The number of people in northwest Arkansas is increasing. The number of jobs is also increasing, but alignment of people and jobs doesn't align perfectly. Addressing those gaps is inspiration for a new report commissioned by the Walton Family Foundation. The report indicates the region is doing a better job providing pathways for entering high-demand job sectors. Ozarks at Large's Kyle Kellams talked with Terra Wallin, senior program officer at the foundation. She says there are more students working toward in-demand careers.
WALLIN: A couple of the shifts that we saw over time is we've seen more students, or a larger percentage of students, enrolling in things like medical skills, pre-engineering, some growth in construction technology, areas that we all know are starting to really boom in this area, and which students can access with a high school diploma or perhaps an additional certification on top of that. But they could go into the workforce.
There are thousands of jobs available in those areas making more than $20 an hour immediately. And so we've seen growth in those pathways. We've seen some shift away from some enrollment in some of the agriculture associated pathways, where we see fewer opportunities for high-wage, high-demand jobs post-graduation.
KELLAMS: How does that shift happen? Is it school districts? Is it municipalities? Is it a combination?
WALLIN: I don't think we can point to a single factor that led to some of those shifts. But I think there are a couple of things that we know have shifted over time. One has been the state policy and legislative changes that have taken place. So both the LEARNS Act and the ACCESS Act in 2023 and then 2025 made shifts that impacted these pathways. So they established requirements around schools having at least one H2 pathway, meaning a pathway that's in a high-wage, high-demand field. They established more access to concurrent enrollment so students could start taking some college courses while they're in high school. And we know that those types of shifts have then shifted the behaviors of some school districts. And school districts are really thinking about how do they serve the breadth of the population, some of whom may be going directly into college and others who may be going directly into the workforce or some other kind of training program.
So I think we've seen some state policy change. I think we've seen individual school districts looking at their data over time from our analysis and the data that they have and the combination of those things. And frankly, a more open conversation that's about how do we prepare every student for what they want to do, what interests them, but also what will lead to economic mobility? That conversation, I think, has broadened. It's ebbed and flowed between being college only or career only. And I think what we see now across the nation and certainly here, is that it's a college and career conversation.
KELLAMS: We've been hearing for more than a decade how there is a gap in Northwest Arkansas between people seeking medical attention or medical specialties, and the number of people available to provide that service in health care. Have we seen more pathways, enablers to get young people interested in health care professions?
WALLIN: I would say that what we saw in this analysis is that health care is certainly an area where we're seeing more high school students have interest in health care in what we call medical skills, which could be things like a certified nursing assistant all the way up through an LPN. So we have students who are becoming EMT certified in high school. We have students who have become nursing certified. So we're seeing more students with interest in those pathways. And I think we're also seeing beyond high school, we're seeing more programs like Upskill Northwest Arkansas who are taking and helping retrain or upskill people that are working in other fields. So this report is focused on K-12, but I think we see K-12 as one piece of solving that puzzle around the health care workforce. And then we know that we need to continue to focus on upskilling adults who are already working in medical services or in other careers, and want to pivot into some of those patient-based service roles.
KELLAMS: Are there some of the growth sectors, growth industries that we don't have enough people to fill, those jobs that are still not being well represented in pathways?
WALLIN: I think what we see in this study is, especially at the K-12 level, there are a handful of regional priority sectors that are underdeveloped at this point in time, meaning that there are not enough students enrolling in those pathways to help meet what we see as the coming workforce demand. And I think some of those are not entirely surprising based on what we're hearing from employers in the area. Things like advanced manufacturing, building and construction, transportation and logistics, things related to supply chain management, I would say. And then technology, which we see is really cross-cutting because there are kind of technology roles within all of those sectors. I think those areas are ones that the report highlights as being underdeveloped, meaning that we need to think, how do we tackle that at a regional level? How do we get more students enrolled in those types of programs? In K-12, and then how do we think about the existing workforce as well?
KELLAMS: Are there more pathways available for students in larger high schools or school districts than the smaller ones?
WALLIN: I think one of the things the report showed is that our four largest school districts have students enrolled in all of the regional priority sectors. Many of our smaller districts, students in those districts lack access to some of those pathways. That may be because their school doesn't have an opportunity to enroll in those pathways, or the school is partnering with someone, and a student would have to travel to get to that opportunity and is unable to do so. And so I think one of the themes we saw emerge in this report, and we're really thinking about in terms of what the Walton Family Foundation will do going forward, is how do we take more of a regional approach to this? How do we think about those small districts and how we support them as a consortium or as a group to work in partnership on tackling this? Because no individual small school district is going to tackle the workforce needs for the entire region. If we're thinking about workforce across an area, then we need to be thinking about all the schools in that area and not thinking about this as an individual school district challenge to solve.
MOORE: Terra Wallin, senior program officer at the Walton Family Foundation, spoke with Ozarks at Large's Kyle Kellams last week. The full report can be found at waltonfamilyfoundation.org.
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