The Fastest-Growing Workforce Pathways Are the Ones We Know Least About: Dr. Michael Kirst, Professor Emeritus at Stanford University

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health, welcoming you to WorkforceRx, an ongoing conversation with leaders and innovators offering insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

For years, the dominant storyline about American education has been one of decline: stagnant test scores, a so-called learning recession, and polls that show decrease in public confidence that schools and colleges are truly preparing young people for the economy ahead. But what if that story is missing major parts of the picture?

My guest today, Dr. Michael Kirst, is a professor emeritus of education and business administration at Stanford University, and he recently authored a report challenging that narrative, arguing that it relies too heavily on high school test scores instead of accumulated years of schooling. The good news is that using that broader measure produces a more positive picture.

Dr. Kirst is uniquely positioned to analyze this subject. In addition to his nearly six decades at Stanford, he is the longest-serving president of the California State Board of Education and worked on education policy at the U.S. Department of Education and on Capitol Hill earlier in his career. And by the way, listeners, he was my advisor when I was attending graduate school at Stanford.

Thanks very much for joining us today, Dr. Kirst.

Dr. Kirst
It’s a pleasure to be here and to see you again.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Good to see you. So Mike, what first led you and your co-author Victor Chan to think the conventional narrative was incomplete?

Dr. Kirst
Well, unlike most scholars, I’ve worked for years on K-12 education, but also on higher education and published a couple of books: one called Remaking College and another called Higher Education in the Silicon Valley: Connected but Conflicted. And when you look at it, I think the major age range you’re talking about extends from fifteen to twenty-five. The assessments tests, the international one called PISA, run by OECD, is at age fifteen, and the one that’s most cited. The National Assessment of Education Progress ends at age seventeen with broader results for fourth grade and eighth grade.

So when you put the whole system together, and you look at all its components — I looked at eleven separate components — you see not a picture of decline, but a picture of growing years of schooling and education, and you also see a lot of dynamic change in particular in the postsecondary field, with things like certificates and licenses and so on.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So, as I noted in my introduction, your report lays out a better story about American education than we have come to believe. You call it counterpunching the narrative. Please tell us more about that fuller picture that you’ve just hinted at.

Dr. Kirst
Well, I looked at eleven pathways beyond traditional college, and of course I separated these and they interact, but I’ll just read them all for you: early college credit, AP, dual enrollment, career and technical education, K-12 apprenticeships. I also looked at on-the-job training, military education, correctional education, and I looked at four-year and two-year degrees, and transfer between institutions. There’s a whole lot of movement. It’s not a pipeline. Students are moving between these areas and getting non-degree credentials such as certificates and licenses.

So, these are all in the study and I think that gives you a much bigger picture. Those areas are expanding in many ways. Some of them we don’t know anything about. So I have two major messages. One, the years of schooling are going up when you put in postsecondary education and look at it over time; and the other is there’s whole dark continents and even partially dark continents that we don’t know much about. We don’t know a thing about on-the-job training, which is very powerful in many ways.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So one of the strategies on your list was dual enrollment, on which you shepherded a big policy in California. That is a real bright spot not only in California but across the nation. Where does it stand right now in terms of adoption, and what do you see as the follow-on to the dual enrollment policy now that so many are participating? And maybe if you could just start by explaining dual enrollment for listeners who are less familiar.

Dr. Kirst
Yes. Dual enrollment is a system where students take college courses in three different locations. They can take them in a college, mostly community colleges. Community colleges dominate in this. They can take them sometimes in high schools where an approved community college professor comes to the high school. Or they can take them online. So 82% of our high schools offer dual enrollment. You get college credit while you’re in high school.

One in three students take a dual enrollment course by graduation from high school. The rise has been from 1.1 million in 2023 to 2.5 million in 2025 and up past twenty percent in the past three years alone. So they’re getting a head start, they’re getting better prepared when they’re doing this, and they’re also picking up a lot of college credit. Now there are some unknowns. We don’t know exactly how much credit they’re getting in college and how it really translates because we don’t have a lot of longitudinal data systems that follow students for a long time. But again, these numbers are so large that you you’ve got to be seeing growth.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So these two and a half million, three million students who have dual enrollment credit, is there a way to build on that? If you were still chair of the Board of Education, for example, what follow-on policy would you consider to build on that work?

Dr. Kirst
Well, I would make sure that the dual enrollment is aligned well with college in terms of getting credit for it and that it is incorporated in the counseling plans that students have. It really does save them money and save them time. There’s a problem that we will discuss later of transfer between higher education institutions, and also the transfer process for early credit is not well researched or well documented.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So from a workforce perspective, one of the ingredients that we often talk about is the work experience. You call out major growth in the registered apprenticeship programs. I would love for you to share the role that apprenticeship plays as you assess the state of the American education.

