3 overlooked reasons K-12 students don’t seem ready for life after high school

Colleges report that incoming students lack basic math skills. Employers say new hires struggle to communicate or collaborate. Even students themselves say, I did everything I was told to do, and I still don’t feel prepared.

Versions of these complaints have always existed at the margins of the education system. What’s different now is how costly and widespread they’ve become. There are fewer entry-level roles that allow time to learn on the job. Employers express disinterest in hiring young people, while young people express disinterest in filling the roles available to them.

Districts and states are investing more in readiness than ever before, yet confidence in student preparedness for life after high school continues to erode. EAB’s ongoing research points to three emerging barriers that help explain why.

3 emerging barriers to student postsecondary readiness

1. Students must develop higher-order skills under conditions that make them harder to build

What’s changed

Employers increasingly emphasize “AI-proof” skills like critical thinking, judgment, and creativity. But cognitive science is clear: these skills cannot be trained in isolation. They depend on deep domain knowledge, strong literacy and numeracy, sustained attention, and opportunities for practice over time.

In response, many districts have adopted Portrait of a Graduate or similar frameworks to elevate (and in some cases, assess) these “durable” skills. Too often, however, these initiatives are layered on top of unresolved foundational gaps—without protecting the learning conditions required to build the very skills they prioritize.

As a result, students are asked to demonstrate advanced thinking skills without the cognitive foundations needed to develop them. Throughout our ongoing research, EAB will identify and study districts that have redesigned AI and ed tech use to protect foundational learning time and measurably improve literacy, math, and higher-order skill development.

2. Students are expected to stay motivated in an economy where effort no longer guarantees payoff

What’s changed

Psychology research finds that adolescence is a developmental window when motivation is tightly tied to status and respect. Historically, school success offered relatively clear pathways to both. Today, those signals are weaker and arrive later. Grades increasingly overstate mastery. College credentials no longer guarantee strong early-career outcomes. Traditional markers of adult success—financial independence, stable careers, homeownership—are occurring later in life.

What adults often label a “lack of grit” is more accurately a breakdown in the relationship between effort and payoff. Students are being asked to persist in systems that struggle to demonstrate how academic success translates into real-world opportunity.

When effort no longer reliably leads to recognition or progress in the adult world, even well-intentioned systems struggle to sustain student engagement in the learning experiences required for future success. In response, EAB researchers are working to identify districts that have forged sustainable partnerships with local employers and industries to provide more credible, authentic accountability levers for postsecondary readiness.

3. Students face fragmented career education without clear pathways to the best-fit options

What’s changed

Career education has expanded rapidly, driven by policy momentum and family demand. More districts are moving away from the “college for all” mindset and toward a more integrated college and career readiness philosophy. But for many students, these “integrated” offerings feel fragmented in practice: a career day here, a job shadow there, and credentials with unclear value in the real world.

To make career education flexible and avoid “tracking” students prematurely, career programming becomes even more light touch. Most districts ultimately emphasize career exposure rather than coherent, skill-building pathways aligned to labor market demand.

At the same time, the responsibility for choosing and navigating these options increasingly falls on students—particularly those without strong social capital or adult guidance outside of school.

As a result, districts invest heavily in longer menus of career-program options but see even more disconnect between what students work on in high school and the pathways available to them in postsecondary. EAB researchers will be identifying districts with system-owned career pathways to understand governance, advising, and sequencing models that reduce cognitive load and prevent readiness from depending on student self-navigation or social capital.

Why your district’s career education strategy should be a top priority

In today’s labor market, readiness failures are harder to recover from and more visible to families and communities. Improving postsecondary readiness will require districts to shift from adding programs to protecting conditions: safeguarding foundational learning, clarifying which achievements truly matter, and redesigning pathways so the system, and not the student, does the heavy lifting.

EAB’s ongoing research in innovative career education will help districts not only engage more students in relevant learning opportunities—it will also help leaders demonstrate to parents, communities, and stakeholders that district investments reflect what it truly takes for students to succeed in the future economy. The work will help rebuild confidence that schools are preparing graduates for what comes next.

Olivia Rios

Senior Director, K-12 Research Development & Design

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