Beyond Navigation: Building Critical Discernment for Academic & Career Decisions

Session Overview

Practitioners advising FGLI students on post-college pathways (graduate programs, credentials, career decisions) are doing some of the most consequential work in the field, often with limited time and under real pressure. The data on those pathways tells a more complicated story than most advising conversations can hold. The Burning Glass Institute shows only 1 in 3 credentials helps people advance, and Georgetown CEW found 41% of master's programs fail a basic debt-to-earnings test, with disproportionate impact on marginalized borrowers. Since the systems FGLI students navigate are not always designed to work in their favor, practitioners need ways to help students critically evaluate not just the options in front of them, but the systems producing those options.

This session introduces The Discernment Series, a workshop curriculum developed at Northwestern Academy and grounded in systems thinking research, that is part of a larger body of work exploring what it looks…