Higher Ed’s Role in Shaping the U.S. Workforce

This is Future youe with Jeff Salingo and Michael Horn.

Welcome to Future youe. I'm Jeff Salingo.

And I'm Michael Horn.

And it's great to have you here again with us this week. We have a great guest with us this week, somebody Michael and I have known for quite some time, Jamie Marisotis from the Lumina Foundation. And it's great to have you here. We're actually live at the ASU GSV conference. And so it's great to have you with us.

Great to be with you guys. Great.

So, Jamie, a question that we ask all of our guests is what got you started in higher ed? What are you passionate about? But why higher ed? Of all the things in the world.

You know, when I first graduated from college, I'm a first generation college graduate, I was looking for a job in public policy. And truth is, I could have found a job in transportation policy and, you know, defense policy. I ended up getting a job at the College Board. It was a really good job. I was a policy analyst, the College Board. And I was literally about six months into the job when I realized the work that I was doing on student financial aid and access to college was actually about people like me. And it really hadn't occurred to me when I took the job that the work that I was doing was actually people like me. So I was analyzing the high school and beyond data set that was literally my age cohort, and it just didn't occur to me. And at that point I realized this is what I want to do. This is my passion, because I felt like I got lucky. I got lucky getting into college, got lucky getting through college, some combination of, you know, great family support, but also a lot of fortunate things along the way. And luck is a terrible societal strategy. I wanted to work on actually having, helping to contribute to some sort of plan to help a lot of people do better. Because I believe then, as I do believe now, that learning is the pathway to economic and social prosperity. And so it's been my passion since then.

And so since you've obviously been at the helm of Lumina for some time now, for the listeners that are not familiar with the role that Lumina has played in the higher education ecosystem for many years and deeply thinking about the upskilling of American talent and getting beyond this luck, can you give us a sense of where the strategy is now and the big goal that you all set, obviously for learners with credentials in the future?

Yeah, you know, it's been an interesting pathway. So I've Been at Lumina a decade now. It's gone by very fast for me. And you know, the, the idea that we have to have this North Star goal, I think is something that had been talked about in the context of that time period. We were about a year ahead of President Obama on when, when he worked to, to establish his national goal. Obviously his imprint on this sort of changed a lot of the conversation nationally. But, but setting the goal was sort of like you get into your car and you turn on the gps, he's at the destination first, and you figure out how to get there. And for us, it really became our view that we are a leadership organization and we can actually contribute to the national dialogue by being a catalyst in helping the country achieve that goal. So it's not Lumina's goal. It's a goal that we think the country needs to have and we're sort of the arbiter of it, if you will. And so we've been the consistent partner over time, interestingly. And you know, the, the, the most recent data, which is that when we started it was a little below 38%

with a post secondary. Yeah.

With a, with a post secondary degree or credential. Today we're at 47%. And, but we are not on the path to get to 60% based, based on that. We will fall short based on the, on the linear projection, which means a lot more needs to be done. And a lot of that has to do with, if you think about the sort of evolution of the strategy, equity has got to be at the center of all of the work. We simply won't get there unless we dramatically improve the success rates for African Americans and Latinos. We simply aren't going to get there unless we figure out how to actually get more adults into and through the system. There's a sort of math problem that we have now with our own goal, which is that if you're talking about a 2025 goal.

Yeah, 60% by 20% by 2025.

That means that for the most part, we're no longer talking about students who are in, you know, below high school at this point. Right. Because they literally wouldn't have time in order to be able to get, to help the country get to the goal by 2025. So a lot of this now has to do with adults, which you can see in Lumina's latest strategy. We're focusing very heavily on adults with some prior post secondary experience. And then the hardest nut to crack, which is adults that have never participated in the post secondary system at all.

So let's talk a little bit about that strategy. But let's first go back a little bit. Why is there, are there a couple of things that didn't quite work out that you thought would have worked out or why are we going to fall short of this goal? Are there a couple of things that you think if they'd gone a different way that we would reach the goal? And then secondly, let's talk about the strategy. So what do we do about adults particular specifically to get to the, to get to the goal?

