A New National Compact Just Pledged Millions for Career Pathways. Not One Dollar Goes to the Counselors Who Run Them.

Everyone agrees that American teenagers need a straighter line from the classroom to a paycheck. On September 10, a dozen organizations, including the country’s largest teachers union, stood on a stage in Washington and proved they agreed enough to write checks. The American Federation of Teachers, CareerWise, and Jobs for the Future launched the Compact for America’s Youth, and the initial commitments totaled more than a million dollars in grants, curricula, and new tools aimed at what AFT President Randi Weingarten called the “launchpad decade” between ages 16 and 26.

Read the list of commitments twice, though, and a pattern emerges. Grants for local union affiliates. An AI research partnership. A construction-apprenticeship app. Manufacturing curriculum pilots. Not one line item funds the person who actually sits across the table from a student and helps her sort through all of it: the school counselor.

What the compact actually funds

The Compact asks organizations to commit across three pillars: mobilizing industry investment, advancing policy, and deploying tools. The early money follows that script closely. The AFT is putting $150,000 into Career Pathways Partnership Grants for local affiliates. Jobs for the Future and LinkedIn are spending $400,000 over a year studying how artificial intelligence is reshaping entry-level jobs. General Motors is giving $500,000 to an AFT program linking Detroit middle schoolers to advanced manufacturing careers. North America’s Building Trades Unions and Microsoft built an AI tool called the Jobs Machine to help students find registered apprenticeships. The Siemens Foundation, the Walton Family Foundation, and the Annie E. Casey Foundation are backing CareerWise’s own apprenticeship model.

“We are missing early-career infrastructure at a time when there is a lot of uncertainty around what the impact of AI will be on early careers across a range of sectors,” said Brent Parton, president and CEO of CareerWise. Schools cannot do this work alone, he said. The compact’s goal is to build the connective tissue between education, labor, and industry, one grant and one tool at a time.

The infrastructure everyone keeps citing already exists. It is underfunded.

Here is the part that should sting a little. The infrastructure Parton is describing, the person who maps a student’s interests to a pathway, connects her to an internship or apprenticeship, and tracks whether it actually worked, already exists in every building. It is called a school counselor, and the federal program built to fund exactly this work has been losing ground for two decades.

“Funding for the federal Carl D. Perkins Career and Technical Education Act, which provides foundational support for CTE programs in every state, is actually hundreds of millions of dollars below the inflation-adjusted level from over 20 years ago.” Alisha Hyslop, Association for Career and Technical Education (2026)

The contradiction gets sharper from there. The current administration has repeatedly praised career and technical pathways as an alternative to a four-year degree, with Education Secretary Linda McMahon pushing that message at every opportunity. Last summer, the same administration abruptly canceled more than $48 million in active CTE grants, including in Republican-led states, and redirected the money toward a new prize challenge instead. A compact built on private philanthropy and corporate goodwill is not a substitute for a federal funding stream that keeps shrinking in real terms.

What this means for your caseload this fall

None of this makes the compact worthless. A construction-apprenticeship finder, a manufacturing curriculum pilot, a research partnership on how AI is changing entry-level hiring: these are real tools your students and your CTE colleagues will eventually touch. But they arrive as a patchwork of grants routed through unions and nonprofits, not as staffing dollars routed through your district. Kate Kreamer, executive director of Advance CTE, put the underlying challenge plainly.

“It turns out our workforce is dependent on engaged students who are excited about the future, who are engaged with their coursework and getting prerequisite credentials, and who are ready and connected to a workforce that needs them.” Kate Kreamer, Advance CTE (2026)

Getting a student “connected” is a counseling function before it is a curriculum function. If your district applies for a Jobs for the Future partnership, a Siemens-backed apprenticeship slot, or one of the AFT affiliate grants, you are the one who will identify which students belong in it, hold the conversation about tradeoffs, and follow up when the placement falls through. That work does not show up in anyone’s press release, and right now it does not show up in anyone’s budget line either.

The advocacy window is open now, not later

Parton said the compact’s real goal is a shared policy vision that lawmakers can act on. That is a door, not a guarantee. If your district, state association, or ASCA chapter has data on caseload size, on how many students you are able to individually advise into a career pathway versus how many you should be advising, this is the month to put it in front of whoever is shaping the next Perkins reauthorization conversation or state CTE budget. The organizations at that Washington podium are actively looking for a common policy vision to point to. Right now, nobody is bringing them the counselor staffing data. Someone should.

This week, look at whatever career-pathway partnership your school already has, whether it is a local apprenticeship program, a CTE course sequence, or a nonprofit tie-in like the ones announced this month, and count how many hours of counselor time it actually takes to run well. Bring that number to your district’s next budget conversation. The compact proved the money exists. Your job is to prove where it needs to go next.

Sources

• How Can Schools Connect Students to Careers? A New Compact Has a Plan and Money — Education Week, September 2026
• Compact For America’s Youth Launches With New Commitments From Labor, Industry, Education, and Philanthropy — CareerWise, September 2026
• Compact for America’s Youth — American Federation of Teachers, 2026