My name is Dr. Stephen Himes, and most of my work revolves around helping students and schools leverage Real World Learning experiences in college and career applications. 

I’ve had an unusually varied education career:  My LinkedIn profile is quite an adventure.  Having been almost everywhere and done almost everything, I will say that the Next Big Thing in education can be Real World Learning and the Success Ready Student Network.  It’s the most fully baked, transformative framework for reimagining high school graduates for today’s economy. 

Over the past fifteen years, I’ve had hundreds of conversations with teachers, counselors, district administrators, education support organizations, private-sector education advocates, school board members, state legislators, and most of the original architects of Real World Learning. 

From all these conversations, I’ve identified one key gap within the Real World Learning framework.  If we close this key gap, RWL advocates will be able to show measurable post-graduation impact that supports a movement for transforming American education for today’s economy.  And, if you are beginning your RWL journey, it’s the one low-hanging fruit that will amplify the impact of your investment. 

Let me explain.  This goes for both our career-path and college-bound students, but I’ll talk mostly about our college-bound kids. 

In all the various RWL frameworks out there, one word is always emphasized:

Prepare.  How do we prepare students for post-graduation success?

Too often, RWL frameworks end with prepare, that our job is simply to prepare them for the post-graduation world, and then the kids…take it from there? 

But in our hyper-competitive college and career landscape, simply preparing students isn’t enough.  To fully realize the investment in Real World Learning, we have to help connect them to their right post-graduation opportunities.

Even then, connecting isn’t quite enough:  For our college-bound students, connecting can’t just mean pointing them to scholarship databases, helping them with college search tools, facilitating FAFSA help, and giving kids checklists and deadlines.  1:1 guidance can’t scale support to help kids create difference-making applications.

Here’s why:

In today’s college admissions landscape, tests are optional and high school GPAs are inflated.  Kids know they need lots of extracurriculars and service activities.  So, many college applications are virtually indistinguishable. 

Beyond that, with the post-COVID generation, these traditional metrics aren’t what colleges are looking for.  Employers are telling them they need graduates with skills, yes, but moreso, they are looking for character, empathy, communication, collaboration, proactivity, and executive functioning.

College application readers screen for these characteristics by looking for distinguishing experiences–which are exactly what Real World Learning experiences provide.  College applications readers will tell you that applications score better with the “get your hands dirty” experiences of RWL. 

This is why simply preparing kids isn’t enough.  Real World Learning experiences don’t write applications themselves.  Students have to convey these characteristics and experiences in the precise format of the college application.

That is the whole ballgame.  It’s not just preparing or even connecting.  We have to teach kids how to plug themselves into their next opportunity.

Think of your school’s Real World Learning as a platform with programs that help kids develop the skills, character, and experiences that will win them admissions and competitive financial aid at colleges that are the right programmatic and cultural fit. 

Post-graduation, kids migrate from your platform to their platform.  To do that, they need the right adapter that plugs their high school experiences into the college admissions process.

The adapter that connects high school to college is…the college application.  Without it, your kids can’t get from one to the other. 

Now you see the issue:  If we aren’t teaching the college application in a systematic, scalable way, we might be preparing kids for their future career, we might even be connecting them to opportunities, but without college application support, we aren’t helping them migrate from platform to platform. 

This is a real problem with measurable, material impact not just on post-graduation outcomes, but on the extraordinary anxiety of senior year. 

In the latest National Association for College Admissions Counselors research, “over half of students rank college applications as their most stressful academic experience.”   The Common App really is complex:  Think of the college application as Grant Writing for High School Seniors. 

It’s a storytelling exercise where you explain why you’re the right fit for your target schools.  This involves understanding how they evaluate test scores (if they do at all), how they interpret transcripts, how to write about experiences in the honors and activities lists, how personal essays are read, how they use letters or recommendations—all to show that you’re the right fit for their mission and worthy of merit-based financial aid.

Real World Learning experiences can anchor difference-making, award-winning college applications.  They provide what colleges are screening for–but only if students know how to leverage RWL in the storytelling of a holistic application.   

This is why checklists and even 1:1 advising still isn’t enough.  When you dig into the NACAC data, something emerges that should resonate with high school educators:

A vast majority of students report being “overwhelmed” by the college application because they don’t know how to do it, which compounds the stress of this being “a major life moment.” 

So, giving them checklists telling them what to do, or investing in data aggregation software that tracks who hasn’t turned in what, doesn’t really solve the real problem.  They know it’s due, they just don’t know how to do it. 

Even using data to allocate time and resources doesn’t help if you don’t have a curriculum to teach them how to do the college application.  As for your 1:1 advisors, if you don’t teach kids how to create great materials upfront, that precious facetime gets eaten up with checklists and high-level explanations–literally, this meeting could have been an email, or better yet, taught to them beforehand. And, kids often report that they don’t understand why their advisor is advising them because they don’t understand how a college application works. 

If this is such a major problem, then why haven’t public schools tackled it?

First, college applications are not taught in public high schools because there’s often no class where this naturally sits.  Second, our counselors are licensed with expertise in social-emotional needs, often with application advising and letter writing crammed under other priorities.  Contrast this with private schools, whose counselors are almost always former college admissions professionals.  Third, public school accountability focuses on test score data and “preparedness” measures, so resources aren’t devoted to post-graduation outcomes. 

The impact is real:  In one of the few studies on the subject, the Michigan Department of Education found “strong post-secondary outcomes” in college enrollment and college graduation from schools where “college planning” (including specific application instruction) is taught:   



This is even more true for low-income students, especially first-generation college students.

This is why, for your Real World Learning program to pay off in material ways for your students, you have to program to help kids achieve post-graduation outcomes.   This means helping them migrate from your RWL platform to the college platform, which requires strategic, systemic teaching of the college application in a way that leverages RWL experiences in the precise format of the application. 

As you’ll see at the Real World Learning conference, educators at RWL Early Adopter districts have developed all the experience and tools to make this programming work to prepare students and connect them to opportunities.  And, we know that college and career application support is necessary to migrate them to their next opportunities.  This is how RWL creates impact. 

The next question, always top of mind for educators, is figuring out how to measure that impact.   That’s the subject of my next article, and yes, it involves college and career application support.