Yeah, you know, I think a couple of things have, have happened in that, in that time period. I mean we have seen an increase in completion rates, which is one component of attainment. Right. So attainment is sort of a function of both participation and completion. And we haven't seen the increases in participation required to get to the attainment in order to get to the attainment. So, so that, that's one problem where, where we've, where, where we fall into it again, particularly for those equity populations.

And the problem of course we know those equity populations are the populations that are growing.

That's exactly right. Right.

So it's another numbers problem.

Right. So the other issue I think that we probably could have done a better job of articulating is that this is a broad ecosystem and within this ecosystem there are lots and lots of providers of post secondary learning. And I would say in the early years Lumina was almost exclusively focused on colleges and universities, what we would call higher education today. Over time now our goal always included non degree.

You've always been clear about that, right?

It always did. But we had, we had another problem which was that the data systems didn't allow us to count the non degree quadrantals until fairly recently. So that's one issue, but it's always been there. But frankly we had focused most of our energy and efforts on the degree side that we probably should have accelerated the investments on the non degree side earlier. We're now doing a lot of that. You can see that in a lot of our work that again, particularly for this adult with no prior post secondary experience population, some of them actually are theoretically do have a credential, but it's not recognized because it's a certification. And certifications can't be recognized based on our definition because our definition of a high quality credential is that it's got to lead to further education and employment. And the problem with certifications is they lead to employment but there's no pathway

further education but stackable credentials could Solve that.

That's exactly right. That's exactly right. So that's one sort of technical problem that we want to work through here is, and we're clearly trying to focus on making sure that these are high quality credentials. But how do we acknowledge certifications in this post secondary life, especially since those

certifications do lead to jobs. That's right.

They clearly lead to jobs.

And especially for these adult populations that haven't had college experience. I did a piece for the Atlantic, thankfully supported by the Lumina foundation and talked about these people who either dropped out of college or didn't go to college at all who were in these non credit programs at community colleges that were leading to certifications that they could get a job even in a couple of weeks. And that was the most important thing to them. Right. They didn't want to get into a program, maybe get a degree after two years that might not lead to a job. So it's all for these populations, I think critically. And this maybe could get back to your strategy now going forward with these adult students is a job is critically important to them.

That's exactly right. And we all know this, right, which is that for too long higher education told people we don't prepare you for jobs, we prepare you for life. And, and now there's clearly been some movement in the other direction. I want to acknowledge that, that there's a lot more recognition of that now, but I think it cost higher education with that population because they were never.

They didn't see it as relevant, is that.

That's right. They didn't see it as relevant. And so now we're trying to convince them that in fact this is the pathway. We know this right after the Great Recession, this is the pathway to the

middle class even more so now, even

much more so than it used to be. And, and you know, the work that Tony Carnevale and the team at the Georgetown center have done on certifications, it's pretty clear here that for a lot of those individuals they've actually got to sort of get that credential, that certification recognized as the sort of first rung on the ladder to greater opportunity. But for a lot of them, that hasn't happened. So part of what we're trying to do is to figure out how we get the certifications into that post secondary learning ecosystem of credentials, making sure that the certifications are part of this broader network, you know, this effort that we've supported called Credential Engine, where we're trying to actually get, you know, a sort of broader understanding of what's happening across the whole array of credentials into this nationally recognized sort of protocol. You know, that's, that's an example of where if we can do that and they truly do become stackable in the way that you described Michael, you know, then we've got an opportunity here to move those individuals up the ladder.

And for those that don't know, Credential Engine has done an amazing job cataloging literally, I think, every single certificate degree, et cetera, that is out there in the ecosystem, if you will, of American higher education.

Right, exactly right. And the interesting thing about Credential Engine, if you want to geek out on this, is that what's behind Credential Engine is actually this web based protocol called credential transparency descriptive language, which is actually like HTML or any other descriptive language that you see in the Internet, but it is a descriptive language that was developed to describe credentials. The idea here is that any credential issuer can use CTDL to publish information about their credentials to the web using that format. Once we get critical mass on that, you have a very different ecosystem because now employers, consumers, even governments can capture that data, develop apps, tools and other things to actually be able to use the information. So it's an open source platform, so we did it before somebody else who might want to charge a toll for that system would do that. And the idea is that if we get enough critical mass in it, there will be a whole market of tools and apps that are developed in order to be able to capture that data.

