Mike Feinberg on Why College Counselors Should Have Been Career Counselors

When Mike Feinberg looks back at KIPP’s college counseling model, he sees a well-intentioned program that handed students a map with only one destination marked. Reflections from his years at KIPP reveal how that single-path philosophy shaped an entire generation of school culture — and why he now sees it as an overcorrection.

“Hindsight being 20/20, all of our college counselors could have, should have been career counselors or life counselors — where college is an important pathway but not the only pathway,” said Feinberg, who co-founded KIPP in Houston in 1995 before launching workforce nonprofit WorkTexas in 2020.

Feinberg spent more than two decades helping KIPP students get into and through college. Getting Houston’s KIPP region to a 50% college graduation rate — measured transparently, with all eighth-graders in the denominator — took years of work and marked a real milestone. Researchers focused on school choice and outcomes have cited that kind of honest accounting as a model for how charter networks should report student success.

The other half of alumni hadn’t gone to college, or had started and not finished. Some of those who didn’t finish had taken on debt that followed them for years. Others who skipped college entirely found good careers in skilled trades, the military or small business ownership. Neither story fit neatly into the “college for all” framework.

“We told kids and parents that if you want to be successful in this world, you have to go to college,” Feinberg said. When he started teaching in the 1990s, student loan costs were manageable — closer to a car payment than a mortgage. Today the math has changed completely, and so has the calculation families have to make.

What Feinberg advocates now is a model where college preparation and career preparation coexist in schools from early on. He continues to share his perspective on education and workforce reform through platforms including @kippbigdog on X. At WorkTexas, that philosophy shapes how the program measures success — not certificate completion rates, but whether graduates are employed, still employed a year later and building toward careers with upward mobility.

“Our mission is to help people get jobs, keep jobs and advance in careers,” he said.