Podcast

Related Links

• Charting Career and Education Pathways
• Invest in What's Next on Federal Reserve Education

Transcript

Tim Sablik: My guest today is Sarah Gunn, a district outreach manager at the Richmond Fed who leads a team focused on workforce pathways. Sarah, welcome back to the show.

Sarah Gunn: Thanks for having me, Tim.

Sablik: In your role, you collaborate with K-12 and postsecondary education systems, workforce development practitioners, and businesses to advance programs that improve access to high-quality information for career exploration, minimize education and workforce barriers, and increase workforce participation. One such program is Invest in What's Next, which is an online tool developed by the Federal Reserve System to help students explore career and education options.

Can you talk about why the Richmond Fed cares about the human capital decisions of students and the problem it was trying to solve by creating Invest in What's Next?

Gunn: As you know, one of the Federal Reserve's goals is maximum employment. The decisions that people make about education — whether or not to get an education and how much to get — is strongly tied to employment outcomes. A healthy labor market really depends on connecting people to opportunities.

The returns to education are well documented in the literature. On average, higher levels of education are associated with better labor market outcomes, higher earnings, lower unemployment. People tend to have better job satisfaction and better health outcomes, too, and there are societal benefits as well.

Of course, there's maybe some change. Fewer high school graduates are choosing to go directly into higher education. We're curious what's driving that shift. We're also paying attention to unemployment rates of young college graduates. It looks like the protections that having a bachelor's degree have had may be lower for young workers.

But we also know that the benefits to additional education aren't evenly distributed. The outcomes can vary significantly for an individual. So, Invest in What's Next is a tool that can provide unbiased information on education pathways that students can consider and help them evaluate how those pathways align with their interests, their lifestyle and work preferences, and also what it might take to be successful on a given path.

Sablik: So, let's say I'm a student interested in using this tool, Invest in What's Next. How does it work exactly?

Gunn: Invest in What's Next is an online course, designed mostly for classroom use by middle and high school students to determine which education pathway is right for them. Once they've narrowed down their options, they begin to learn about the specific education opportunities they can choose from — whether that's at their local technical school, community college, an apprenticeship program, the military, or a four-year university. Throughout the course, they'll be recording their choices on something that we call a plan builder, so they're able to refer back to their selections later as they learn more.

I have a few favorite parts of the course I wanted to share.

Sablik: Sure.

Gunn: First is an exploration into jobs, education, and earnings. As we mentioned earlier, on average, more education leads to higher earnings. But the specific job choice matters. This interaction gives students an opportunity to explore specific jobs, the entry-level education that's required to get into that job, and the average earnings so they can see how jobs with the same level of education may have different median earnings. Or they can see how jobs with different levels of education result in similar earnings.

Another favorite of mine has to do with students exploring their areas of interest. The course gives students the chance to start with what interests them and then dig a little bit deeper into what the jobs might look like in that field. Often, students expect that a career in a field requires a certain level of education. But, in fact, most fields have jobs at multiple levels of educational attainment. So, this is an opportunity for students to see how, within an interest area like healthcare or information technology, there are jobs that require both a certification, an associate's degree, a bachelor's degree, or even higher.

Sablik: Digging in a little bit more into that education component, can you talk about the role of education in human capital development, and how this tool can help students identify and evaluate pathways and overcome challenges with information access?

Gunn: The course helps fill an important gap. Not every student has equal access to information [on] education and career pathways. Some students don't have an older sibling, a parent, a friend who they've seen pursue a particular path. Invest in What's Next is designed to give them access to paths that maybe they haven't seen before.

One other component of the course [is] these virtual peers. The virtual peers are making the decisions alongside the students throughout the course. So, as the students themselves are approaching a particular decision, they can see how their virtual peer is evaluating different pieces of information. We don't imagine that the virtual peers are going to match exactly what the students are choosing, but we want them to see the different ways you can weigh the pros and cons of the different options to pursue and come to a conclusion about what path to choose.