So, Jamie, I'm curious one thing. So they show literally thousands of credentials that are possible. How do you know which ones actually have value in the marketplace? Either from a labor perspective, getting into employment, or from a further education perspective, as in they'll actually lead to an opportunity, career ultimately.

So in the beginning, that's not the goal. The goal is to get the credentials into the system. And then to my point about the development of apps and tools, then, then once the data is there, once you've got enough critical mass on the data, then the conversation about so what is the sorting mechanism to ensure that you don't want to every credential to count? There's no doubt about it. Who gets to decide and what is high quality then becomes part of the conversation. But we're sort of asking the prior question. You can't assume that a credential is high quality or not unless you know what's behind it, what it actually is. And that's a fundamental problem with the current system, is that we don't know what these credentials are. We don't know which represent. Yeah, the opaqueness is really challenging.

Jimmy, I want to take you out of your role as head of Lumina because a couple of years ago you wrote a book on talent and how talent is distributed across the country, but not opportunity for that talent. You talked, I think in the last couple of years, it seems, particularly among more selective colleges, you know, colleges that had really low numbers, for example, Pell Grant recipients, first generation students. There's been a lot of push on them to do better on that front, which was a big, big part of your book. You talked a lot about immigration and we're probably not necessarily going, it seems, in the right direction. So we're. What do you think as now, as you look back on what you wrote in that book a couple of years now behind you, what do you think is where do you think we're going well in your recommendations? And what do you think is going well in terms of your recommendations? And again, maybe immigration is the big one, but what do you think really needs to change in order to better distribute opportunity for the talent that's in this country?

The biggest change that we've seen since 2015, when I wrote the book, is that. And you both have written similar things about this topic, but there really is an emerging ecosystem of here of post secondary learning. This is not just an idea. You can see it starting to emerge in some concrete ways. And so all of us who were sort of talking about those issues, I think we've been generally validated by what we've seen since that time period. I do think that there is still a lack of acknowledgement that the key to prosperity in American society is talent. And that talent has to be developed, that it's not just innate and some of that talent actually has to be imported because we don't have enough talent in the United States. And so it's been interesting, my writing about immigration. One of the things that I talked about was a skills based immigration model, which in some ways might sound a lot like what President Trump has proposed. But there's a huge distinction between his idea and my idea. My idea is that we need more immigration. What they want to do is use

that as a life factor.

Right?

Yeah.

Eliminate family reunification as the, as the Abdallah skills maze. My point is family reunification is a necessary but not sufficient element of an immigration system. That what we need is a skills based model in addition to that to increase immigration because we literally don't have enough talent in the United States. Now, our goal should be to grow as much of the talent as we can. That that should be our objective. But we won't be able to do that fast enough. We need to use immigration as part of the strategy. And when I wrote the book, I thought I had some controversial ideas. But, you know, events have sort of surpassed me here in terms of the national debate on immigration. And I've been very clear in saying that I think we are having the wrong conversation at the wrong time in this country about immigration. I feel like we've hit bottom and we keep digging. And I'm very concerned about this view that immigration is actually a negative to the country when we have clear evidence that immigrants actually add tremendous value to our to our democracy, to our economy, to our social success as a nation.

Jamie, thanks for all that you do to bring these issues to the spotlight and focusing the efforts of the Lumina foundation to upskill America across all populations. Really appreciate the work you do and for joining us on Future youe, thank

you both very much.

And we'll be back right after this.

This episode of Future youe was made possible with support from the Academy for Innovative Higher Education Leadership. The Academy is a partnership between Arizona State University and Georgetown University and is the premier training ground for those who aspire to senior leadership positions in higher education and those who want to lead organizational change at colleges and universities in the future. For more information and to apply to our next cohort, go to Georgetown asu. Edu. This episode was also made possible with support from the Entangled Group, where innovation meets operations. Entangled is a venture studio focused on helping the education ecosystem transition to support the knowledge economy. We build companies and nonprofits that support higher education institutions as they innovate to carry out their critical missions for society in the 21st century.

