What Illinois Data Reveals about Promising College and Career Pathways

For more than a decade, a deceptively simple question has shaped conversations about economic mobility: Is college still worth it? Skepticism about a four-year degree has grown for understandable reasons. Degree inflation has pushed bachelor’s requirements into jobs that didn’t previously require them, and rising costs have increased the financial stakes, particularly for low-income students.

But recent Illinois data make one thing clear: higher education remains one of the most reliable pathways to good jobs. Findings from the Illinois High School 2 Career project show that postsecondary education — two-year degrees and beyond — continues to provide strong access to economic mobility across race, ethnicity, and gender. In fact, higher levels of educational attainment help narrow long-standing disparities in access to well-paying careers.

College is not the right choice for everyone. Still, limiting educational options for people from low-income backgrounds is not a solution; it is abdicating our responsibility to create opportunity for everyone. Although there are gender and racial disparities in economic outcomes for higher education, the data show that education continues to function as an equalizer. Even when women, Black students, and students from low-income families face barriers within the same fields and industries, those gaps shrink as their level of education increases.

What’s troubling is how often the response to these inequities is to steer people away from postsecondary education altogether, frequently toward short-term training and placement programs. While these programs can help people secure jobs, getting a job and being a good employee doesn’t ensure economic mobility. Economic mobility through work comes when people have a stable career with long-term advancement and wage growth. The pathway to mobility inevitably intersects with postsecondary education. High-income families rarely begin career conversations by removing options; we should not do that for anyone else.

Thankfully, the Chicago region is addressing these inequities in postsecondary pathways. Through policy change, direct interventions, and wraparound supports — from college access to persistence — local partners are addressing one of the most common attainment outcomes among low-income students: some college, no degree. Given how common it is to start and stop along the path, the answer should not be “don’t go,” but rather investing in systems that help people persist, return, and continue moving forward without the cost of exploration being permanently punitive.

At the same time, it would be a mistake to read the research on pathways to good jobs as proof that a four-year degree is the only route to economic mobility. The challenge ahead is to make non-bachelor’s pathways as viable in practice as they are in theory, and to ask whether our education and workforce systems actually leave people better off. Employers also have a role to play. Confusing a talent pipeline (getting people in the door) for a development pipeline (the promotion, retention, and advancement of employees) will leave Chicago replicating systems we already know don’t work.

Whenever I return to any place I’ve lived or worked, one interaction is almost inevitable: someone recognizes me, and one of us asks, “Do you remember me?” These moments remind me how much it matters that someone made us feel like we belonged—that we had options, and that our choices mattered. That’s what strong pathways should do. They should expand options, not limit them. As we build systems for education and work, the question isn’t just what the data says, it’s whether people are better off because we showed up. And whether we gave them the freedom, support and opportunity to move forward.