There are moments in an organization’s life when you pause, look at the work you’ve been doing, and realize the way you’re telling your story no longer fully captures who you’ve become.
This is one of those moments for the Lab.
Over the last decade, our innovative (and sometimes messy) work has sharpened, and so has our point of view.
Our mission has always centered a “who”: New Majority Learners are why the Lab exists. We coined that term to reflect the diverse group of individuals who now represent the majority of enrolled learners. This growing demographic includes working adults, first-gen students, learners of color, parenting learners, and others for whom postsecondary education was not designed. They need affordable, faster, more flexible paths to good jobs, where their skills are visible and portable.
Since our founding in 2013, we’ve launched dozens of projects to address the barriers learners face, all leading to this critical insight: Change doesn’t happen one program at a time. It happens when we redesign systems.
Systems is the key word for the Lab’s next chapter: We envision a future where learn-and-work systems are intentionally designed with and for New Majority Learners — systems that drive real economic mobility and close opportunity gaps.
In order to realize that vision, we’re focusing our work on four impact strategies that move from individual projects to full, place-based system transformation:
Here are the strategies in more detail:
- We’re scaling skills-based pathways so learners can access short-term, affordable, and stackable routes into good jobs — with skills that are visible and valued by employers.
- We’re fueling community college innovation so that career-connected, learner-centered practices aren’t one-off pilots, but embedded in how institutions operate every day.
- We’re unlocking regional and rural talent ecosystems, bringing employers, colleges, and workforce partners into alignment so learners can access opportunities close to home, with systems that actually connect.
- And we’re designing state talent systems that work, aligning policy, data, and funding so learners can move seamlessly across education and employment, with skills and credentials that travel with them.
Across all of this, our approach remains the same: We design with learners, not just for them. By bringing learners, educators, and employers into the same room, we surface the insights that matter and translate them into systems that work better for everyone.
But what about our impact and outcomes?
The Lab’s collaborative design process results in a ripple effect of transformation across multiple levels, from individual programs and colleges, to regions and state systems. We’re measuring our progress through four elements of change that signal system transformation:
CONNECT: How are we strengthening cross-sector partnerships to better align education, workforce, and employer needs, creating clearer, more supported pathways for learners?
ENABLE: How are we shifting policies and practices to remove barriers and support more flexible, skills-based, learner-centered pathways?
BUILD: How are we strengthening the capacity of institutions and partners to design with learners, using data and human-centered approaches to continuously improve?
SHIFT: How are we changing mindsets about learners, skills, and success — challenging outdated assumptions and redefining how systems create opportunity?
We’ve launched a new website
You’ll also see our strategic clarity reflected in how we’re sharing our stories, including a new version of our website. It’s designed to make our work more visible and useful — a place where our priorities, our partnerships, and the impact we’re seeing come together more clearly, along with resources and tools for practitioners across the field.
Explore how we’re turning our strategies into concrete actions and impact at our new digital home: www.educationdesignlab.org. (And please pardon our dust as we continue to build out the site in the months ahead.)
At the Lab, we love good ideas, but we’re biased more toward action. The most generative work we know happens when the right people are in conversation with each other, designing and building together. If this work connects with something you’re thinking about, something you’re wrestling with, or something you want to build, we’d love to be in conversation. That’s where the most important things begin.
Lisa Larson, EdD
CEO, Education Design Lab
August 2026