And welcome back to Future youe. Just coming out of a great conversation with Jamie Marisotis of the Lumina Foundation. Jeff, several interesting strands that I'd love to pick up on in our conversation, the first of which he talked about this phenomenon, if you will, of non credit bearing courses. In effect, you've explored this in your own reporting. Can you go a little deeper on what this is and why it matters?

Yeah, I mean, you talked about certifications, right? Certifications that lead to jobs but are not counted necessarily as credentials. And I saw this, I did a piece for the Atlantic a couple months ago in Newton, Iowa, which was always known as the Maytag capital of the world. At one point that Maytag had 5,000 employees there over Time they downsized and eventually were bought by Whirlpool and moved all their operations to Cincinnati and to Mexico. And so it let this big void in the town for people who worked for Maytag, many of whom didn't have high school or college experience at all. And so what happened was typical of the federal government, they come in, they do all these federal job retraining programs. Almost all of them are degree bearing programs, even two year degree programs. And the completion rates of them are awful. Most students started. These are students who hadn't been in a high school classroom for years, let alone college. Let alone college. Maybe some of them at some point attempted college, but they just didn't like it. So what Des Moines area Community College, which has a campus in Newton, decided to do is why don't we work with local employers, talk to them about what they need, and then develop a curriculum based on that?

Sounds logical, right?

And that we divide it up, we unbundle it so that we say, okay, Here are the 1216 competencies you need. But what do you need to get the person started in the job? It might only be two competencies that we could deliver, by the way, in a two week non credit course, they did that. And so what happened was these people would come in now in two weeks, they'd be skilled enough to start work, they continue on. Eventually they'd be able to get some credit for that work and for the courses they took that eventually would lead to a degree. But the completion rates on these were twice more than, twice as high. And people again were getting into jobs because that's what they wanted. They didn't want an associate's degree.

So that sounds like a great innovation. Yeah. What's the problem with it?

Well, part of it was the federal government doesn't really like this in terms of money. Right. So.

Meaning they don't know how to account.

They don't know how to account for it. Right. And so this was actually a state program that they use state money for instead of federal retraining program or Title 4 or anything else. And so it really goes back to something we've talked about before on this podcast, is that, you know, the federal regulations and federal money really lags behind what's needed in this, in this economy. And then a lot of this could stack up over time to other credentials.

Yeah. And so that was something Jamie talked about. And for those that aren't familiar, stackable credentials is a bit of a buzz phrase in the, in the higher education landscape in certain quarters. But the basic Idea is that you can take certificates, various credentials, and stack them into something that the system recognizes over time, such that I can take a one of these certificates from this community college, I can take something I earned from Coursera, I can take something from Udemy, et cetera, Put these together and somehow create something that is bigger than the sum of its parts, that adds up to an associate's or bachelor or master's degree in some sense. And you know, it's this interoperability of how do you think about stacking these credentials together has been the source of a lot of friction and debate. And also, you know, do institutions, do they need to. How do they ingest and understand what a certificate actually means to give you the credit toward an associate's or bachelor's or a degree that the system actually formally understands? The flip side view of it, I think, is that we'd actually move to an entirely different credentialing system that wouldn't rely only on an associates and bachelor's, but that you could continue to accumulate certificates and so forth that represented competencies that would basically sit in a portfolio of your education experience and work experience that would communicate what you could know and do for employers, which is the actual ultimate goal, not the degree in of itself. From my sense, this feels like something that makes a lot of sense and just hasn't been as much movement on as I think people five, ten years ago might have expected.

I mean, this will probably be though the foundation of lifelong learning.

Right.

And so I think some of these systems probably would be developed over, over time. I mean, the other thing that I thought was interesting that Jamie said was that, you know, we're not doing as well on, on access as we tend to think. So it's not just a completion problem when, especially when you're talking about the, the Lumina goal of, of 2025 a 60, 60%. And as he pointed out, it's a numbers problem because now these people are actually in school, they're in college, and so you have to move faster on that. He talked a lot about this idea that colleges have long said that their goal or their mission is not to train people for a job, but to get them ready for life. He said that's changing. But is it really?

