This interview is part of a series on AI, high school, and the Experience Gap. Our report, Closing the Experience Gap, makes the case for a high-school model in which at least 50 percent of formal learning is experience-based.
College is an expensive career exploration tool. It is also poorly designed for the job.
Patrick O’Donnell tells the story of a student who entered a four-year nursing program certain she wanted to become a nurse. Once enrolled, she discovered that the work was a poor fit. Earlier immersion in healthcare, she told him, would have moved that discovery forward by several years. Now she needed to transfer to a community college and remap her plans.
Her predicament is familiar. We ask teenagers to choose a college and course of study with little direct knowledge of the work on the other side. Many spend their first years of college trying to answer a question high school gave them few opportunities to explore: What kind of work fits me?
Pat recently co-founded Ridgeline after seven years as CEO of Making Waves Education Foundation. The new Bay Area intermediary places high school students inside healthcare and maritime workplaces, giving them enough contact with a career to understand its demands and begin imagining themselves within it.
Most of Ridgeline’s programs run after school and on weekends. I had regarded out-of-school learning as a piecemeal response to a system that needed deeper change. Pat helped me see its strategic value. Operating outside the school day allows Ridgeline to launch across a region without renegotiating curriculum and schedules one school at a time. Each cohort deepens its employer relationships and sharpens its model. Demand provides its own signal: applications exceed available seats several times over.
Now schools are approaching Ridgeline about formal collaborations, including CTE pathways. Ridgeline arrives with experience already earned and a model students have already chosen.
The path toward making half of high school experience-based may begin outside school.
- Allison
On Why Out-of-School Learning Is More Transformative Than You Think
ALLISON: What’s something you’ve changed your mind about in the last year or so?
PAT: I’ve come to believe out-of-school learning is a powerful lever for shaping student career outcomes. I used to view out-of-school time as somewhat superficial. But today at Ridgeline, we’re betting our business on the power of out-of-school learning time. We did so because it’s the fastest way to serve an entire region without changing the most intractable things about school, like the academic calendar and instructional day. It’s been incredible to see young people take advantage of this time, doing things like taking their clinicals and studying for their CNA credentialing exam—really using out-of-school time to accelerate toward high-wage jobs.
ALLISON: In prepping for this interview, I’ve realized I share the same bias: that learning outside of school is supplemental, at best a piecemeal solution—not transformative. But you’re right that out-of-school learning is a great place to start in proving out an MVP of an intermediary model, precisely because it doesn’t require systemic or logistical change.
So how do we go from transforming out-of-school learning to transforming learning in school?
PAT: We are early in this work, but we’re already seeing interesting signals in conversations with schools about how our work to date might set the stage for either launching CTE pathway programs within their schools or helping them build capacity for their offerings. That’s not something we set out to do; we were originally built as an intermediary, coordinating direct service programs. But now schools want to bring these kinds of experiences in-house—that kind of work could be the bridge between today’s instructional delivery model and one more aligned with the labor market.
ALLISON: What kind of learning could be accomplished in out-of-school time if you were to put it to its limit?
PAT: Our programs help young people pursue credentials to accelerate their paths into strong, in-demand jobs. But ideally, I’d love to see out-of-school time used to give kids more opportunities to be in Explorer mode—I really love that framework from The Disengaged Teen.
Scale is the limiting factor. We are seeing huge demand from young people for pathway programs—for every program we’ve launched, we have three to five times the number of applicants as there are open spots. So we have to figure out scale. And we need to meet the students who are not raising their hands to join an out-of-school program where they are.
On Creating High-ROI Career Paths for Young People
ALLISON: What do people systemically misunderstand about creating quality career pathways for young people?
PAT: So many schools or organizations stop at exposure, partly because that’s what they can acceptably accomplish, given their charge and structure. Visiting a job site or attending an employer talk or career fair can be a meaningful entry point on the continuum of career exploration. But to really prepare young people for the future of work, we have to offer real, paid, work-based experiences, including durable skill credentialing.
ALLISON: Why do we stop at career exposure? I’d argue that we don’t even do that part all that well—too often, it’s just ad hoc.
