Announcements & Commentary
Working Learners Know What They Want. Our System Needs to Help Them Get There.
By Amanda DeLaRosa, Director of Program & Strategy at College Futures Foundation
At every stage and every age, Californians are still learning. They’re gaining new skills at work and going back to school between shifts, between kids’ bedtimes, between one job and the next one they’re hoping to get. Millions of working adults across California are weighing whether to enroll in training in the next few years. Their choices won’t just shape their own futures and the lives of their families – they’ll shape our communities, our economy, and our state.
But there’s a problem: our system asks working adults to find the education that will deliver the most value while giving them too few options that actually fit the realities of their lives. Work, caregiving, transportation, cost, time and poor institutional design can eliminate choices before adults ever get to weigh what a program might offer.
At College Futures Foundation, our postsecondary value initiative starts from one core belief: California’s postsecondary system has to deliver more value, for more people, in more places – not just for the students it was built for generations ago, but for every kind of learner today. Some of them will enter classrooms at the start of a semester; some will juggle their coursework while making supper for their kids or caring for their aging parents. Working adults are the clearest test of whether we’re delivering on the promise of a system that cares for and cultivates everyone.
So we partnered with ideas42, a nonprofit research team that applies behavioral science to real-world problems, to understand why so many working learners end up in programs, even when they have a clear goal in mind.
The result is the illuminating new report, Choosing in the Dark: What Working Adults Need to Make Better Postsecondary Choices. We talked to working adults and adult learners across California about their needs and dreams. Their responses highlight four hard truths about how they make one of the most important decisions of their lives.
1. Adults know exactly what they value most.
Forget the idea that working learners haven’t thought it through. They have. Roughly nine in ten California adults without a degree say a credential is worth real money to them, and they can also tell you why: bigger paychecks, a recognized and respected credential, a schedule that actually fits their life, a shot at something better for their families and communities. The question was never whether college pays off. It’s which path actually delivers the most and is feasible for them right now.
2. But constraints decide what’s possible before value ever enters the conversation.
On paper, a certified nursing assistant becomes a registered nurse by enrolling in a BSN program. In real life, however, that decision runs headfirst into work schedules and expectations, childcare, commute time, gas prices, let alone the price of tuition. By the time someone is “comparing programs,” the real list has often been whittled down to only one or two viable options and the question has quietly shifted from “Will this pay off for me?” to “Can I even make this work?”
Ideas42 notes, “Even before constraints remove options from the table, they are already reshaping which criteria matter most. Adults’ underlying criteria stay consistent: affordability, economic return, employability, compatibility with existing responsibilities, and a path that feels meaningful. But the weight on each criterion shifts with a learner’s time horizon, and that horizon is shaped by circumstance.”
As one adult learner we spoke to told us, “I work full-time, I’m a full-time mom and wife… I don’t have a lot of time to go through the material. I decided to enroll in [a certificate program] because it’s not a long program.”
3. And when adults do have the room to choose, the information they need isn’t there.
Californians work really hard for their families. That should count for something in a system that’s supposed to work for them in return. Too often, Californians are steered toward postsecondary programs that won’t actually deliver on what they’re looking for, while implicitly demanding they absorb every risk and fill every gap on their own.
Comparable data on program cost, completion and post-graduation earnings barely exists at the scale California needs. Four in ten adults who enrolled said it was hard to even find outcome information for their program. That’s not a lack of interest on their part. It’s evidence of an inadequate system that was never built or incentivized to answer the question in the first place.
One recent graduate lamented that the info about their program on the school’s website “is 80% wrong… I wouldn’t have chosen this program if I knew that before.”
4. So they default to whatever information they can find, wherever it may be.
Friendly advice. Social media. AI chatbots. Marketing copy. Name recognition. None of these sources can actually predict or speak to whether a program is actually right for them and their lives. But it’s what they can find. What’s available replaces what’s reliable. That’s how some of the most consequential decisions of people’s lives end up resting on some of the least helpful information out there.
Add it all up and the picture is clear: working adults are choosing in the dark. Not because they lack ambition or clarity — they have plenty of both. It’s because the system has left them to navigate some of the biggest decisions of their lives with too little reliable information and too few supports.
It doesn’t have to stay this way.
California’s working adults are already doing their part. They know what they want. They’re showing up ready to invest in their futures, at whatever age or stage they’re in. Now the system owes them the same effort in return. And that means more supportive institutional structures, not just better navigation tools. It takes public investment in the data, the design and the incentives that make a postsecondary system actually work for every kind of learner today, not just those it was originally created for.
Choosing in the Dark makes a case for what it will take: real data on labor market outcomes, employment trajectories, time to completion, choice architecture that lets adults compare options, and support that reaches people at the moments that matter most. It also provides community-based organizations, institutions, funders, and policymakers a concrete place to start.
College Futures would add institutional redesign to that list. Institutions that weren’t purpose-built to serve working adults with full lives need to interrogate the potential barriers and design choices that narrow learners’ options from the outset.
If we get this right, working Californians will have more college options that fit the realities of their lives and can make college decisions based on real outcomes. When we get this right, California becomes a place that delivers more value, for more people, in more places; we become the state where promises are kept and dreams come true.
Read the full report at the interactive website: Choosing in the Dark: What Working Adults Need to Make Better Postsecondary Choices.
