Our Mission

Portal Learning bridges the gap between education and employment by bringing together high school students and leading employers to develop the career pipelines needed to fuel economic growth and increase income mobility for the next generation of young people.

✦ Our Evolution

✦ Empower

Empowering schools to launch, expand, or improve experiential and project-based career connected learning.

✦ Inspire

Inspiring students to build career pathways at the intersection of passion + purpose and develop career-ready skills through real world learning and doing.

✦ Support

Supporting employers to tackle today’s complex workplace, talent, and CSR challenges in a truly innovative way.

Bridging the gap between schools and employers

Our first site, on the campus of Belkin International in Los Angeles, serves dozens of local high school students in collaboration with a growing ecosystem of local and global companies. 

Portal Learning evolved from a micro high school established in 2021 to a nonprofit career-connected learning program provider, starting in July 2023, in order to scale quickly and meet the demand for increased collaboration between schools and employers

Portal Learning is currently engaging with school and employer partners in California to launch programs that meet the needs of all stakeholders: students, families, educators, and industry.

The education to employment pipeline requires reform.

Portal Learning was designed to address these challenges.

College isn’t delivering the promised ROI for students resulting in increasing cost and time to degree, and a decreasing number of college graduates.

LOW GRADUATION RATES: Nationwide, only 11% of low-income students graduate college. (Source: The Brookings Institution)

GROWING STUDENT DEBT: Over 45 million borrowers in the U.S. owe a record $1.6 trillion in student loan debt. (Source: Federal Reserve)

High school and college graduates aren’t equipped with the skills they need, resulting in underemployment or unemployment.

UNFILLED JOBS: There are 10.1 million unfilled jobs across America because applicants don’t have the skills employers need. (Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics - updated Oct. 2022)

UNDEREMPLOYMENT: 43% of recent U.S. college graduates are underemployed. (Source: Wall St. Journal)