My sense is that in quarters it is right in your traditional liberal arts faculty member, if you stop them on campus somewhere, my guess is that they wouldn't echo that. But I think in leadership levels more and more it's, it's changing. We're even seeing presidents of you know, places like DePauw College make promises that when you graduate our liberal arts college, you will get a job. And we will put a guarantee on that that 100% of our graduates will get a job. So I think, I think he's right. The conversation is shifting there. What's interesting is panel that you and I, Jeff, were on for Strada with the launch of their Institute for Work and thinking about the future of work and education and connections between the two, a conversation came up of should we replace the phrase lifelong learning with something else, which we've talked about, of course. And the reason, Michelle Wise, our friend and colleague there at strada, the reason she said that she doesn't like the phrase lifelong learning is because it's too often allowed colleges to revert back to this formulation. We prepare you for life. See, that's lifelong learning, not with an end goal of an actual job in mind. And it sort of lets people off the hook. I think is. Was her contention, which is why she was searching for a different way to phrase or think about this.

Yeah. And so, you know, I, not only do I think it's changing among, you know, groups of institutions, but it's definitely changing among students, even traditional students. Right. When you look at the UCL freshman survey for decades, basically since they started it back in the 60s, students said the number one reason to go to college was to learn something. And since about 2007, 2008, they said the number one reason was to get a job. And we're even seeing this. You know, we're at asu, gsv and I presented on a panel yesterday with Pearson. They just did some research on student attitudes and mindsets. And one of the fastest growing segments of students is this career focused student at all generational levels. But the biggest generation in their research is Gen Z, you know, the students currently in college. So it's very clear that the consumer, and I know people in higher ed hate that word, but it's very clear that the consumer is very job focused. It doesn't mean that, by the way, colleges can't teach you and prepare you for life.

Yeah.

Again, I think that, I think this argument, and that's an argument that we really need to get over. You can do both.

Yeah. And I mean, obviously in the jobs to be done research that I've been doing for my next book, we've seen a more complicated picture than the surveys have represented, where it feels like because to get a job is a choice, it's the easy thing to mark because that's the thing we're constantly hearing, but the motivations are actually far more complicated is what we're at least seeing. The point I think still remains, which is that students, the end customer for that product, if you will, to use another phrase people hate in the higher ed space is employers often to take graduates and to put them into meaningful positions. And you know what? That's to prepare them to have a good life. So, like you said, false dichotomy often that we see here.

I mean, it was great to see Jamie because he's been at the helm of, of Lumina for 10, as you said, 10 years. We haven't seen that a lot in higher ed philanthropy. We've seen a lot of turnover, especially the big foundations. So not only has he been there for a long time, but they set this really aggressive goal a long time ago. And of course, I think it got a lot more attention, as he mentioned, from, because of President Obama's push on the same thing. And he's pretty honest today that it looks like we're not going to make it.

Yeah, the candor was refreshing. But it also brought me back to one of our first episodes with Goldie Bloominstick that we're, we're, you know, she talked about the adult learner. Right. And serving the adult learner and the difficulty colleges have of wrapping their minds around serving that adult learner. And I thought what Jamie reflected on was that, you know, we're actually looking at a broader higher ed ecosystem of players that will hopefully fill that void over time if colleges and universities can't make that shift.

Yeah, I mean, I think that's an interesting thing. I mean, Lumen has changed, shifted its focus and its strategy over the years. I think sometimes that frustrates funders or, I mean, grantees. But I think it's clear what he said we learned and that traditionally we just looked at legacy institutions in the beginning. So I think that's changing, that they're looking at this broader ecosystem. I think the other thing, and we didn't get into it with them, that's changing is that they're looking at, at systems as well as at broader systems. Right. So we have had Bridget Burns on the, on the, on the podcast before, and, you know, she's the executive director of the University Innovation alliance, which Lumina has funded. And, you know, they're looking at these broader ecosystems, these broader systems of institutions in terms of making these changes.

Yeah, no, I think that's right. And so we're starting to paint a picture of interlocking players working together in different ways to create what that system will look like. But more here to be explored in future episodes of Future you. This was a lot of fun to be broadcasting you live from ASU GSV with a lot of great guests and Jamie was just terrific today. So for those of you listening, if you enjoy the podcast, please rate us wherever you are listening and subscribe and give us feedback through the email or comments on the Future you page. We always love hearing from you, love the ideas. Gives us more fuel for ideas for future episodes. And until next time, thanks for listening.