XQ Institute’s new The Future Is High School report signals that the way we define student readiness is evolving faster than the systems meant to support it. To explore what this means in practice, we sat down with two of our K–16 leaders, Laura Slover, Managing Director, Skills for the Future and Ken Eisner, Managing Director, Global Higher Education to Workforce and K–16 Skills, to hear what needs to change and why.

Their perspectives are informed by different roles through their leadership of Skills for the Future and Futurenav Compass, yet connected by a shared belief that every student deserves to carry real, recognized learning beyond graduation.

SLOVER: We need to recognize and value all learning, not just what is tied to coursework. As a former teacher, I've seen that kids are craving real and relevant experiences. They can show leadership on the basketball court. They can show up diligently for work. They can do behind-the-scenes work on the school paper to get it to press on time. These are all learning experiences that do not show up on transcripts. We're still organizing high school around scores, credits and time, even though what employers actually care about are durable skills: problem solving, collaboration, judgment and the ability to apply knowledge in real situations.

EISNER: The biggest challenge is that high school outcomes are poorly translated across systems. Families, students and employers care about real-world skills and job readiness, not just a diploma. High school is trying to prepare students for a world that's changing faster than the rules of school, but the signals we rely on haven't kept up. A transcript still tells colleges and employers very little about what a student can actually do.

SLOVER: In some (but not all) schools, students have access to internships, apprenticeships and work-based learning. They are developing real-world skills by grappling with uncertainty, collaborating with others and working through performance tasks, group projects and capstones.

And many states are working to expand access to internships and apprenticeships, increase dual enrollment and early college credit, redesign graduation requirements and emphasize skills through Portraits of a Graduate. North Carolina, through the Skills for the Future initiative, is piloting ways to capture evidence of durable skills aligned to the state's Portrait of a Graduate, while New York City is redesigning transcripts and student records so that evidence from projects, performance tasks and real-world learning can be documented at scale.But progress is slow and access is uneven. Too often, these experiences live in pilots or depend on zip code, school leadership or luck.

EISNER: Across the country, education systems are expanding their definition of student success to include durable skills like collaboration, communication and critical thinking, but far fewer have figured out how to document those skills in ways students can carry forward and institutions can trust.

Policy can create the conditions for this work, but it cannot make it real on its own. What's missing is practical infrastructure: enough high-quality placements, shared expectations for quality, documentation that isn't burdensome for educators and credentials that colleges and employers actually act on when making decisions.

SLOVER: The report calls for work-based learning not as an enrichment opportunity, but as something that should count explicitly for credit, not for some students, but for everyone. That means changing not just policy, but the day-to-day experience of school, and acknowledging that kids do a lot of learning, sometimes their best learning, outside the school walls.

EISNER: What stands out is how the report treats work-based learning as a core state policy action, specifically crediting internships and youth apprenticeships toward graduation, and situates that move within a broader, aligned set of changes. It connects competency-based credit, redesigned transcripts, next-generation assessment, K–16 alignment and postsecondary success data into a coherent vision.If future-readiness is going to mean something, every student should graduate having done real work with real expectations and hold a record of that learning that travels with them.

High school is already doing more than our current systems recognize. Students are building meaningful skills, navigating real challenges and demonstrating readiness in ways that transcripts alone cannot capture. The work ahead is building shared infrastructure across K–12, higher education, and workforce systems so that assessment, credentialing and policy translate that learning into signals colleges and employers trust and act on.