A Campaign to Build Awareness of What it Takes to Be College and Career Ready

High school students across the Commonwealth are thinking about what they should do this summer – and some are focused on what will look good on their college application. What about the high achieving student who has no one in his or her family who has gone through this process?  What if you didn’t think about college until high school graduation loomed and you suddenly discover you haven’t taken the prerequisite courses to be eligible to study what you want? A recent story in The Atlantic highlights these stories. With guidance counselors handling large case loads and dealing with immediate crises, there are fewer resources to help students navigate the often-daunting process of planning for postsecondary success.

Future Ready Massachusetts will change this narrative. The Future Ready Massachusetts Campaign will bring together the college and career ready initiatives that already exist under one comprehensive “umbrella” and effectively provide communities with the tools to communicate the roadmap to becoming future ready.  With so many programs, educators are often not familiar with all of the options; and parents and legislators know even less about program offerings and how each relates to the others.  The goal is to raise awareness of what it takes to succeed in college and career and what programs are available to assist in that effort.

In Massachusetts, the demand for middle- and high-skilled workers (jobs that require some postsecondary education or training) is outpacing the state’s supply of workers educated and experienced at that level.

• 81% of Massachusetts jobs are middle- or high-skill.  Yet only 50% of Massachusetts adults have some postsecondary degree (associate’s or higher)
• By 2018, 68% of all jobs in Massachusetts will require a postsecondary education

Future Ready will help promote a college and career ready curriculum to provide all students with the core, foundational knowledge and skills they need to succeed in college, career and life.

Interested in learning more about Future Ready? Join us on May 20 for the Future Ready Summit at the DCU in Worcester. Click here to register!

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Future Ready Massachusetts is a collaborative project of the Massachusetts Business Alliance for Education (MBAE), the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education (DHE) in partnership with Achieve Inc., an independent, bipartisan, nonprofit education reform organization based in Washington D.C.