Lumina Foundation
Stronger Nation
Turning a foundation’s ambitious new education goal into a shared roadmap 13 states have committed to follow.
Redefining a goal the whole field was tracking
Post-high-school education, whether a college degree, technical certificate, or workforce credential, is what stands between most Americans and a stable, prosperous career. For 16 years, Lumina Foundation’s Stronger Nation tracked the country’s progress toward its attainment goal, setting the targets that state policymakers, advocates, and educators build their work around.
In 2025, Lumina evolved that goal. The question is no longer just whether Americans hold credentials, but whether those credentials lead to economic prosperity.
The numbers show why: 54.8% of working-age Americans hold a post-high-school credential, but only 43.6% hold one that actually leads to economic prosperity. If the new goal didn’t land with the field, its most-used tracker would keep pointing at an outdated destination, and the harder question of which credentials deliver would stay sidelined.
Lumina asked us to refresh Stronger Nation around the new goal: make credentials of value intuitive for the policymakers and advocates who rely on the site, and shift the national conversation from attainment to economic prosperity, without losing the audience that built their work around the original.
“Darkhorse brought fresh thinking and clarity to the redesign of our Stronger Nation site. Their design sense, data expertise, and thoughtful collaboration made them an exceptional partner.”
Courtney Brown, Vice President of Impact and Planning
One platform for education and engagement
We refreshed strongernation.luminafoundation.org, an interactive platform that introduces the credentials of value goal, surfaces state-level disparities, and gives policymakers and advocates the tools to act on what they see.
Following our data hero framework, the site opens with the big picture: the new goal, progress at a glance, and a revised methodology page that makes the difference between the old goal and the new one intuitive. From there, the story deepens to reveal disparities by education type, age, and race. A deeper exploratory view serves users who want more, with charts that export straight into presentations and reports.
Every view can be copied and shared with a link, so a finding travels as far as the conversation needs it to. And because state stakeholders kept asking for the underlying data, we built downloadable datasets that let states run their own analysis. That last part matters most to Lumina: the impact they value isn’t the goal they set, but the states now setting their own goals and tracking their own progress because of the site.
The work shows up where decisions get made. A U.S. Department of Education program memorandum, instructing states on aligning WIOA and Perkins V programs, references it. So do Tennessee’s Strategic Higher Education Master Plan for 2025-2035 and Utah’s First Credential Master Plan.
The Impact
25K
ACTIVE USERS
SINCE LAUNCH
11
citations
in research papers
13
STATES COMMITTED
TO GOAL 2040
Stronger Nation turned an ambitious new goal into a roadmap 13 states have committed to follow. Get in touch to make your data’s story as clear, compelling, and impossible to ignore.
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