Dr. Kirst
Well, I would say three things about it off the top and then look at some numbers. One, it’s expanding rapidly. Two, it’s a very small portion of our of the people that are in training — it’s about 3.5% of our labor force. Point number three is it gets an enormous amount of attention. People are really touting this when really what’s growing more rapidly is not apprenticeship, but certificates and licenses and credentials of various types, even badges. There’s a lot more growth and action there.

But nevertheless, the apprenticeships have gone up in recent years and it’s a strong growth area. There’s been a 113% growth in apprenticeships between 2010 and 2020. So it’s coming on like gangbusters here. Now, I would estimate the first comment I got from an expert on this area was there’s a whole lot of unregistered apprenticeships. All my numbers are for registered apprenticeships, but there’s a lot of places that run an apprenticeship system but don’t register it because of the various reporting requirements for the federal government, and so it’s much bigger than I think we know. There’s a really a lack of data here to understand it. There’s a lot of darkness.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
One of the values of the apprenticeship is that you’re getting on-the-job experience, you get exposure to the workplace. Are there other types of reforms or approaches that can get the young students this exposure?

Dr. Kirst
Yeah, well the biggest growth area that’s out there is in certificates and things of that sort. There are 134,000 entities in America that award credentials and it’s just really pretty dramatic in terms of growth. I think what you have is that these are short programs. The Pell Grants are coming in now where students can get financial aid for as brief as eight-week training courses. So what we see is, for example, high dropout rates in community college, but then a movement to credentials. I think it’s an area that we’re getting more and more tracking on. We gave out about 1.8 million of these last year.

So, you know, students are moving around. They may stay out of college and get a credential and then go back to community college again, or go to four-year or whatever.
Longitudinal data is really important. I just got done reading a study in Washington State — we have no national data — but Washington State does follow students. They follow twelve pathways longitudinally for people between fifteen and twenty-five, and that’s very, very interesting.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So, let’s switch topics for a moment. You said years of schooling attained may track national productivity more closely than test scores. Can you help us understand why?

Dr. Kirst
Yes. First of all, test scores, as I pointed out, end at seventeen. The New York Times ran an article that declared we’re in an education recession because of the scores attained by seventeen-year-olds. A lot of that’s driven by the pandemic, of course. What we’re seeing in America is that the much-maligned postsecondary system, which focuses on maybe four percent of the enrollment in these selective colleges, is making up for this.

So, a test score predicts some productivity, but the number of years of or partial years of total educational time is a more effective predictor of the economic productivity. And that goes with a long period. Just think about the pandemic where these kids are out of school for two years. Our math scores dropped significantly. So, the most important thing is you’re there learning something.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
When you talk about test scores, you’re not talking about the standardized tests, like the college admissions test. You’re talking about the tests that you take during high school.

Dr. Kirst
Yeah, I’m talking about the national tests. The college admission tests no longer pick up a majority of students and they’re misleading in that only a few of the four-year institutions require it. California is test blind. They won’t even look at the scores even if you send them in. So you can’t run national numbers off of such a selective group of students who take SAT or ACT.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So, you briefly mentioned the education recession comment associated with the pandemic and the students who are affected during those years. I wonder what other observations you have as students move through the higher education system as well as the secondary system.

Dr. Kirst
Well, they are moving, and as I indicated, they’re moving between institutions, short-term programs, and long-term programs. I would add that four-year college completion has been going up significantly in America. We had a major movement to complete college and it has made a difference. Every year we’re now at our highest point of completing four-year college in in the American history, so that’s a part of it.

What I would observe, however, is students don’t know how to make the best choices navigating this array of postsecondary institutions. Just review what we’ve talked about. For example, 51% of the students who transferred from a four-year public university transferred to a two-year college. So a majority are doing what is called in the trade “reverse transfer” from four-year to two-year in the public sector. So, how do students find out about where should I go? I’m running out of money, what can I do? There’s no navigation system out there, and of course the students with the least social capital and wealth are caught the most in this.

I read a report this morning from Washington State that they want to focus on students who went to community college but never got anything and did not enroll in a certificate program of any other type. These are students out there sort of lost in the system. How do we intervene in this? So, part of what I’m trying to say is if we broaden our vision here, we have an entirely different challenge as to what is going on than what you read about in the media.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
And what are some of the remedies that Washington State is thinking about putting in place or are they still not quite yet at that stage?

