Report shows Alabama gains in career readiness, gaps in college affordability

The Strada Education Foundation–a national nonprofit focused on strengthening connections between postsecondary education and workforce opportunity–recently published its 2026 State Opportunity Index, a report which details how individual states across the U.S. are performing on several metrics related to postsecondary education and career-readiness pathways.

The Index evaluates each state using five research-based criteria: Clear Outcomes; Quality Coaching; Affordability; Work-Based Learning; and Employer Alignment. These criteria are designed to capture a graduate’s ability to secure meaningful work, achieve economic security and mobility, and experience a positive return on their investment in a state’s postsecondary education system.

Per the index, Alabama has made several gains in key areas over the past year while also lagging behind on metrics like the cost of attaining a bachelor’s degree. To learn more about the state’s performance and how Alabama can use such data to inform policy, APR discussed the report’s findings with Nathaniel Rankin, director of the Alabama Office of Education and Workforce Statistics, OEWS.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

With regard to the “Clear Outcomes” metric, which measures a student’s ability to access accurate information on employment outcomes from postsecondary institutions, Alabama generally excels, receiving a rating of “advanced.” However, the state does not track employment and earnings data for students who only attain a high school diploma. Do you believe Alabama should begin tracking employment and earnings statistics for high school graduates, and are there currently any plans to do so?

Yes, and yes. That is something that's been on the research agenda for ATLAS, which the Strada report talks about–that's the data system that I run to help understand those kinds of outcomes. It has the capacity to do employment outcomes for any Alabamian who currently pays into the unemployment insurance tax system. We're working on expanding that, [which is] one of the reasons why we're “advanced” and not “leading.” But that's part of a standing report that I'm hoping to bring to the Alabama Workforce Board in the next several months to be able to show outcomes for all of our programs at the high school level, especially since every high schooler has to have those college and career readiness indicators, things like CTE [Career and Technical Education] that feed into those. I think it would be fantastic to know the ROI on those programs and be able to take that back into the classroom and give that information to students so they know where they're going and help them do that navigation piece that we thrust on all high schoolers.

Alabama’s four-year institutions also received an “advanced” rating in Quality Coaching—a measure of students’ access to education-to-career coaching and personalized guidance. However, the state’s associate’s degree institutions appear to lag behind, particularly when it comes to providing students with guidance informed by timely labor market information. How can the state improve in this area?

Folks at the state are really working hard to try and improve how we do career navigation, especially at the associate's degree level. A lot of the community college system, their institutions are on Handshake, some of them use the Alabama Talent Triad, our talent marketplace, and then some are working to develop new ways of doing that. But I think it comes down to making the data accessible and making those touchpoints with the students something that happens as part of their enrollment and processing through college. Because a lot of students, especially entering college, will have had a strong touchpoint maybe with a high school career coach, counselor, whoever it is. So I don't think that they have a lack of career navigation at the associate’s level, it's that it's not being continued kind of in the whole pipeline, but I think it's improving.

I think on the labor market data piece, we have a lot of that data on the department's website, but it's a communications thing: getting out and talking to people and making sure they know what's available and keeping it up to date. I think it is something we could do better, but we try to do that to the best of our ability and as we're integrating and systematizing everyone at the state who's in this pipeline, I think we're getting there.

One of the biggest factors in pursuing postsecondary education is affordability. While Alabama remains one of the most affordable states in which to attain an associate’s degree, it is far less affordable for students in the state to pursue a bachelor’s degree. How can the state reduce the cost for students seeking their bachelor’s, and are there any lessons that can be taken from the state’s associate’s degree institutions to do so?

I can really only speak to the data side of it, the policy stuff is more for the folks at ACHE [the Alabama Commission on Higher Education]. But I think creating this pathway, this continuum of care, essentially, for students who are planning out their careers is something that will help with affordability by helping students understand that maybe they don't have to do the bit of career navigation where you figure out what you don't like one or two years into a bachelor's degree, because that's going to contribute to a lot to higher costs for students. If you're changing your major, that adds additional time. I think Alabama is already in the lower half for students completing in the expected amount of time, so I think reducing that and helping students understand where they're going, doing better career navigation at the high school level, helping them decide where they are hoping to go earlier, is one of the ways to alleviate the affordability question.

