For decades, the narrative in American education has been straightforward: college is the primary path to success. However, education innovator Mike Feinberg has come to challenge this one-size-fits-all approach after witnessing its limitations firsthand.
The 50% Revelation
Feinberg, who co-founded the acclaimed Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP) charter school network, had a moment of reckoning several years ago when examining KIPP’s college completion data.
“We got the results for the KIPP alumni up to 50% of the kids, 50% of alumni, were graduating from college,” Feinberg recalled in a recent interview on The Balanced Voice podcast. “And that’s when you don’t cheat with the numbers… The very simple and honest and transparent math is take all your eighth graders, put them in the denominator, keep them there whether they go to your own high school or not, keep them there whether you lose track of them or not.”
Reaching 50% was significant, especially considering these students came from communities where college completion rates typically hovered between 5% and 10%. But Feinberg’s celebration was short-lived.
“I remember celebrating it for about 15 seconds, then thinking, ‘Shoot. That’s half. What about the other half?” he stated.
This question sparked a profound realization that would ultimately reshape his educational philosophy. Despite KIPP’s singular focus on college preparation, many alumni who never completed college thrived in alternative career paths.
“We had a bunch of alumni who wound up in the trades, and they wound up in the military, and they wound up being entrepreneurs, starting their own businesses, and they were doing just fine,” Feinberg explained.
Even among college graduates, success wasn’t universal. “We looked at our half that graduated from college and most of them doing just fine, but not all of them, not the ones that went $100,000 in debt for philosophy major,” he noted.
Feinberg’s New Vision
This led Feinberg to a critical insight about modern education: “College prep is a good thing. We don’t need to get into a soft bigotry of low expectations debate. College prep should be in all the schools. But college prep does not need to mean college for all.”
This revelation led to Feinberg’s next venture—WorkTexas, a vocational training program he launched in 2020 alongside furniture retailer Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale and Vanessa Ramirez, a former KIPP student from his original class who later built a career in juvenile justice reform.
WorkTexas operates a high school trades program and evening courses for adults, offering training in electrical work, welding, carpentry, auto tech, plumbing, HVAC, and culinary arts. The program’s mission goes beyond certification to focus on employment outcomes.
From Certificates to Careers
Feinberg criticized vocational schools that measure success solely by certification rates. “By definition, we don’t use the word training in our purpose or mission statement. We don’t want to fall in that trap. Our mission is to help people get jobs, keep jobs, and advance careers.”
The program’s approach represents a significant departure from the college-for-all mentality that has dominated educational reform for decades—a shift Feinberg sees as a necessary correction.
“This is where I think KIPP and Uncommon Schools and YES Prep and Teach America and the whole kind of ed reform movement of my generation, I think we overshot the target,” he reflected. “Hindsight being 20/20, all of my college counselors could have, should have been career counselors or life counselors where college is an important pathway but not the only pathway.”
For Feinberg, this evolution in thinking represents a more mature and balanced approach to preparing young people for successful futures—one that recognizes diverse pathways to meaningful careers beyond the traditional four-year degree.
“We spent the first half of my career helping the first half go to and through college,” he concluded, “and now we’re going to work on the other half.”
