Antoine Joyce-Roach

Senior Vice President and City Leader of All Stars Project of Dallas, where he leads youth development, workforce readiness, internship, and community partnership work for underserved young people. He grew up in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, first became involved with All Stars Project as a youth performer, and later built a career connecting students with opportunity through performance-based development and corporate/community partnerships.

College Alternatives Risk Tracking Poor Students Away From Opportunity

At the Aspen Ideas Festival, education leaders Shavar Jeffries, Ted Mitchell and Aneesh Sohoni argued that college remains a crucial route to mobility, but only if it is made more accessible, transparent and connected to work without becoming a tracking system. Their central warning was that “college alternatives” can expand opportunity when they are stackable and portable, but can also reproduce inequality when poor, Black, Latino and rural students are steered away from degrees while affluent families still treat college as the default. The panel framed higher education’s task as broader than earnings alone: it must prepare students for changing labor markets while preserving purpose, agency and the ability to choose among futures.

The Aspen InstituteJun 30, 202617 min read