Dr. Kirst
They’re just beginning to think about it. I keep thinking that maybe we could have AI tutors that would be created to do this. I’m not an AI specialist, but it seems to me I could go into a one of the AI instruments and say, “I live in Tacoma, Washington. I want to enroll in a program for heating and ventilation and I want it to be short and low cost. Where do I go to get it?” It seems to me that ought to be within the state of the art, but I don’t read about anybody talking about this.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Career navigation has always been an infrastructure that has been shallow within our high school system. And even in the community colleges, the array of careers that you can pick is so many and so it’s difficult to counsel compared to the transfer pathway. So, we’re definitely going to need more tools for the families, for the individuals and frankly for the staff themselves to improve the navigation. And so you’re right, maybe AI can add bring more tools to the table.

Dr. Kirst
Yeah, and the high schools don’t know where their high school graduates go. There’s no tracking system. If somebody gets into Harvard or something, they know about that. They may know something about the college counseling, primarily two- and four-year, but not much about the rest except five percent go to the military. Now there’s an education system. They have basic training, then you’re trained for a job and then you get you can get a lot of money, starting after 9/11, for going to another educational program. But on the other hand, we don’t know what these graduates in the military exactly do who use the money.

So again, we’re back to data systems, and to me it’s gotta start with a broader vision of what the system is, and it’s really the on the positive side. The postsecondary system’s very dynamic, and the community colleges can start and drop programs very quickly.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well, so let’s go to this point that you’ve made elsewhere, which is there’s a to near-total absence of a national tracking system for things like professional certification, job credentials, and on-the-job training. There’s a number of players working in this space to get more data, but what what’s the implication of this knowledge gap or more so the data gap?

Dr. Kirst
Well it’s gonna it get worse. I don’t know that you can do this kind of study I’ve done. A lot of my cites are the National Center for Education Statistics. That’s a part of the U.S. Department of Education and they underwent cuts through the Musk department of efficiency, and they were reduced to three people. They had hundreds of people in the agency and Musk decided that three was the right number. So we need to keep the staff we have is the first thing I would say. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has also suffered a lot of losses. So one is, you know, reverse the bleeding.

Second then is to be able to put up money to find out what’s going on in that regard. In terms of on-the-job training, the federal government had a proposal in the Department of Commerce to spend $119 million studying on-the-job training and it never got done, and so they never spent the money. The last study of on-the-job training in the United States is 1999. That’s the best I could find, so we need to really get our act together.

Individual states are doing a good job. California will soon have a thing called Cradle to Career, where they’ve merged all their data systems in education. They will have tracking of students and they put in a whole bunch of health and well-being data into it as well.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Mike, why so much darkness. Why so many data gaps?

Dr. Kirst
Well, the title of the paper that I did is Broadening Our Perspective on American Education Attainment. And my basic answer to that was we’ve lack a broader perspective. We specialize too much. K-12 people rarely talk to postsecondary people. I was president of the California State Board of Education for fifteen years and I met with my colleagues and the chancellors and heads of systems in California maybe eight times over that period for brief meetings. So there’s no communication between the levels. Most scholars focus either on K-12 or higher education. People don’t look at the seams.

So what I’ve done in my career is I keep looking for areas that nobody’s been looking at, and I’ve been doing that for quite a while. The Silicon Valley study helped me greatly. I mean I went to truck-driving schools, beauty colleges… we found three hundred and fifty institutions of postsecondary education in the seven-county Bay Area. We tend to focus on four-year completion, and even what the community colleges are doing in vocational and technical education is not well tracked.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well you and your report called for eliminating that rigid line between high school and college for the sixteen- to twenty-year-olds. I mean, especially with the success of the dual enrollment policy, young students are getting exposed to the college campus and college credits much earlier. So, is there a future where we’re gonna be able to be more fluid in the systems and how they work together?

Dr. Kirst
I don’t know. We’re separate professions. I’ve rarely ever been in a meeting where there was a large contingent of K-12 people in a higher education meeting, and a large continuum of higher education people in a K-12 meeting. I’m one of the few people who works back and forth between the divisions of higher ed and lower ed, if you will. I think we’re fundamentally organized to keep this divide in place and it will take some leadership to get it done. I think these big data systems will help and a lot of people will begin working on these, but they’ll be statewide. I don’t see much hope for national at all.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
And as we think about AI and what it does to the workforce, one of our podcast guests has described that we’re gonna be moving from a triangle-shaped workforce to a diamond-shaped workforce. So triangle, historically, has been you have the big boss at the top and then at the bottom you have the types of roles that we begin our careers with — like the analysts, like the coordinators — when you’re learning the ropes. This guest postulates that as many of those tasks get outsourced to AI, we just have less volume and hence the shape of the workforce becomes more of a diamond shape with less opportunities to grab onto that first rung.

Given that, it’s a challenge for higher education and a challenge for high schools to think about what would they do to ready a student who’s gonna come into this environment. I wonder if you have any insights or advice for those who are in those seats worried about what’s happening to the workforce or whether the students can grab the first rung?

