The promise of education in America is freedom, asserts David Coleman, CEO of The College Board, an organization that helps students attend and be successful in college. What kind of freedom? “The freedom to make decisions about your life, and the capacity to see those decisions through,” he says.

Consistent with this notion, Coleman praises the U.S. K-12 system for attempting to prepare students for both college and career, noting that students are given the “broadest possible horizons,” and their options are rarely constrained.

His primary criticism, though, is that “we do too little to help students navigate the change from the structured world of high school to the more open-ended challenges beyond.” This is true for college-bound and workplace-bound students alike, Coleman says, stressing the need to teach young people to be ready for life, citizenship and “the weight of adult decisions.”

While recognizing that pursuing a career immediately out of high school is a legitimate path to independence for some students, Coleman also defends the value of a college education, calling it “a very powerful way to own your future” — one that is capable of producing more productive citizens who earn higher salaries and are freer to follow their passions and interests.

Freedom is the outcome of a true education. The freedom to make decisions about your life and the capacity to see those decisions through.

The genius of the American approach to schooling is that it doesn’t narrow those choices as students advance — it expands them. A K-12 system that prepares students for both college and career is a feature of our schools, not a flaw. Instead of efficiency in sorting students and constraining their options, we aspire to the broadest possible horizons.

That expansive ideal is reflected in the College Board’s purpose, which is to clear a path for all students to own their futures. A very powerful way to own your future is to go to college, a decision that can greatly expand a student’s capacities to be a productive citizen, to earn more, to pursue intellectual passions and become who they want to become.

Exploring a career before college is another route to independence for many students. They, too, are well served by a K-12 system that prizes thinking well, writing well, learning well and working successfully in a team. Cultivate those skills and habits and almost any route is open.

Right now, we do too little to help students navigate the change from the structured world of high school to the more open-ended challenges beyond. In our K-12 system, we spend a lot of effort managing student time and prescribing their academic path. In college, students are given lots of free space and endless choices. They need discipline to manage their newfound liberty and to throw themselves into the more expansive world of higher education.

The same concerns apply to high school graduates starting a first job. Readiness is for more than just college or career — it’s being prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship and the weight of adult decisions. Those are matters of character as much as skill, which is why our schools should encourage a deeper exploration of the spiritual world, a more thorough introduction to public life and a wider engagement with age-old questions of the soul.

In our focus on practical readiness, I fear we have made education too small, too narrow to command much political interest. We should seek a richer education, one more concerned with readiness for life than training for an immediate next step.

I often hear nostalgic fantasies about the way education used to be, a rose-tinted past of rigor and common sense inevitably contrasted with the perceived shortcomings of how we learn today. Even a cursory look at education history, however, reveals a steady expansion of opportunity, of greater freedom and meaningful choice for more students.

America has made the completion of high school a universal expectation. We opened the doors of higher education to those who historically had been systematically excluded from opportunities beyond high school. We have recognized, with agonizing slowness, that there is enormous talent in every part of this country.

When given real challenges and the resources to meet them, students of all backgrounds respond in remarkable ways.

The real value in education is in the moment when a student finds a deep passion for a tough subject, when she is kept awake at night — enthralled, moved to new levels of depth, inspired to do good work. Our challenge as educators, parents and community members is to create such moments for all students and then guide them toward a satisfying set of options, whether that be at work or in college.

At the College Board, that vision for meaningful choice has driven the steady expansion of Advanced Placement courses and our determination to grow the program in minority communities, rural regions and low-income schools. Fifteen years ago, only one in 10 AP students came from low-income households. Today, it’s one in five, and those students are thriving alongside their wealthier classmates. They’ll have more choices — in college or career — as a result.

Giving students and families more control over their futures was also the driving force behind our investment in top-quality test practice that is free for all students. Millions of students have used Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy to improve their skills and lift their scores. It’s a remarkable testament to the power of agency and the belief that commitment and effort can reshape destiny.

Martha Graham’s essay, “An Athlete of God,” is one of the finest pieces of education writing I have ever read. The great choreographer and dancer holds practice and devotion above all. It’s not technical skill or virtuosity she extols, but the humility and purpose that come from working to get better. “It’s permitting life to use you in a very intense way,” she said in a documentary about her career. “Sometimes it is not pleasant. Sometimes it is fearful. But, nevertheless, it is inevitable.”

