“If you can’t get a job today, it’s your fault,” writes Auren Hoffman, a prominent Silicon Valley investor. 

He argues that the job market is fine. Unemployment sits near a 50-year low. Companies are hiring and spending more on talent than ever. What changed is what “qualified” means. The problem is young job-seekers haven’t adjusted. 

The old credential signal, built on college brand and GPA, has collapsed. Employers want demonstrated competence, examples of something built, run, or reliably finished. If you’re still sending the same resume into the same void, Hoffman says, that’s on you.

He’s more right than critics want to admit. The credential signal is collapsing. Grade inflation is killing the transcript as a screening tool. AI is making knowledge access essentially free, so the college you attended no longer signals that you had access to learning. Only what you did with that knowledge matters. 

Hoffman describes three archetypes of the newly hired: the builder, the operator, and the closer. They’re defined by self-directed action, not pedigree. That’s a real shift. Young people who ignore this do so at their peril.

But Hoffman’s diagnosis stops where the harder questions begin. Questions such as what makes agency possible in the first place, and why do some young people have the conditions to act on good advice while others don’t? 

He assumes that once you tell people the rules have changed, they can adjust. That assumption doesn’t hold for a large share of the young people who most need to hear it.

The late psychologist and Gallup senior scientist Shane Lopez spent his career studying what separates individuals who navigate to opportunity from those who stall out in that endeavor. His answer, developed across decades of research, is hope, understood not as a feeling but as a cognitive skill with three components. 

  • The first is goals: knowing where you want to go.
  • The second is agency: believing you have the capacity to get there. 
  • The third, most often missing, is pathways thinking: the ability to generate routes toward your goal, and find new ones when the first route is blocked.

Most young people have goals. Many have agency in the abstract. They want to succeed and believe they could. What they lack is pathways thinking. This is the practical capacity to see options, generate moves, and recalibrate when something doesn’t work. 

That capacity isn’t innate. It’s built through relationships, through models and networks of people who navigated successfully, and through structured practice in settings that allow for failure without catastrophe.

Hoffman’s advice, build something, show what you learned, do what you said you would do, is excellent pathways-thinking guidance. But it assumes an individual has the relational infrastructure to act on it. For many individuals, especially those from under-resourced backgrounds, that infrastructure simply isn’t there.

Consider the contrast. A young person from a family with professional networks, economic cushion, and adults who model self-direction can hear Hoffman’s advice and act on it. They can afford to spend a summer building an app, fail, and try again. They have people in their lives who tell them what to build, connect them to someone who’s done it, and vouch for them when the time comes.

Now consider an individual from what researchers call the opportunity youth population, the roughly 4.5M Americans between 16 and 24, neither in school nor working. They may have goals as clear and serious as anyone’s. They may have real agency in Lopez’s sense. They’re neither passive nor indifferent. What they lack is pathways thinking and the social capital to act on it. No one in their immediate world has modeled it. No institution has built it into their experience. 

The cost is real. Research finds that by their thirties, those who were connected to education institutions or work as young adults earn $31K more per year and are 42% more likely to be employed than those who were disconnected. Telling them it’s their fault the rules changed doesn’t solve that problem. It adds blame to an already difficult situation.

This isn’t an argument against individual agency. It’s an argument about what makes agency possible.

The good news is that the scaffolding exists, in pieces, to build agency. We know roughly what works. Three model types have accumulated enough evidence to be taken seriously.

The first is structured earn-and-learn pathways, like youth apprenticeships, dual enrollment programs, and hybrid work-and-credential arrangements. These allow young people to accumulate the kind of demonstrated competence Hoffman prizes. This occurs inside a supported setting rather than through pure self-direction. 

CareerWise, which began in Colorado and has expanded to several states, places high school students in multi-year apprenticeships with employers in fields ranging from business to healthcare to technology. These programs don’t lower the bar. They build a ramp to it.

The second is career navigation with human connectors, adults whose job is to help young people see options, map routes, and recover when a pathway closes. This is Lopez’s pathways thinking made institutional. Junior Achievement’s JA Workforce Coaching program pairs under-resourced young people aged 16 to 21 with coaches in sustained one-on-one sessions. 

This helps them build personalized action plans and connect their interests and skills to real employment pathways. Research consistently shows that a single consistent adult relationship is one of the strongest predictors of whether a disconnected young person finds their footing.

The third is approaches for reaching scale, moving from boutique to baseline. Earn-and-learn programs and navigation services exist and work, but currently reach just a fraction of the young people who need them. America’s Promise Alliance has spent years documenting what it takes to move proven youth-serving models from isolated pilots to system-level practice. It requires sustained funding, institutional will, and cross-sector coordination that’s harder than it sounds and more important than it looks. 

Two current policy levers are especially worth naming. First, there’s the recently finalized Workforce Pell rule that opens federal Pell Grant funding to short-term workforce credentials, giving community colleges and workforce programs a financing mechanism to bring earn-and-learn models to scale. 

And there are state apprenticeship intermediaries like CareerWise that broker relationships between employers, schools, and young people, providing the connective tissue that no single institution can supply on its own. 

The policy task is embedding these models in the institutions that already serve the broad middle of young people, places like our high schools, community colleges, and workforce development programs. 

Blaming the young person who lacks pathways thinking for not having pathways thinking is not a workforce strategy. It’s an abdication of one. Hoffman is right that the rules changed. 

The civic and policy question is whether we build the architecture to make the new rules clear to all young people, not just those who arrive with the networks, models, and cushion to figure them out on their own. The tools to do better exist. Let’s deploy them at the scale the moment requires.

Bruno V. Manno is a senior advisor at the Progressive Policy Institute, where he directs the What Works Lab, and is a former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education for Policy.