The following was originally published by the Press-Republican
Four years ago, Finn was a ninth-grader at a small rural school just south of Utica, New York. He earned strong grades, excelled in math, and was well-liked by both teachers and classmates. By every measure, he seemed to be on a clear path to success.
Yet whenever someone asked what he planned to do after high school, his answer was always the same: “No clue.”
Finn’s response reflects the uncertainty facing millions of young people. Doing well in school can open doors. But first, students need to know where the doors are.
Finn had never spoken with professionals whose careers extended beyond the community he knew. The industries and opportunities shaping the modern economy existed outside his field of vision.
Then something changed.
His school joined an organization that connected students with mentors, employers, and colleges. Over the next three years, Finn visited more than a dozen college campuses throughout the Northeast. He worked with a mentor and met professionals from companies including Morgan Stanley, Colgate-Palmolive, Southwest Airlines, and TransPerfect. As his world expanded, so did his understanding of what might be possible.
This August, Finn will enter Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. Four years ago, he didn’t know what an engineer was. Today, he plans to become one and hopes to develop sustainable energy technologies.
Finn’s story raises an important question: How many talented young people never discover what they might become because no one ever exposed them to the possibilities?
For decades, American education policy has been guided by a simple idea: if students achieve in school, they will have opportunities in life. Raise test scores. Improve grades. Increase graduation rates. Help more students enroll in college.
Those efforts produced results. The U.S. high school graduation rate rose from 71 percent in 2000 to 87 percent in 2022, and more Americans than ever are earning postsecondary credentials. Yet a diploma is not a roadmap. Many young people are doing everything they have been told to do while remaining uncertain about what comes next.
The challenge is not achievement. It is knowing how achievement leads to opportunity.
Careers rarely emerge from academic achievement alone. They emerge when achievement intersects with social capital—the relationships, information, and exposure that help young people understand and navigate the world beyond school.
Research increasingly demonstrates the power of those connections. A landmark study from Harvard’s Opportunity Insights found that access to diverse networks and relationships is among the strongest predictors of economic mobility. In other words, who students know often shapes what they can become.
Unfortunately, access to those networks is not distributed equally. Students from lower-income communities are far less likely to have exposure to professional careers, workplace experiences, or adults who can help them navigate pathways into opportunity.
At the same time, employers across the country are struggling to fill positions in engineering, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, information technology, and other high-demand fields.
But consider a different possibility.
A manufacturer may have open positions while students nearby have never set foot inside a modern production facility. An engineering firm may be searching for future talent while mathematically gifted students have never met an engineer. Hospitals need future healthcare professionals, yet many students have never spoken with someone working in those careers.
At first glance, these appear to be separate problems. In reality, they are often different descriptions of the same problem.
America does not suffer from a shortage of talent. It suffers from a shortage of connections between talent and opportunity.
No mentor replaces a great teacher, and no workplace visit can substitute for rigorous academic preparation. Strong schools remain essential. But achievement alone is not enough. A student can earn excellent grades and still have little understanding of where those achievements can lead.
Creating those opportunities requires intentionally connecting students to people, places, and experiences that expand their horizons. It means providing mentorship, workplace exposure, internships, college visits, career exploration, and professional relationships.
For generations, the American Dream rested on a simple promise: work hard, develop your talents, and opportunity will follow.
Today, that belief appears increasingly fragile—not because young people lack talent, but because too many cannot see the opportunities their talents might create.
The question, then, is how we build those connections at scale.
In our forthcoming book, America’s Next Dream, we explore what it will take to create pathways that connect talent to opportunity. Some of those pathways run through schools. Others run through workplaces, communities, mentorship programs, and professional networks. All of them depend on helping young people see futures they cannot yet imagine.
We ask students every day to envision what comes next. But opportunity is rarely discovered in a textbook. More often, it is encountered through a mentor, a workplace visit, an internship, or a conversation. The moment a young person can see a future, that future becomes possible.
America does not need more talented young people. It already has them.
What it needs are more windows.
Finn’s talent was always there. What changed was his horizon. Someone opened a window onto a future he had never been able to see. Once he could see it, he began moving toward it.
Imagine how many other students are waiting for someone to open that window for them.
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Ray McNulty and Rick Dalton are leaders at CFES Brilliant Pathways and have each spent more than five decades working in education and workforce development. They are co-authors of the forthcoming book America’s Next Dream, which explores the future of opportunity, talent, and economic mobility in America.