October 21, 2025
Nineteen schools in Colorado, with support from JFF and partners, are building a model that opens student access to college and career navigation supports, dual enrollment, and work-based learning.
The start of the 2024–25 school year marked the beginning of a new college and career pathways model across Colorado. Nineteen high schools welcomed their ninth-grade students to On-Ramps to Postsecondary Transition (OPT), a model that focuses on removing barriers and building a seamless transition from secondary through postsecondary. Systems across the country are creating pathways that include career navigation, work-based learning, and dual enrollment, and while all of these experiences enrich and strengthen a student’s readiness for postsecondary, students often struggle to connect the dots. OPT allows schools to focus on the unique challenges related to designing pathways and testing creative solutions.
A hallmark component of OPT is a college and career navigation course (CCNC) that ensures every ninth-grade student has a meaningful and intentional opportunity to learn about postsecondary options, how to use high school as a tool to prepare them for postsecondary, and early career awareness experiences. The course serves as the foundation for future work-based learning and dual enrollment courses that students will take along the pathway.
Offering CCNC is one way OPT pursues the goals of Jobs for the Future’s No Dead Ends and Pathways to Prosperity frameworks, which aim to remove boundaries between systems and create clear pathways. Both frameworks identify key levers critical to removing barriers and supporting students in the transition from secondary to postsecondary to work.
Secondary-postsecondary integration erases boundaries between high school and postsecondary systems, aligning curricula, credits, policies, and practices to support student transitions.
CCNC begins in ninth grade, where students are encouraged to learn about various postsecondary paths—two-year colleges, apprenticeships, career and technical education (CTE), etc.—and the requirements to access them.
ICAPs guide students in selecting courses and credits supporting their future goals, promoting better alignment between high school offerings and postsecondary expectations.
By integrating CCNC modules into existing advisory, CTE, or elective periods—or through standalone courses—schools can organically embed postsecondary awareness into facilitated conversations about further education.
Career navigation systems help students make informed, sustainable education and career decisions by guiding them to understand their interests and relevant pathways, building social capital, and accessing resources.
CCNC includes tools like interest inventories (for example, Truity, O*NET, Roadtrip Nation) and guided reflection, helping students discern their strengths and align them with career pathways.
Students explore a broad spectrum of postsecondary and career options, and ICAP supports identifying advisors, mentors, or community members to expand their social networks.
CCNC encourages teaming with educators, counselors, and families to co-design personalized navigation plans—mirroring the collaborative approach of career navigation systems.
Work-based learning (WBL) provides students with meaningful job-based preparation that connects structured instruction with valuable workplace experiences.
Through CCNC, students gain initial insights into workplaces and industry contexts via modules like Possible Futures and STEMploration.
Having more knowledge of self and pathways, students are better positioned to engage in future work-based learning—internships, job shadows, or apprenticeships—once they reach higher grades.
CCNC’s focus on self-awareness, planning, and pathway exploration lays the groundwork for JFF’s new WBL quality indicators, such as alignment, mentorship readiness, and pathway integration.
Leadership and policy call for cross-sector teams to align systems, remove policy barriers, and mobilize funding to support high-quality pathways at scale.
CCNC’s requirement of 90 minutes per month creates a policy-viable model that can gain district- and state-level buy-in without overhauling schedules.
Encouraging asset mapping and student voice ensures policies around CCNC align with leadership-driven student access and opportunity.
Schools that design and submit CCNC syllabi and delivery plans to JFF lay the groundwork for potential policy support, resource alignment, and broader institutional endorsement to scale the initiative within districts or states.
We have a lot more options than we think. There’s so much that we can do that it sort of changes what you would like to do, it changes your viewpoint on it.
Teacher buy-in and creating the capacity for them to deliver CCNC content are critical. Schools learned that engaging teachers early, by including them in course design, increased their buy-in and understanding of the course goals. Schools that used a seminar course or advisory period rather than adding CCNC content into an existing academic course found it less challenging for teachers to navigate competing priorities. The schools tested out new solutions to support their teachers:
Master schedule integration: One school leveraged its student orientation seminar to embed the CCNC course. It was done on a modified timeline, and students were tasked with creating their high school plan using the curriculum, paying particular attention to how WBL and dual enrollment can become a part of their educational journey.
Teacher engagement: One school created a small team to design the curriculum with a plan to provide professional development for course instructors throughout the year. The team quickly identified that teachers needed more foundational knowledge to understand the course and its content, later revising their professional development plan to engage teachers in a more impactful way.
District-wide engagement: One district co-developed the CCNC curriculum with multiple schools to ensure consistency and quality. The district collaborated and shared resources to support teachers, which helped increase buy-in when implementation began.
Students completing CCNCs leave with the skills and knowledge needed to make clear choices about their education. The next phase of the work will push schools to dive into the complexities of expanding WBL and dual enrollment offerings. Similar challenges have already emerged related to staff capacity and buy-in. The schools must rely on the solutions that carried them through the first year—engaging their teachers early, creating the space to engage in planning, and finding new ways to utilize time within the school day—and continue to design a model that positions students to drive their educational journeys.
While the content of this resource was developed under funding from the Education Innovation and Research grant program, the content does not necessarily represent the policy of the U.S. Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the federal government.
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