A national commission uses real-world examples to make the case for improving education and workforce readiness, while another set of reports calls for integrated education-to-career systems. Also, Eckerd Connects and evolving job centers, and seed money for helping North Carolina community colleges reimagine the workforce. (Subscribe here.)

Opportunities After High School

The midterm elections in 40 days will decide gubernatorial races in 36 states. They arrive amid rising anxiety about AI’s impact on entry-level jobs and workforce readiness. Two broad new reports offer practical solutions for shifting state governments, with a goal of better connecting education and work.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Commission on Opportunities After High School identified strategies to make economic and social mobility more accessible for all.

“Education leaders, business leaders, and policymakers should align education and credentialing to the existing and predicted structure of what the labor market needs,” the commission says in its final report, which represents a consensus reached over two years of work by 30 experts spanning K–12, higher education, business, philanthropy, healthcare, military service, and the arts.

The cross-sector coalition highlighted 100+ promising local and regional practices that could be replicated around the country. They conducted dozens of listening sessions and roundtables around the country, hearing directly from a wide range of students, educators, and employers.

“We’re building systems that all of these learners need to be able to navigate,” says Bobby Pace, provost and VP of academic success at Colorado’s College of Aurora, who served on the commission and led listening sessions.

In addition to pushing for better cross-sector alignment, the report’s core recommendations include emphasizing future-ready skills, multiple pathways for learners, and supports to help students thrive.

Harrison Keller, president of the University of North Texas, is one of the commission’s three co-chairs. The report isn’t designed to be a playbook, he says in an interview, but rather a source of inspiration with a focus on existing efforts and local context.

“Things are moving incredibly fast,” says Keller, a former CEO of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board. “We don’t have time to reinvent the wheel.”

For example, Keller through the commission learned about Braven, a nonprofit that helps students make the transition from college to careers. UNT later became Braven’s first university partner in Texas.

Keller also pointed to the BlueSky Tennessee Institute, a bachelor’s degree program at Eastern Tennessee State University that the commission features. Students can earn a degree in 2.5 years, and completers get a guaranteed job with BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee.

The commission called for improved data collection and sharing. The need for better data is increasingly urgent due to uncertainty about AI’s potential to transform the labor market. Washington State got a shout-out from the commission for its P20W data system, which Keller singled out for praise as well.

“Texas has a lot to learn from these other examples,” he says.

State lawmakers can help encourage meaningful interactions across workforce and education systems, says Keller. More employer voices are needed for that work. So is the sort of actionable intelligence about the labor market that the Texas Talent Accelerator has distilled to better coordinate industry, higher education, and economic development partners.

Big Tech and philanthropy can contribute to efforts to better understand what’s happening with jobs, says Keller.

The Kicker: “We need a renewed sense of shared responsibility,” he says.

Beyond Silos

A new series of six briefs published by the Christensen Institute describes how state policymakers can build integrated education-to-career systems and prevent leakage that’s occurring at every joint in that pipeline.

Governments at the state level are best positioned to lead this work, write the coauthors of the series: Michael Horn, an author and fellow at the institute; Angela Jackson, research director at Future Forward Strategies; Mallory Dwinal-Palisch, president of the Craft Education System; and Danny Curtis, a project director at the innovation hub of the Massachusetts Department of Higher Education.

“States are close enough to understand local labor-market needs and institutional constraints,” they write. “They can also address those challenges by setting statewide strategy, aligning laws and funding, and coordinating across education and workforce systems.”

Like the academy commission report, the series is peppered with descriptions of real-world projects. Those examples include a vision for transformation (the Tri-Agency Workforce Initiative in Texas), a cross-agency governance structure for developing a statewide strategy (the workforce cabinet in Arkansas), and informing those strategies with shared data (the Maryland Longitudinal Data System). 

The coauthors seek changes in how state funding flows, calling for financial formulas built for career-connected outcomes rather than seat time.

For example, they point to Indiana’s Career Scholarship Account program. That funding mechanism was created in 2023 as part of a broad education and workforce development law. It offers students in grades 10–12 who enroll in an approved, employer-driven career program up to $5K annually to help cover costs.

“Much of our argument is about removing regulatory barriers,” Curtis says in an interview. “There’s an opportunity to reallocate resources.”

But new money often is needed as well, he says. That was the case for the scholarships in Indiana, as well for California’s apprenticeship initiative, which the briefs cite. “You still need to have that additional funding,” says Curtis. 

He says state money can help leverage additional investments, including philanthropic support or even federal funding. The briefs are optimistic about the potential for that sort of collaborative strength—for combining assets across systems and traditional structural boundaries. For example, Curtis points to the expansion of career-connected learning in high school, which combines the student supports of K–12 education with the opportunity to earn credits that lead to a college degree.

“We have a lot of the necessary pieces to make this work,” he says.

Curtis agrees with Keller (who is quoted in the briefs) about the potential role for AI labs in supporting state pushes on education and the workforce. For example, he cites Google and Anthropic’s support for Credential Engine.

“They recognize that they have an important place in this work,” Curtis says of Big Tech.

More Than Job Placement

Eckerd Connects runs Job Corps campuses for young adults and American Job Centers across 14 states and D.C. In an article for Work Shift, reporter Lauren Coffey looks at how the nonprofit goes beyond job placement to help jobseekers with a multitude of challenges, including food insecurity and unreliable childcare.