PAT: I came up through Teach for America and have been a classroom teacher. That experience instilled in me a deep love and optimism in the power of high-performing schools to change young people’s lives. But my work at Ridgeline has also reinforced that building strong career pathways requires a fundamentally different set of relationships and infrastructure than schools have traditionally been asked to develop.
School leaders are focused on getting instruction right; they aren’t tasked with connecting education to labor market demand, or even knowing what that means in their region. They aren’t tasked with connecting with employers, and they don’t have the staff capacity or skill to manage the intensive work that goes into moving beyond career exposure.
ALLISON: What’s your telling of how we ended up with a public high school system that is not preparing students for a quality career path? How did we end up here?
PAT: I don’t have a definitive, research-backed answer either, Allison, but I’d venture to say that the push to send every high school student to college has played a role.
I absolutely believe every young person should be prepared for college by the end of high school, if they choose that path. But in prioritizing that pathway as a core outcome, resources swung away from career preparation as an equally important part of the high school experience. And the workforce readiness baton got passed to colleges instead.
ALLISON: And we just accept that students enter college without an understanding of what they want to do. You’ve called college an expensive career exploration tool. Tell us more about this opinion, and if you can, orient us to a more helpful alternative.
PAT: Sure. Ridgeline spun out of Making Waves Education Foundation, where I was CEO for seven years. It’s an incredible nonprofit that helped first-generation students get to and through college.
So many students at Making Waves were using college as career exploration: one student, a college sophomore, was certain in high school that she wanted to be a nurse, but when she enrolled in a four-year nursing program, she realized it wasn’t at all what she wanted. She said, “If only I’d had actual experiences in high school to immerse myself in this career, I’d be in front of this challenge now. But now I need to pivot to a community college and remap my life plan.”
This is not unique to Making Waves; that’s a common situation, and so high-stakes, especially for young people from low-income backgrounds who don’t have the flexibility and safety to make those pivots.
If we want young people to make empowered, informed choices about their future, we must give them real-world experience. That means advising has to go beyond information sharing and dialogue, and instead be grounded in a foundation of experience too.
Here’s how we’re offering that kind of experiential career exploration at Ridgeline: in our healthcare program last year, 50 juniors and seniors from 20 Contra Costa County high schools spent five months in Kaiser’s labs. They explored some of Kaiser’s highest-demand roles, including radiation tech, sonography, and nuclear medicine. Interacting with Kaiser professionals, students completed simulations and team-based projects digging into real medical scenarios they could face in those roles. An on-the-ground perspective is the only way students can develop an opinion about the work, and it builds skills, confidence, and motivation too.
ALLISON: At Humanist, we’re asking folks to imagine what it would look like for 50% of formal learning in high school to be experience-based. I’m curious to know: what do you think is the right dosage of experience kids need to start developing that sense of identity within a career path?
PAT: We haven’t yet landed on a definitive dosage, but I feel strongly that students need enough time to truly become immersed and get enough reps and reflection to shape an opinion. That takes longer than folks appreciate. Our model in both healthcare and maritime begins with a short but rigorous three-day experience that serves as a funnel into more intensive programming. As I mentioned, our introductory healthcare pathway program runs five months, every Wednesday after school for two hours and one full Saturday monthly. Our new maritime program is shorter—just three days—and while it’s quite rigorous in terms of simulations, we see it as a funnel into a more intensive experience that is launching this year.
That said, even that smaller level of exposure proved meaningful for students: I was reading evaluations this morning, and many students indicated a high level of intent in exploring maritime careers.
ALLISON: Ridgeline’s experiences offer unique hands-on application, and it sounds like they cultivate a broader set of durable, metacognitive skills too, like problem-solving and communication. In conversations with employers, there’s strong interest in durable skills, because they feel those skillsets will help employees—and thus companies—better navigate the ambiguity AI is creating in the workforce.
Personally, I think we’re oversimplifying it, isolating skills out of context. I’d love your take.
PAT: I totally agree. We work closely with employers to co-design our healthcare and maritime pathways and define the durable skills that matter most—without that context, we could do a lot of programming on durable skills but still not prepare students for what employers require.