Dr. Kirst
I think this is a particularly important area. What I am following is a publication by an organization that does span these levels called Jobs for the Future. And if you go in Google and you put in Jobs for the Future and the big blur, you’ll see, I think, where we have to go in that crucial issue. The big blur theory is that we have institutionally had this organizational structure of K-12 and then you go on. There’s no clear pathway or thinking about what’s next.

Let’s just take the twelve pathways in Washington State. They want to merge and blur completely the difference between them and create what is essentially a K-14 public system that would have somebody overseeing that and blurring these boundaries.

We need to rethink public education now and really have a K-14 system. California and other states have now picked up four-year-olds. We fund all four-year-olds and have essentially added a grade and then articulated age three with age four. We need something like that for grades twelve to fourteen, if you will.

I would add, if you went back to the turn of the century in California, you had a system like that. The community colleges were part of the high schools. There were no separate community colleges. They were called junior colleges and the San Francisco Unified and the other California institutions were K to 14. And then we created separate community college systems and they went off on their own way. They are in these beautiful foothill campuses that are not easy to get to. So I think that we need to rethink some of the basic things here.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So let’s go back to the thesis of your paper and it’s to remind us to look more broadly at the comprehensive picture that we’re growing all these less-visible pathways that tell a positive story beyond the test scores that are dominating the public conversation. Is there anything else you would like to add that the listeners should hear about?

Dr. Kirst
Well, I’ll make a few comments on specific areas that we looked at as part of the broader narrative. We haven’t talked yet about Advanced Placement courses known as AP. Fifty-three percent of the high school graduates in California took an Advanced Placement course. Fifty-three percent. In 1984, there were two thousand people that took AP. In 2024, more than three million took an AP course.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Amazing.

Dr. Kirst
Now that that’s really something, and the pass rate did not decline. So that’s very interesting. But what we don’t know is how the colleges award credit for AP, so we don’t know whether AP helps with effects on time to degree, saves you money, or leads to higher labor outcomes. And we don’t know as you transfer across institutions how AP comes into it. So that’s another area where you have huge growth. Is that an education recession? I don’t think so.

Career and technical education in high school… that’s one where we don’t know much. We do know that the number of students taking four courses rather than just one course has gone up dramatically. We don’t know the coherence of those, but we do know that a lot of states are expanding their programs for two years in high school linked to two years or less in community college.

Out in California it’s called Linked Learning. I haven’t found a person that doesn’t say that career and technical education in high school is better now than it was twenty to thirty years ago. That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a whole lot of career and tech education in K-12 that looks like it was twenty to thirty years ago, but we’re making increases there. So that’s one that I think is very important as well.

I’ve talked about four-year completion and transfer between institutions. This is still pretty much of a mess. Students often lose credit as they transfer. They don’t have good information on what transfer courses need to be used to get their credit for the major they want. So transfer is a little bit better, but not much.

Remedial education…now here’s something that community colleges confronted and still confront. One, we’ve gotten much better tests. The tests used to be made up in California by faculty members. Now we have much more standardized tests and we are giving students co-requisite courses, not just remedial courses, so they can succeed in something. So remedial education has improved over time. There’s still places that run it in an old-fashioned, non-effective way.

The one area that is clearly receding is in correctional education. We have many more prisoners and many fewer programs that educate prisoners. So that is the one spot where we’re really moving downward. Less money, less support, and cutbacks in federal and state aid.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well, I appreciate you sharing the data with our listeners that creates room for optimism in our education system. You reminded us of dual enrollment uptake, AP coursework uptake, more prevalence of CTE and the list goes on. So thank you for raising our spirits here.

So, let’s conclude by asking you what makes you optimistic about the future of learning?

Dr. Kirst
Well, I’m very impressed with the dynamic changes in postsecondary education. It adapts quickly. And I’m not talking about the four-year institutions. Even they are talking about three years. All of a sudden there’s a lot of talk about do we really need four years? Can we do it in three years and lop some costs off? I think this is an issue to watch.

And when there are gaps, institutions come in to fill them. Unfortunately, some of these are private for-profit operations that give credentials and things like that and they don’t really do a good job of it or have much of an economic payoff. So there’s an increased attention to return on investment.

The K-12 system in Ohio went from 118 credential programs in high school to forty-eight. They found that only forty-eight really led to a higher wage and so on. So I think that’s moving much better. You see this interest in apprenticeship.

K-12 education is slower to change because it has a lot of local control that has different outcomes, but it’s certainly waking up and moving in career and technical education, and I think more change will come over time.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well, thank you very much for being with us today, Dr. Kirst. It’s so wonderful to have the benefit of your knowledge and your research.

Dr. Kirst
Well, it was a pleasure talking with you.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us to I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future-focused workforce in the nation.