Widen the Path: Priorities for 2023
March 11, 2023, will mark three years since COVID-19 was declared a global pandemic. While the anxiety of the pandemic may largely be behind us, the urgent need to update and improve equitable opportunity to economic mobility remains. One critical factor in economic mobility is access to learning and skills development. And, while we’ve worked tirelessly to improve the system, much remains to be done. There are still 39 million Americans with some credit but no credential. For millions of prospective students, higher learning – on campus, on the job, or at an apprenticeship – remains unaffordable and inaccessible. Due to this inequity, the economic instability that festers in communities nationwide is staggering.
That’s why Higher Learning Advocates launched Widen the Path last summer, a campaign to break down barriers between higher learning and the workforce to create a more inclusive system for all of today’s students. But if the pandemic taught us anything, there is no going back. There is only moving forward. The federal policies that addressed the challenges of yesterday are outdated and insufficient. We need bipartisan, pragmatic federal policy change that responds to students' challenges.
In the last six months, more than 40 partners pledged their commitment. We sounded the alarm in print and on the airwaves. And we took our campaign directly to members of Congress, challenging them with a favorite childhood board game: what if there were more ladders and fewer chutes?
{Join us: sign the pledge today!}
What’s to come this year:
As we look to the year ahead, we have a tremendous opportunity with the new Congress to advocate for bipartisan solutions and create the conditions for change. Throughout this year, we will use the Widen the Path platform to advance our policy agenda so that millions of Americans can seamlessly transition between higher education, skills training, and work. Changes such as creating clear and valuable connections between community colleges, universities, and workforce training; building on-ramps for learners to quality programs that lead to work; and increasing opportunities for potential learners with some college and no degree to rejoin the higher learning pathway of their choice. Changes that will impact millions of today’s students.
Priority 1: Remove barriers for the 39 million Americans with some college and no degree and recognize more high-quality learning opportunities.
We will advance an agenda in Congress and with the Administration on policies such as: resetting satisfactory academic progress (SAP), ensuring students can pay for credit for prior learning (CPL), increasing access to high-quality, short-term programs, and ensuring students can physically get to school and also take care of their loved ones.
{Hot off the press: You can read HLA’s latest paper on credit for prior learning here}
Priority 2: Create a national conversation, elevating the stories of learners overcoming the impossible, employers creating on-ramps, institutions filling in the gaps, and policymakers fighting for change.
A critical component of any change movement is ensuring that policymakers, practitioners, and, most importantly, learners (and prospective learners) see that multiple pathways to and through higher learning are possible and already happening. We will have exciting opportunities and announcements to share this community’s stories in the weeks ahead.
To our current partners, we are grateful for your support and ready to hit the ground running together. To our future partners, sign the pledge and join us. It’s time to get to work and we can’t do it without you.
The Widen the Path Pledge: Access to learning throughout our lives is essential to economic mobility and key to achieving the American Dream. We join the movement for a new American learning economy: a future where higher learning is flexible, accessible, and responsive to a changing world. By widening the path to and through higher learning, we will create a future where all learning that promotes economic mobility is recognized and where all of today’s students have the opportunity and the support to succeed.
