Advancing lives: The system wasn’t built for my life.

^{Written by Mara Woody, Director of Strategic Partnerships, US Ecosystem at Riipen, this perspective draws from both lived experience and extensive work with higher education institutions. Mara partners with colleges, universities, and workforce organizations to expand access to experiential learning and career-connected opportunities. Part one of a six-part blog series sees Mara's insights help academic leaders better understand the systemic barriers learners face and how institutions, partners, and states can design more inclusive, scalable pathways to student success.}

I remember standing on campus, searching for my advisor’s office. I had rushed in from work and already knew I didn’t have much time. I found one of the campus billboards with a map, studied it quickly, and headed in what I thought was the right direction. A few minutes later, I stopped. I found another billboard map. Even with the map in front of me, I still couldn’t locate the building.

Not because I wasn’t capable or because I didn’t care.

But because I didn’t have the time to navigate a system that assumed I did.

At the time, I was working full-time, commuting, and trying to hold everything together. My classes fit around my work schedule, not the other way around. Support services were available when I could not access them. Exams conflicted with the hours I needed to earn a paycheck. Standing there, looking at that map and realizing I still couldn’t make it work, something became clear.

This system was not designed for my life.

And when a system is not designed for your life, it does more than create friction. It limits opportunity and slows progress. For too many learners, it becomes a barrier to economic mobility.

That moment did not just stay with me. It shaped my work.

The issue is not whether learners are capable of succeeding. It is whether the system is designed for them to do so.

For too long, we have built systems based on the assumptions that:

• Learners have time
• Access is attainable for all
• Support is available when needed

When those assumptions fail, the consequences are not abstract. They show up in delayed progress, lost momentum, and missed opportunities.

We have also relied on credentials as signals of potential, defined by time spent, credits earned, and content covered. But that signal no longer holds. It does not tell us what someone can actually do or how their learning translates into real progress. It leaves learners without a clear way to demonstrate their abilities, and in the absence of that signal, employers default to what feels safe, hiring based on background rather than capability.

When learning does not clearly advance someone’s life, the signal breaks down. And when the signal breaks down, trust breaks with it. This is why so many efforts to improve the system fall short. We try to add experiences, expand programs, and introduce new initiatives without addressing the underlying design.

Experiential learning is often positioned as a solution to signaling capability and creating opportunity. Internships, externships, capstones, co-ops, work-based learning, the list goes on and on. Strada’s The Power of Work-Based Learning report estimates that learners who participate in a paid internship as part of their undergraduate journey make more than $3,000 annually than learners who do not. We know experiential learning works.

However, it is critical to understand the limitations of current work-based learning programs. The Business Higher Education Forum’s Expanding Internships report highlights disturbing findings: less than half of the 8.2 million learners seeking access to internships are able to do so, and only two-thirds of those internships are considered of high quality. Further, Strada found that the learners who are most unlikely to secure internships are also the most underserved in education: students of color, first-generation, financially vulnerable, and more likely to attend open-access institutions.

But this does not mean experiential learning is failing. We never designed the system for it to succeed. It remains disconnected, uneven in access, and too often reserved for those who already have an advantage and access to those opportunities. Changing this requires more than programmatic solutions. It requires a systems change. But systems change does not happen in isolation. It happens when people align around a shared goal, design together, validate what is working, and build the conditions to scale it.

This is not a program problem; it is a systems problem. Systems problems require systems change. That is the work ahead.

About the author:

Dr. Mara Woody, Ed.D., is an award-winning leader, nationally in-demand speaker, and a leading national voice on transforming higher education for a rapidly evolving workforce. With over two decades of experience across public policy, academic affairs, and workforce development, she is known for turning bold ideas into scalable, system-wide impact. As Director of Strategic Partnerships at Riipen, she brings together educators, employers, and policymakers to expand access to real-world learning and advance responsible AI-enabled education. Previously serving as Missouri’s Assistant Commissioner for Postsecondary Policy, she led statewide initiatives to redesign systems around learner success. Dr. Woody, who holds a doctorate from Vanderbilt University, is dedicated to building collaborative, education ecosystems that expand opportunity and drive meaningful outcomes.

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