TNTP Launches The Mobility Center to Identify What Moves Young People from Opportunity to Economic Mobility -- Before It's Too Late

National, cross-sector center will identify leading indicators of mobility, test long-held assumptions about what works, and build a shared evidence base needed to put 50 million young people on a measurable path to mobility by 2035.

NEW YORK, Nov. 10, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Today TNTP launched The Mobility Center, a national, cross-sector center built to answer a question the nation's education and workforce systems have been unable to solve: What does a young person need to build a thriving life, and how can we know they are on track soon enough to act?

The Center will develop leading indicators of economic mobility that can be read far earlier than today's measures, test whether the strategies schools and states invest in produce economic security, and evaluate how learning and experience translate into good jobs and upward movement. In doing so, the Center will bring together research, policy, and practice and share what it learns with the families, schools, colleges, employers, and states positioned to act on it.

"Young people are capable of far more than our systems are built to recognize, and the economy is full of opportunities they could reach," said Tequilla Brownie, CEO of TNTP. "For decades, we've measured our success almost entirely based on the assumption that if young people cleared milestones like test scores, seat time, and graduation rates, then mobility would take care of itself. The data tell a different story. The proxies are breaking, and they are breaking even for the students who did everything we asked of them. The Mobility Center exists to find out sooner what turns opportunity into mobility, and to say so plainly, so we can adjust course while there's still time to change a young person's path."

Mobility is an outcome the United States' entire economy depends on, and it has been slipping for half a century. For Americans born in 1940, out-earning their parents was nearly a given, according to research from Opportunity Insights. But for those born in the 1980s, it is closer to a coin flip. Even worse, for children of middle-income families, the odds have fallen from 93 percent to 45 percent. TNTP's own Paths of Opportunity analysis shows how wide that gap has grown: just 3 in 10 young people who grew up in poverty earn a living wage by age 30 — and even those with strong academic backgrounds who achieved all the important milestones in high school still have only a 58 percent chance of reaching a living wage by the same age.

Artificial intelligence is now raising the stakes, reshaping work at every level and making career paths harder to predict. Yet most evidence about mobility still arrives a decade late. By the time we learn what isn't working, millions of young people have already spent years, money, and the start of their careers on our best guess.

The Mobility Center will focus on three lines of work, each aimed at replacing an assumption with evidence:

• Leading indicators for a post-proxy world. Mobility as the field measures it today arrives only as lagging indicators — earnings at 30, a career a decade in — long after the decisions that shaped them. The Center will develop indicators that can be validated against what happens next.
• Testing legacy assumptions about what works. The country has invested for decades in strategies it believes drive mobility — dual enrollment, internships, advising models, employer-aligned credentials — but most are judged by whether they raise enrollment or completion, not whether they raise economic security. The Center will test what the field already believes before launching new studies, asking of each strategy whether it moves young people toward a good life, for whom, in which communities, and at what dose.
• Turning learning and experience into advancement. Young people build capability in classrooms, jobs, internships, service, and informal settings, but too little of it shows up in how employers hire and promote or how systems define success. The Center will study which experiences lead to good jobs and advancement, and how schools, colleges, and employers can make that connection more reliable.

"For too long, K-12, higher education and the workforce sector have each measured success at our own finish lines, and nobody has owned the handoff from school to work, which is exactly where too many young people lose their footing," said Angélica Infante‑Green, the Rhode Island Commissioner of Elementary and Secondary Education. "In Rhode Island, we're making big bets on career-connected learning, from readiness-based graduation requirements to new CTE pathways, but I want to know which of those bets are paying off while there's still time to act on the answer. The Mobility Center is asking the right question: What can we see early enough to make a difference? The young people choosing their paths right now aren't going to wait for us to catch up, and they shouldn't have to."

"Making decisions without good data is like navigating in the dark, and right now we are steering workforce policy in the pitch black—counting diplomas alone. To be competitive in the age of AI, we need to know which skills carry a young person forward: the ability to keep learning, to adapt, and to exercise sound judgment in a job that didn't exist five years ago. The Mobility Center is taking that head on," said Margaret Spellings, president and CEO of the Bipartisan Policy Center and former U.S. Secretary of Education. "That initiative reflects the same conviction behind our Commission on the American Workforce, whose bipartisan recommendations call for a national talent strategy and a Talent Data System to ensure that policy rests on evidence. Together we can give educators, employers, and lawmakers the data they need to build a workforce ready for what comes next."

TNTP partners with schools and districts across nearly 40 states, from big cities to rural communities. Increasingly, its partnerships also reach community colleges, workforce systems, employers, and state leaders, as the organization helps connect the systems a young person moves through, building stronger pathways into college, the skilled trades, and purple-collar professions.

Alongside that work, TNTP has a long record of producing research that makes the invisible visible and changes what the field does. For example, The Opportunity Myth (2018) showed how much class time went to student work below grade level, and as a result, systems rethought what they ask of students. The Mobility Center brings that same discipline, and TNTP's growing reach across systems, to a question that extends well beyond school. It will serve as the engine behind 50 Million Futures, TNTP's commitment to put 50 million young people on a measurable path to economic mobility by 2035.

TNTP launches the Center today with a reception hosted by the Fund for the City of New York. In early 2027, TNTP will name an advisory board of leaders from education, business, philanthropy, and government. TNTP is inviting states, districts, colleges, employers, researchers, community organizations, and funders to join the work here.

About TNTP

TNTP is a national nonprofit that works alongside schools, districts, states, and communities to ensure every young person has the knowledge, capabilities, relationships, and agency to build a thriving life. Through research, policy, and on-the-ground partnership, TNTP's work reaches 4,500 districts and 35,000 schools across 39 states. Learn more at tntp.org.

SOURCE TNTP