Lexis Czumak-Abreu was a pre-med student before she became an electrician. For the past four years, she has posted videos from job sites in Cornwall, New York, and more than 2 million people now follow along. Thousands credit her videos with sparking their interest in the skilled trades.

Education Week's Elizabeth Heubeck asks whether influencers like Czumak-Abreu can hook teens on the skilled trades, fields the U.S. Department of Education says could face a shortage of more than 2 million workers by 2030. There's reason to think they can: In one global survey Heubeck cites, 44% of young skilled professionals said social media influenced their career choice.

But Alisha Hyslop of the Association for Career and Technical Education offers an important caveat: "It's not enough just to get students interested in a career." Students also need to understand the pathway that gets them there, whether that's an apprenticeship, an industry certification, or a degree.

They also need to know how to pay for it. In The 74, Patrick O'Donnell reports on the new Workforce Pell Grants, which launched this summer and extend federal aid to short-term career training. His example: Indiana has more than 500 openings for medical assistants, but training can cost between $1,500 and $4,000, even at lower-cost institutions like Ivy Tech Community College. For low-income students, Workforce Pell could make Ivy Tech's program essentially free. Indiana submitted it for federal approval in July and is still waiting. So far, the Education Department has approved exactly one program in the whole country: a 14-week EMT course at Iowa Central Community College.

The interest is there, and the money is arriving. But the evidence is another matter.

Writing in Fast Company, Sara Schapiro of the Alliance for Learning Innovation argues that career pathways are growing faster than the data needed to judge them. A report she cites examined work-based learning in 10 states and found 10 different approaches, with different definitions of what counts, different information collected, and different systems for tracking results.

Nebraska offers a glimpse of what stronger evidence can do. In a federally funded study, students who completed structured CTE pathways graduated on time at higher rates and enrolled in college more often, by 7 and 10 percentage points, respectively. The findings helped convince lawmakers to approve the state's first dedicated CTE appropriation; today, CTE is offered in every Nebraska public high school.

But when the same researchers tried to answer the question that may matter most to students—whether participants went on to earn more—they couldn't. The infrastructure connecting the state's education and workforce records simply didn't exist.

Influencers can help students imagine a different future, and new aid can help them afford the training to pursue it. The next challenge is ensuring that the pathways attracting students actually take them where they want to go.

— Thomas

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