Key questions about the State Opportunity Index

The State Opportunity Index offers a framework to help policymakers, higher education system leaders, and institutions connect education with opportunity. The Index centers on five research-backed keys to improve outcomes for learners and employers alike:

Clear Outcomes – providing accurate information on career and earnings outcomes so learners can make well-informed choices.

Quality Coaching – offering personalized guidance and support so learners can navigate education and career pathways with confidence.

Affordability – making sure cost is never an insurmountable barrier to opportunity.

Work-Based Learning – expanding opportunities for paid internships, apprenticeships, and other immersive experiences that connect education to career.

Employer Alignment – ensuring prepared learners can readily access programs that lead to quality jobs and upward financial mobility.

The Index benchmarks progress across 50 states and Washington, D.C., in each of these five focus areas, where data are available, highlighting both advances and areas for improvement.

For each state, the Index reports the percentage of students who experience a positive return on investment in their education, and state progress in the five areas. States are grouped into four categories: Leading (at the forefront, demonstrating strong progress); Advanced (substantial progress); Developing (early stages of improvement), and Foundational (just beginning their journey).

Before releasing the inaugural State Opportunity Index in 2024, Strada worked for a year with both strategic and technical advisory groups, as well as individual experts and leaders, to develop the measures for each of the five areas. The shared commitment to that work was inspiring, and that spirit of partnership is part of what makes the State Opportunity Index such a useful tool.

The Index gives states and the nation a framework for measuring how well their education and employment systems are connecting education to opportunity. The first and most important step in that process was to identify five key areas in which organizations and leaders across all three sectors — public, private, and nonprofit — can work to improve equitable pathways to opportunity. From there, we developed a set of valid and attainable measures that states could use to map their progress in these five focus areas. The State Opportunity Index is a first step in helping policymakers, educators, and business leaders measure and improve the connections between education and opportunity in their state.

No, the State Opportunity Index categorizes states according to their progress in meeting identified performance thresholds. We aspire to support every state in performing at the highest level across every area, and states are not compared to one another nor ranked. They are assessed independently with regard to their own performance.

We recognize the importance of understanding the full spectrum of education and training programs after high school, but because of the limitations in data availability about participation in nondegree programs and other credentials and the associated employment outcomes, we were not able to reliably include them in this report. We want to support the field in building these data resources so that future reports are more comprehensive.

The ROI measure was developed around the idea that everyone who invests their time, effort, and money in education after high school should be, at a minimum, able to boost their earnings by enough to pay back that investment in a reasonable amount of time. (For our measurement, that is within 10 years.) The ROI measure we use is not focused on maximizing ROI because our research with students indicates that once graduates surpass $50,000 in annual earnings, higher wages are not linked to increased perceptions of the value of their education. The measure also is not focused on the average or the median student or on a specific institution. The ROI measure we use reveals what percentage of students are experiencing positive value and the sizable percentage of students that are not.

While the ROI measure gives us one way of understanding how many graduates are seeing economic benefits from completing education after high school, the five focus areas tell us what we can do to ensure more graduates experience those benefits.

Strada’s goal is that all graduates see a return on their investment in postsecondary education within ten years of graduation.

We believe that asking whether an education after high school is worth it is actually the wrong question. Instead, all of those involved — educators, employers, and funders — should be asking what we can do to ensure that all students have the support they need to make informed decisions about their careers and realize the full value of their education investment.

Because the State Opportunity Index was developed to help states better connect education with economic opportunity, we encourage state leaders to use SOI to examine the fit between their education systems and their state and local economies. The targeted policy and programmatic measures in the State Opportunity provide them with a framework, centered on five research-backed keys, to improve graduate outcomes and strengthen talent availability for employers. This year’s report also features 10 “States in Action,” which detail show some states are using the SOI framework and shares some tools and resources they use to support their work.

We anticipate updates to the report that track progress against each of the metrics. As stakeholders engage with this work and as data resources improve, we will have even greater ability to provide the information and insights needed to guide improvements in practice and policy that will ensure equitable pathways to opportunity for all students. Strada plans to update the SOI findings on a regular basis and as state-based data becomes available.