A recent piece in University World News by Dr. Michael Edmondson puts a name to something we talk about constantly at America Succeeds: the “hidden curriculum” of higher education. Across countries and systems, the evidence keeps pointing to the same conclusion. Graduates aren’t failing because they didn’t study hard enough or because their institutions didn’t care. They’re struggling because the system that prepared them optimized for the wrong things.
As Edmondson writes, students in most higher education environments are rewarded for finding the right answer, following structured pathways, and minimizing risk. That works beautifully for grades. It falls apart the moment someone is in a job where the problem is undefined, the information is incomplete, and three colleagues on the team see the situation differently. We’ve been training students to perform under conditions of certainty in a world that runs on uncertainty.
That’s not a curriculum problem. It’s structural.
What the Data Keeps Telling Us
Our own analysis of tens of millions of job postings reinforces this. Across nearly 80 million postings analyzed through our Durable by Design research, 76 percent request at least one durable skill – skills like communication, collaboration, problem solving, adaptability, and judgment. Employers aren’t asking for a specific degree or the latest software tool. They’re asking for the human capabilities that determine whether someone can actually do the work, stay in the job, and advance over time.
What makes this particularly striking is that these aren’t new expectations. Employers have always valued these capabilities. What’s changed is the urgency. As AI continues to automate technical tasks and reshape roles across every sector, the skills that remain distinctly human are becoming the primary differentiator. The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce found that roughly 37 percent of bachelor’s degree holders are underemployed, which suggests the issue isn’t access to credentials. It’s whether those credentials are actually preparing people for what work demands now. A separate Intelligent.com survey found that 60% of employers have hired and fired a Gen Z grad within months, mostly citing a lack of motivation, professionalism, and communication. That’s durable skills by another name, and it tells us the problem isn’t just about getting into a job. It’s about being prepared to stay and advance.
The Gap Starts Well Before College
At America Succeeds, we think about this challenge across the full PK-16 continuum, because by the time a student reaches a job interview, the patterns Edmondson describes have often been years in the making. Our Research Practice Collaborative, a 16-month study of twelve high schools across the country, found that the schools developing durable skills most effectively shared a common set of practices: they made skills explicit and visible rather than treating them as background goals, they connected learning to authentic real-world experiences with genuine stakes, and they assessed students through demonstration rather than just tests.
Those aren’t complicated ideas. But they require a fundamental reorientation of how we design learning, from pre-kindergarten through postsecondary. Our Beyond the Portrait policy scan found that while 26 states have formalized a Portrait of a Graduate that names durable skills as essential, only 7 require students to actually demonstrate those skills as a condition of graduation. The vision is nearly universal. The infrastructure to deliver it is still rare.
And yet, the structural challenge doesn’t end at high school graduation. America Succeeds has worked alongside 12 community colleges across seven states through a national Community College Community of Practice to understand what it actually takes to embed durable skills into continuing education programs. The findings are consistent: instruction, reflection, assessment, credentials, and faculty learning must work together as a coherent ecosystem. None of these components alone is sufficient. The same infrastructure problem that keeps durable skills aspirational in K-12 shows up at the postsecondary level too, and solving it requires the same deliberate, systems-level thinking. Education systems have to get this right if they want to credibly claim their graduates are work ready.
What Readiness Actually Looks Like Now
The most useful reframe I’ve seen is this: readiness isn’t what you know when you walk in the door. It’s what you can do when the door leads somewhere you didn’t expect. That’s the bar our education system needs to be designing toward, and it means building systems where students don’t just encounter durable skills once in a capstone course or a career readiness module, but develop them continuously, name them explicitly, and leave school with credible evidence that they can apply them.
That’s what drives the work behind Pathsmith™, our employer-informed durable skills framework built from labor market data and direct input from the employer community. It’s also what drives our partnerships with organizations like TNTP, Willow Education, ProjectSet, and Hidden Skills all of which are working to make skill development visible, measurable, and connected to real opportunity. The challenge Edmondson identifies is real and it’s global. The good news is that we know what works. The work now is building the systems that make it the norm rather than the exception.
Tim Taylor is the co-founder and president of America Succeeds. His recent LinkedIn post on this topic struck a chord; follow him to join the conversation.