Our aim must be to guide students on that path of devotion. My colleagues and I are acutely aware of the inequities that plague our educational system and constrain real choice. Some of the most important work underway at the College Board — and in education circles more broadly — is to recognize the full context in which our students live and learn. There are amazing students who will never set foot in an AP classroom and remarkable young people who will never post an outstanding SAT score. We’ve always known that, and we need to do more to recognize that reality. The College Board is developing new ways of assessing the context in which students develop and achieve and is helping to acknowledge and lift up a wider range of talent.

We know that freedom is bigger than a one-time decision, a choice between college or career. Freedom is the capacity to keep choosing, to keep practicing, to be ready for opportunity wherever and whenever it arises. That’s the promise education makes and the dream we try to make real.

WWhen I enrolled at the same school as David Coleman, the “college decision” was entirely about where to attend, not whether to attend. College was the only path to a successful career — defined as both remunerative and meeting the approval of my judgmental parental units. Building and industrial trades were off the table, even if I’d had the dexterity to make such a table. This made sense to me; employers were seeking capable and motivated young people for entry-level jobs, and there was no better pool of candidates than graduates of four-year colleges and universities.

Today, “career ready” has taken off in an orthogonal, technological direction, drifting away from college. Over the past decade, employers have transformed their internal systems as well as their processes for interacting with stakeholders — customers, suppliers, employees and shareholders — from informal and manual to formal software-based processes. Across all sectors, entry-level jobs are best characterized as managing some business function through software or Software as a Service (SaaS) platforms.

One of these transformed processes is hiring. Because nearly every good entry-level job is posted online and generates hundreds of resumes, employers utilize keyword-based filters called Applicant Tracking Systems to determine which resumes are actually seen by a human. If you don’t have sufficient keyword density, you’re not visible. Faced with the deluge of resumes over the past decade, HR and hiring managers have sought to tighten the screen, and have done so by adding skills to job descriptions. Which skills have they added? Unfortunately, there are only so many ways to say “critical thinking” or “problem solving.” So, the skills that have been added to job descriptions are all digital and software skills. Across virtually every industry, technical skills now outnumber all others in job descriptions, particularly for entry-level jobs.

So if they don’t demand coding, most career-track entry-level job descriptions now list skills like Pardot, Marketo, Google Adwords, ZenDesk Plus, NetSuite, Financial Force, Workday (HR) and the customer relationship management (CRM) platform Salesforce. Without these digital skills in their resumes, too many college graduates are invisible for exactly the career-track positions they want.

Meanwhile, college’s trajectory has only changed by a few degrees, if at all. A few months ago, I spoke to an audience of several hundred college administrators and faculty and asked them whether their schools provided students with the option to learn Salesforce. Not one hand went up. Colleges continue to act as though they’re preparing students for their fifth job, not their first job. Unfortunately, we now know that if students don’t get good first jobs, they’re probably not going to get good fifth jobs. As the 2018 Strada Institute for the Future of Work and Burning Glass Technologies study demonstrated, for students underemployed in their first job, two-thirds will be underemployed five years later and half will be underemployed after a decade.

I remain hugely supportive of the idea and goal of college. Both David and I were seduced by the preface to the Yale College Programs of Study, which stated that college should “cultivate a broadly informed, highly disciplined intellect . . . [and provide] a phase of exploration, a place for the exercise of curiosity, and an opportunity for the discovery of new interests and abilities.” But I’m now hugely concerned that nostalgic adherence to the college model has yielded crises of affordability, completion and employability.

With nearly 50 percent of students matriculating at college failing to graduate, and nearly 50 percent of graduates graduating into underemployment, my colleagues and I have coined the term “Last-Mile Training” to reflect the skills employers are seeking for entry-level positions, primarily: digital — which, given the complex nature of business software, also entails some knowledge of how the business and industry in question actually work — as well as soft skills. I’m honored that my team’s proposal, “Closing the Skills Gap through Last-Mile Training,” was selected as one of the top innovative ideas in education by Pathway 2 Tomorrow. And we’re now busy working to build new pathways to good entry-level jobs that provide better outcomes to the 75 percent of students who aren’t being well-served by the status quo.

To be clear, in no way are we arguing for less postsecondary education in aggregate or per capita. In the global knowledge economy, that would be economic suicide. What we are arguing for is a new, more modern definition of “college” by restaging how that education is consumed. It shouldn’t have to be “all you can eat in one sitting” in the college dining hall. Students should be able to get what they need when they need it.

In the Washington Post earlier this year, CUNY’s Cathy Davidson rejected college’s responsibility to follow employers saying, “This is a social problem, not a higher education problem.” But even if she’s right, colleges ought to be motivated to try to solve this “social problem” rather than sit there throwing stones at employers. To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we’re sending young people out into the labor market we have, not the labor market we might want or wish to have at a later time.