Another area where the state’s four-year institutions fall behind the national average is in access to work-based learning opportunities like paid internships and apprenticeships. How can Alabama work to expand access to these opportunities?

This is something that folks on the Alabama Workforce Board, folks on the executive council, are interested in creating better alignment with how the workforce does its talent sourcing and then how students and job-seekers are testing out occupations–doing the internships, the pre-apprenticeships and the late-career exploration credentialing. It's about connecting to employers and making sure that they have access to the talent, data and information that they need so that any of those unpaid internships they can turn into paid internships, making sure that work-based learning opportunities can actually benefit both sides of the both sides of the equation, and making sure that we can better integrate how the handoff happens.

Alabama appears to be improving in its ability to connect graduates to college-level jobs per the Index’s “Employer Alignment” criteria—a measure based on the supply/demand ratio for high-demand, high-wage jobs in the state. What factors do you think are driving the state’s advancement in this area, and how can Alabama continue to ensure that college graduates are able to secure quality jobs and meet employer demand in key areas like health care, manufacturing and finance?

The employer alignment in Alabama at this moment, I think, is really driven by the employers. We hear from employers a lot that they have trouble finding talent, that they're eager to fill their gaps, fill their needs. So we're seeing a lot of employers who are taking steps to work with local institutions [and] work with the state to make sure that our supply pipeline is oriented to what they anticipate they need. A lot of employers can look at, say, a regional projection and say, “no, no, no, we're gonna need so much more than that and we're gonna shift away from that.”

There is a disconnect between how students interpret labor market data and then how employers interpret it, because the employers are always thinking about the big pushes that are coming that haven't necessarily materialized into job openings, which is something that the projections take into consideration. But I think bringing those two sides together is one of the ways that we can help find the happy medium between supply and demand. It's kind of benefited several of the occupations that I think were mentioned in the Strada report, because with a lot of those, there are employers who go to their local community college and say, “hey, we're really hurting for this occupation, what can we do to step in and help change how you teach, change how you credential, and kind of recruit from the community and then use that pipeline to to fill those jobs?” I think that's big for a lot of health care occupations. It's big for some of the tech-based occupations that we've seen growing in Alabama. But I think it's all part of the same aligned pathway.

Overall, how valuable are third party analyses and indices like Strada’s for you and OEWS?

I really value them. It helps put us in the national conversation. I think that especially where Strada finds the opportunities to compare Alabama to the U.S., it kind of shows us where we should be focusing on, the data that would be helpful to take a look at, and see what the cause of some of those gaps might be, and then reinforce the areas where we're doing things well. It also gives me the opportunity to go look at other states and see how they're doing something and see if we could put together a similar report. Actually, one of the reports that I'm working on now out of Atlas is really inspired by something that Kentucky is doing. So I'm really interested in taking models from other states and making sure that how other folks are doing things, and doing them well, is something that we can take into the ecosystem here in Alabama and then use that to bring Alabama up to “leading” and “advanced” in most of these categories where labor market data can be helpful.

Is there anything else from the report that you think is important to highlight?

I have been thinking a lot about ROI. It's one of the things that we're hoping to bolster our data on, because it's one thing to sit a student down and say, “okay, if you follow this very specific track, those people have a median wage of this.” And that can be a valuable tool, but showing that to a student, they're going to sort the list top to bottom and go down the list until they find something that they think they could stand to do. Showing them the actual investment and return on investment of their effort not only helps with the career navigation, but also helps us at the state level feed the people who make the policy and help them understand what someone's individual pipeline looks like. 

We've done research in the past on benefits cliffs. That's something that a lot of folks are concerned about in Alabama. As people transition off of government benefits as their wage goes up, making sure that they're still able to meet all of their affordability needs. And then when you throw higher education into that, that they would maybe be paying out of their own pocket or looking to find scholarships and funding for, it's something that they need really all the information they can get on.