Mike Feinberg has told a version of the same story in education circles for several years now. Recorded conversations show how the argument has developed: a generation of reformers built schools around college preparation, declared it a success when the numbers moved, and then had to reckon with what the numbers left out.
Feinberg, who co-founded KIPP in 1994 and spent more than two decades building it into a national network of more than 270 charter schools, is now in the business of what he calls the correction. WorkTexas, the Houston-based nonprofit he co-founded in 2020, runs free trades training programs that have certified graduates in welding, HVAC, commercial truck driving, plumbing, electrical work, and more than a dozen other fields.
The economic case for the program has grown stronger since it launched. Wages in the skilled trades rose more than 20% between the first quarter of 2020 and 2024, according to McKinsey research. McKinsey analysis also projects that hiring demand for welders, electricians, and construction workers could be more than 20 times higher than the projected net increase in new jobs through 2032. Meanwhile, the average cost of an undergraduate education has risen 169% since 1980, according to Georgetown University data, while employers have broadly moved away from treating a degree as a reliable signal of job readiness.
Feinberg connects those trends directly to what he observed in KIPP’s alumni data. A South Florida Reporter profile documenting his three decades in education shows how the pivot from college-prep advocate to trade-school builder was driven by evidence, not ideology. When the alumni who hadn’t completed four-year degrees turned out to be doing as well or better than some who had, the college-for-all argument stopped holding.
“College prep is a good thing,” Feinberg says in the piece. “College prep should be in all schools. But college prep does not need to mean college for all.”
WorkTexas was designed from the start to fix what Feinberg saw as the structural failure of most training programs: measuring graduation from the program instead of outcomes after it. Every WorkTexas graduate is tracked for at least five years, with the program monitoring employment status, wage trajectory, and whether graduates are advancing in their fields. Feinberg is blunt about why: certificate completion rates are easy to manufacture. Job outcomes are harder to fake.
The program now operates at two Houston campuses, serves students as young as 16 alongside adults up to 50, and has more than 100 employer partners shaping its curriculum. More background on Feinberg’s professional path — from Teach For America classroom to KIPP co-founder to WorkTexas — is available through his professional profile.
Earlier writing on Feinberg’s views on school culture and beliefs shows how durable his core conviction has been: that what students achieve is determined far more by what the adults around them expect than by the neighborhood they come from. What’s shifted is the finish line. High expectations, he now argues, should lead students toward the best path for each of them — not toward the same destination regardless of what the evidence shows.