College & Career Readiness | News

Nonprofit, For-profit To Collaborate on Digital Career Readiness Curriculum

• By Michael Hart
• 08/07/14

A non-profit and for-profit company that both supply digital tools to help students and schools with educational resources will team up to create a curriculum intended to help at-risk students prepare for careers. The partnership has been created in conjunction with the Clinton Global Initiative America, a branch of the Clinton Foundation.

Roadtrip Nation, a non-profit that prepares career exploration resources, and Hobsons, which creates digital tools to help schools with personalized learning, academic planning and post-secondary enrollment tracking, will launch the curriculum via a digital platform for students in grades 6-12, targeting communities with large numbers of at-risk, low-income, minority populations that have historically high dropout rates.

Called the Naviance College and Career Readiness Curriculum, it is a blended learning program that is intended to help students build non-cognitive skills, college knowledge and the confidence to persevere in working toward long-term academic and career goals.

The curriculum will be distributed to 50 counselors in school districts with unusually high student-to-counselor ratios. The hope is that 30,000 students will be able to participate.

"Schools often do not have sufficient resources to meet every student's individual needs," said Roadtrip Nation Co-founder Mike Marriner. "This addresses this challenge by providing a personalized student-driven tool that covers a range of critical topics."

Among those topics, Marriner said, are goal setting, self-confidence and planning for college. Along with a number of self-directed exercises, there will also be a series of video interviews with professionals and college students, all intended to offer real-world advice about overcoming life challenges. Different components of the curriculum will be tailored for each grade level.

The program, which the two entities will collaborate to design, is a program of the Clinton Global Initiative Commitment to Action, which has as its goal the promotion of economic recovery in the United States.