The four virtual peers bring different perspectives. One is earlier in their high school experience, trying to decide what courses to take in high school to set them up for success going forward. The other students are closer to high school graduation with different levels of certainty on what path is right for them and different ways of evaluating the information.

We hope that the students taking Invest in What's Next can learn from the virtual peers and see that there's not one right choice. It's really about choosing the path that's right for them.

Sablik: You mentioned that students have different access to information and experiences. Do you have any evidence on who is actually using this tool or anecdotes about how it's being used in the classrooms?

Gunn: The course officially launched, the first version of it, in 2018. Since then, we've had about 8,000 students on average use it each year from all across the country.

Most of the time, the course is used in its entirety, meaning a teacher will assign it to a group of students and they take the whole course. But one thing I really like about the course is that it's flexible. With some of those featured interactions, a teacher could just use those with the students instead of doing the course in its entirety and plug it into other resources they're using to work on college and career exploration. There are videos within the course that can be used standalone to target specific topics like budgeting or cost-benefit analysis. It can also be used outside of a classroom setting — it can be used by school counselors in a group or a one-on-one, be part of an afterschool program, or as a mentoring program.

We know that not all learning should take place on computers, so we have some active learning lessons that teachers can use in the classroom to demonstrate particular concepts. One has to do with the net price of college, so making sure students are considering not just the sticker price of going to school but taking the grants and scholarships into consideration. The other one has to do with the relationship between education and income. That one we call the human capital line sort, and it's one of our most popular activities.

Sablik: As you mentioned, this tool has been around for a few years now. But one of the reasons why we're talking about it now is you recently participated in a revamp and a relaunch of Invest in What's Next. Could you talk a little bit more about that process, what was the thinking behind it, and what you were trying to accomplish?

Gunn: Invest in What's Next was actually one of the first projects I started working on at the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond when I joined in 2014. It has been a passion project of mine for a very long time.

As we started promoting the first version of the course, it was very well received and appreciated. But, of course, you get feedback, and things that you learn along the way and ways that you can improve. We had an opportunity a couple of years ago to evaluate the structure of the course and consider ways to improve it and make it a little bit more flexible for teachers and students to use.

So, we made a couple of changes. It is now on the Federal Reserve Education website, along with all of the classroom and instructional resources from the Federal Reserve System. So if you go to federalreserveducation.org, you can find Invest in What's Next and a lot of other great classroom resources. That allows teachers to download the Invest in What's Next module directly from the website and implement it in their own instructor management system, whether that's Canvas, Schoology, Blackboard, or Google Classroom. They can take Invest in What's Next and assign it to their students directly and track their progress throughout the way.

We also added those virtual peers that I mentioned earlier. They were not a component of the previous course. The one thing we learned in sharing the first course was that not all students have an example of someone who's making the decision with them.

The new version of the course officially launched in 2025 and we're really excited about the feedback that we've received so far. As we share it with different communities, we're finding new ways to leverage it as a tool, and we're integrating new data and resources into it.

Sablik: Have you also used feedback and lessons from this project to inform how your team is thinking about human capital development more broadly?

Gunn: We have. We don't think that students will complete Invest in What's Next, create their plan, and execute their plan as written. I don't think you or I ended up in the careers we thought we would when we were in ninth grade. The course is really teaching them a research and decision-making process that they can go back to again and again. As information changes, they can apply the new information to their previous decision and see if they need to change their approach.

When students are making real decisions about their career and education journey, they're considering the economy within their local community — what education pathways are available in their town or their region, what jobs are available in their town or their region. Or maybe they want to move and they need to consider what jobs are available elsewhere. And so, Invest in What's Next is the starting point.

This is where we really partner with those local K-12 education systems, local community colleges, industry, and business community members to understand what the ecosystem is like within a particular community and how can we pair Invest in What's Next with the resources that exist within a region to make sure that the students get well connected to the opportunities that exist there.

Sablik: Sarah, thanks so much for coming on the show to talk about Invest in What's Next.