“We’re not a temp agency,” Michael Smith, president and CEO of Eckerd Connects, tells Coffey. “It’s looking at who you are, what your goals are, your passions.”

Meeting the often-interconnected needs of jobseekers is becoming more important than ever, Coffey reports. And many job centers are experiencing strains, including cuts to food-assistance programs and rising costs of childcare. Click here to read Coffey’s piece.

After a Flood, Rebuilding the Workforce

Two years ago this week, Hurricane Helene swept through Western North Carolina, triggering devastating floods that took 107 lives, caused $60B in damages, and washed away almost 19K jobs in tourism and other hard-hit industries. Now, as the region moves beyond the initial recovery, its leaders are thinking hard about not just how to rebuild but how to reimagine its economy and workforce.

Good Jobs Western North Carolina, which is announcing $3.3M in new philanthropic commitments today, is a key part of that effort. Governor Josh Stein, in a newly released plan for the continued economic recovery of Western North Carolina, called for $20M in investment in the project over the next few years. Working across 23 counties, the initiative’s goal is both to get more residents into good jobs in the near term and to develop strategies to improve education and workforce policy longer-term. It will bring the region’s 11 community colleges together for the first time to work on a shared initiative.

To begin, the colleges have signed on to redesign and expand training to help 900 residents land jobs and to place another 300 into internships, apprenticeships, and other work-based learning experiences over the next two years. Blue Ridge Community College, for example, will be building new introductory academies aimed at moving people into engineering and advanced manufacturing. Others, like Caldwell Community College and Technical Institute and Isothermal Community College, are focusing on healthcare and short-term certificates in HVAC and the construction trades.

The work is guided by America Achieves and is supported by a host of foundations, with the latest round of giving led by the John M. Belk Endowment and the Rockefeller Foundation. The philanthropic dollars are designed to serve as seed capital that the colleges can use to develop and grow programs that could ultimately be supported by the state’s new performance-based funding formula, Propel NC. Short-term programs might also be able to tap into Workforce Pell once they can show a track record of placing residents in jobs.

“Philanthropy is intended here to finance the transition, not permanently subsidize the system,” says Jon Schnur, CEO of America Achieves. —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

AI Safety Net
Research has shown that AI increases individual worker productivity, but evidence has not yet emerged for widespread AI-driven job displacement, Robert Seamans, an economist and NYU professor, writes in a brief for the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. Rather than react to assumed mass job loss, he calls for policies that improve labor market adjustment, including wage and unemployment insurance, and scaling proven workforce-training models.

Entry-Level Jobs
Advertised wages in the most AI-exposed occupations are growing faster than in less exposed jobs, but the pay premium widens with seniority, generating only negligible gains for entry-level workers, finds the Indeed Hiring Lab. The analysis of job ads focused on software development, IT support, data and analytics, marketing, and finance. Some of the wage gains across those industries reflect a shift toward fewer, more senior job postings.

Short-Term Training
The U.S. Department of Labor announced $65M in grants to consortia in seven states to help community colleges develop short-term programs that can qualify for Workforce Pell funds. This round of funding through the Strengthening Community College Training Grants program is aimed at filling gaps in high-demand industry sectors, including AI infrastructure, advanced manufacturing, construction and skilled trades, nuclear energy, IT, and shipbuilding.

AI and the Economy
Google has expanded its AI & Economy research program. For example, Anu Madgavkar, a former partner at the McKinsey Global Institute, and Daniel Rock, formerly an economist and now a Wharton professor, were hired to lead the program alongside other experts. The focus will be identifying organizational practices, public policy frameworks, and training programs needed to ensure AI upskills workers, democratizes expertise, and drives broadly shared prosperity.

Technician Training
GM seeks to address a severe shortage of automotive service technicians by recognizing the next generation of young technical leaders in the space. The automaker offers a two-year training program with college partners to prepare GM service technicians, as well as a 12-week program for military veterans. Over the past year the company invested nearly $200M to help close the labor gap in the skilled trades, which CEO Mary Barra called a “societal problem.”

Community College Students
More than 10M students are enrolled in roughly 1K community colleges across the U.S., notes a new PSA from the American Association of Community Colleges. The video describes two-year colleges as “engines of opportunity” that help power the economy. The nonprofit trade group also recently rolled out a student stories bank, which shares the experiences of real students, media contact information, and data links that relate to the students’ stories.

Foundational Skills
Employer investments in foundational skills development for workers are inconsistent, Chelsea Miller of the Aspen Institute’s UpSkill America writes in a brief based on interviews with U.S. employers across a variety of industries. Likewise, measurement of the impact of those skills programs is largely underdeveloped. But language learning is an exception, with strong employer investment, program design, measurement, and internal buy-in.

Job Moves
Lauren Weber has been hired by the Burning Glass Institute as the data laboratory’s first director of public research. Weber since 2011 was a reporter at The Wall Street Journal, where she covered the workplace and employment.

Jessie Schook has been hired as the senior director of employer engagement at the Competency-Based Education Network. Schook has worked at the Kentucky Community & Technical College System since 2020, most recently as VP of workforce and economic development.

Mary Laphen Pope has been hired as director of state policy and systems change at HCM Strategists. Pope previously worked at Lumina Foundation and the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.

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