school and earning a certificate. Should that be challenged?

Jeffries said yes. KIPP begins early, even naming kindergarten classes after colleges because many students would be first-generation college students and have little exposure to what college means. The argument to families is not only economic, though data matter. It is also about development, exposure, and possibility. KIPP uses conversations with families, college visits, and trusted community relationships to broaden students’ sense of what may be available to them. Jeffries said some colleges have recently backed away from those partnerships under pressure from the federal administration, which he called problematic.

His underlying point was that families’ expectations are often shaped by what they have seen. If what they have seen is shaped by intergenerational poverty and racism, it may be far narrower than what is possible. His advice was to keep leaning in, use data, and show parents that more may be possible for their child than they know.

Mitchell answered the definitional question by saying college should include the range of institutions the questioner had in mind. He pointed again to Colorado Mountain College as both training for employment and a pathway to a two-year or four-year degree. The right move, he said, is doing both. Cutting off options is the wrong move for individuals and society.

Ted Mitchell placed the education debate within a broader mood at Aspen Ideas: a divisive period in American life, with governments once expected to help now often seen as institutions people are trying to keep from hurting them. He asked whether the generation now in high school and college offers reason for hope — a generation seeking agency and an educational future that prepares them to serve, build, and solve problems.

Shavar Jeffries answered by pointing to classrooms. Students, he said, are brilliant, creative, entrepreneurial, optimistic, loving, and caring. Teachers work tirelessly, often without credit and without the pay they deserve. They arrive early, leave late, and give everything to children, families, communities, and the country. In public schools, he said, students and adults from many backgrounds come together in common purpose.

The obstacle, in Jeffries’s view, is not the absence of cooperation but the difficulty of seeing it. Acrimony and negativity travel quickly, especially through social media, while love, collaboration, and common cause struggle to break through. That creates a false perception of the real world. Anyone despairing about the future of the country should visit a public school — not because schools are perfect, but because they show Americans coming together every day to make the country better.

Aneesh Sohoni extended the same argument to college students. He rejected caricatures of Gen Z as insufficiently serious. This generation, he said, is among the most resilient he has met. A 22-year-old encountered social media and smartphones during elementary school, COVID and social isolation during high school, and technological, political, and societal disruption throughout adolescence. Rather than wanting isolation, he said, they are skeptical of going down that path again. They want community and purpose larger than themselves.

That is why Sohoni sees organizations like Teach For America as compelling to young people: they offer immediate service, immediate impact, and proximity to students, families, and communities. Corps members can affect student learning and be changed themselves. Sohoni invoked a line he attributed to David Brooks from the previous day: institutions mold individuals. The country needs institutions young people can trust to shape them into leaders.