I love how Next Prep, a program of The Opportunity Trust, a St. Louis-based intermediary, teaches durable skills—we’ve now incorporated their approach. They work with employers to identify a shortlist of the skills that matter most, then develop a rigorous rubric for what it looks like to demonstrate those skills. For example: one of employers’ most-prized communication skills is receiving constructive feedback. To learn this skill, high school students meet with a volunteer and work through a role-play scenario, where the volunteer serves as the student’s manager in their summer internship. Students are taught a framework for how to receive and respond to feedback—thank, mirror, investigate—then practice it with the volunteer, getting real repetitions to build confidence and fluency.
Embedding that kind of skill-building into an experience like the Kaiser simulation is strong pedagogy—that’s how you teach skills that stick.
ALLISON: I agree, but I’ll offer this challenge: an intermediary is required to do the orchestration and program management, and interface with students so they have a cohesive experience—if an intermediary does that work, there’s no incentive for the core system to change. And you currently do it for roughly 150 students. I’d guess you could scale that on the demand side well beyond that number—75,000 young people graduate in the Bay Area annually. How do we provide this kind of learning to all of them?
PAT: We are building a model for systems change that can scale across a region, once intermediaries become a core part of the system, like they are in Europe, for example. I’d love apprenticeships to be widespread in the US as well, because otherwise, there is no connective tissue to ensure outcomes across K-12, higher ed, and workforce. It’s ok to acknowledge that schools don’t have the capacity to fully accomplish this alignment on their own. Intermediaries can.
ALLISON: I interviewed Tom Kalil a few months ago, who runs Renaissance Philanthropy and also ran innovation, science, and technology under two different administrations. He has an exercise called the Magic Laptop Exercise: if you had a magic laptop on which any policy you wrote today would be executed tomorrow, what would you write? What policy, funding, or design changes would ensure our education and workforce ecosystem produces the outcomes you want for young people?
PAT: Top of mind: policy change to help measure outcomes and create some accountability across K-12, higher ed, and employers.
Today, every player in the ecosystem is incentivized toward a different outcome: high schools are scored on graduation rates, community colleges on transfer rates, and universities aren’t focused enough on meeting labor market demand. I’d like to see a policy that ensures each of those players is aligned on the same outcome: readiness for a high-ROI next step—apprenticeship, internship, credential, college—by the end of grade 14. That’s our primary objective at Ridgeline.
On A Ten-Year View For the Bay Area
ALLISON: What will the Bay Area look like 10 years from now? What’s the default future we are heading towards? And what is a more optimistic future to build towards instead?
PAT: Too many young people right now aren’t positioned for economic mobility. They’re underemployed with a bachelor’s degree because they didn’t have the opportunities to get enough work experience, didn’t persist through the process, or didn’t have the preparation or even just the connections to enter the workforce. That means they can’t continue to live in the Bay Area—we’re losing the younger generation here. Our community will take a huge hit.
To paint a more positive aspiration: I’d love to see the Bay Area become a leader in sectors beyond tech, especially in those fields that need workers and offer AI-durable jobs. That’s one reason we’re focused on healthcare and maritime—both have workforce shortages, and both are relatively resilient amid AI disruption. A regional strategy that supercharges development of these in-demand workforces across the Bay Area would be an incredible win for everybody.
I’m seeing more shared ethos and commitment from healthcare and maritime leaders to work together on this issue—they are realizing that it will be easier to solve this frankly existential challenge together, rather than as competitors. That’s a real source of optimism for me.
One Small Signal
ALLISON: What’s a small signal in the world right to which we should be paying more attention?
PAT: I don’t disagree that there is real signal around Gen Z disengagement. But I am optimistic by nature, and I’ve been inspired by the overwhelming demand from young people here in the Bay Area for rigorous career pathway development. When we ran our first program, it was a pilot, and since then, we’ve expanded from healthcare to maritime, and consistently bring in students from high schools we’ve never worked with before.
Young people are counting on us to bet on and invest in them. They know that sitting in a classroom for twelve years isn’t going to show them how to find a job, let alone a career they love. If we can make meaningful career exploration and experience the norm, rather than the exception, young people will celebrate. That desire should be incredibly motivating for the education and workforce sector.
Great blog. "College Is an Expensive Career Exploration…" Yes! Just dropped one kiddo off, struck by that.