We Need Better Data to Understand What Happens to Students After High School (Opinion)

Every year, millions of students decide what comes next: which courses to take, whether to pursue college, an apprenticeship, or a job-training program, or go straight into the workforce. Too often, they make those decisions without all the information they need to choose wisely.

At the same time, state leaders are trying to answer their own set of questions: Which programs are working to prepare students? Where should we invest? Are we closing opportunity gaps for students to access high-quality jobs? Right now, only the state leaders and researchers working in states with the most robust data systems that link early-childhood, K-12, postsecondary, and workforce data are able to answer those questions and make the most informed decisions possible for their constituents.

Building the systems that generate high-quality, usable data requires two things working in tandem: adequate federal support and strong state infrastructure. At the federal level, the Institute for Education Sciences anchors education research and development within the U.S. Department of Education. While many have called for reshaping the agency, there is also broad agreement that it has a key role to play, including prioritizing and funding education data systems.

The vision for strengthening IES may become much harder to achieve, however, if the president’s proposed cuts to federal education R&D, including a 67% cut to IES, become reality. As Congress begins to map out next year’s funding, cuts of that magnitude would leave states without the support they need to build strong data systems.

The fiscal 2026 budget appropriations process offers some optimism: President Donald Trump proposed the same deep cuts to IES, but Congress rejected them, passing a budget that held the agency at roughly prior-year levels—including maintaining funding for State Longitudinal Data System grants and the Workforce Data Quality Initiative at $28.5 million and $6 million, respectively.

This federal support is critical. To produce the kinds of public tools that people need to understand what works, states must first have a robust data system that connects data across education and workforce. Developing and maintaining these systems is hard, and states need help to get there. The Data Quality Campaign has worked with long-standing leaders like Kentucky, Texas, and Washington, as well as states like Alabama and California, all of which have prioritized answering questions like which pathways lead to good jobs and whether opportunity gaps are closing through public tools and dashboards.

In Alabama, the state built out a data system—ATLAS, launched in 2019—that links data across all levels of education and workforce. But Alabama didn’t stop there: In 2023, the state launched the Alabama Talent Triad, a public-facing platform that puts data directly in the hands of students and employers. Through a credential registry, a skills-based job-matching tool, and a digital learning and employment record that students carry from 8th grade into their careers, a student in Alabama can see exactly which credentials employers value, which pathways lead to good-paying jobs, and where they stand in relation to employer expectations. That’s what a data system looks like when it’s built to serve the people it’s meant for.

California has been building toward a similar goal since 2021, when it first established the Cradle-to-Career Data System, known as C2C, charged with linking data across early learning, K-12, higher education, workforce, and social services. The state built on these efforts in 2025, launching the Student Pathways dashboard—a first-of-its-kind public tool that shows, in aggregate, which pathways California students enter after high school, how those pathways connect to college and career outcomes, and how results vary across different communities.

The dashboard is built for students, families, and counselors with dynamic data visualizations, filters by demographics and region, and the ability to download underlying data. It is one of eight planned dashboards from C2C. Future releases will cover early education outcomes, financial-aid access, transfer pathways, and employment outcomes—including likely earnings by degree and major—giving Californians an increasingly complete picture of which education paths lead to high-quality careers and where gaps remain.

But for every Alabama and California, there are other states that still need support to improve their data systems in ways that unlock answers to today’s most pressing questions. Building the connections between education and workforce data requires continued investment and often necessitates resources that states simply do not have—including people, time, and money. Even where the data connections exist, few state systems are built to translate information into public-facing tools that actually reach students and families.

State leaders across the country are working to build data systems that serve their constituents. The states that continue investing now will change what’s possible for the kids sitting in classrooms today wondering what comes next. But states need federal support to do it. And it will be difficult to scale what we are seeing in states like Alabama and California nationwide if the federal money, one way or another, just isn’t there.