That’s one reason I tuned in to hear Reeves and some of the other speakers at the JFF event, which the organization converted from an in-person meeting in New Orleans to a free, four-day online program, complete with live jazz from Preservation Hall. It runs through Thursday, and sessions will be available to watch after the fact. (I moderated one on Tuesday with the heads of Calbright College, Southern New Hampshire University, and Western Governors University, on solving problems at scale.)
JFF focuses on education and work-force issues, always relevant to this newsletter, but especially so right now. Here are six takeaways from the discussions.
- The last recession hit men the hardest, especially those working in manufacturing. This one “is a very female event,” according to Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. While some businesses around the country are reopening, sectors like hospitality and retail will be slower to bounce back.
- Despite the lessons of the last recovery, this one, too, “is going to be very uneven,” said Harry Holzer, a professor of public policy at Georgetown. And with the likelihood of Covid-19 recurring in some regions, he said, the recovery will come in fits and starts.
- The more we can “examine the root causes of our economic inequality,” the likelier we are not to replicate them, said Alexandra Cawthorne Gaines, vice president of the Poverty to Prosperity Program at the Center for American Progress. The best way to do that, she said, is to ensure that researchers and policy makers actually talk to the people most affected. Also, “people are more than workers,” she said. Even with jobs, many need support like food aid and extra job-safety protocols to protect themselves and their families. Gaines didn’t call out higher ed specifically, but it seems to me that this is one place where academics can really make a mark.
- More than ever before, it’s incumbent on colleges to help students “name the skills” they’re learning and “certify them in smaller bites” to convey to potential employers, said Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education. Mitchell took the opportunity to plug a just-published ACE report on the potential of blockchain technology to advance such practices. He also highlighted the vital role of community colleges — “the sensors on the ground” — in quickly identifying emerging labor-market needs.
- Displaced workers will need a lot of assistance (again), but experience has shown that that’s not an easy population for colleges to reach, especially when people have just seen their industry disappear beneath them. “People don’t want training, they want jobs,” Gaines noted. (Certainly that was a theme that stuck with me from this story in The Washington Post about the challenges of retraining auto workers, and this Chronicle story about “life after steel.”)
- If they’re not from wealthy families, young people still struggle to navigate their way from high school to college or a career. “Youth policy is the missing link,” Carnevale said. His idea is a new counseling system, “not too much owned by educators or employers,” to help young people find their way.
The focus on pathways out of high school resonated with me for two reasons. One, I’ve been intrigued by the prospect of education and training “navigators” for several years now.
The more pressing reason is what’s in a new report on “disconnected youth” — those 16 to 24 years old who are not working and not in school. Since the 2008 recession, that population has been on the decline (from nearly 15 percent of the age group to about 11 percent), a promising sign, because disconnected youth are almost twice as likely as their peers to be living in poverty.
The pandemic will reverse that progress. The new report predicts that “low-income young people of color will be the hardest hit by the economic and social dislocation unfolding before our eyes.” The title of the report says it all: “A Decade Undone.”
Quote of the week.
“Defunding the police sounds radical until you realize we’ve been defunding education for years.”
—T.J. McKay
McKay, a high-school football coach in California, in a tweet that resonated around the internet last week in the wake of Black Lives Matter protesters’ calls to defund the police.
Please join The Chronicle for two virtual events on Thursday.
The pandemic is upending existing business models and opening up new financial and organizational approaches for colleges: new structures for teaching, new uses of technology, new forms of collaboration, even new enrollment patterns. Some shifts may be painful; others could actually lead to better ways of working and serving students.
To help me think through what this might look like — and how college leaders can keep their heads above the waves of change — I’ve invited three experts with hands-on experience in a range of settings for a virtual forum at 2 p.m. Eastern time. My guests are Matthew Rascoff, associate vice provost for digital education and innovation at Duke University; Karen Stout, president and chief executive at Achieving the Dream; and Astrid Tuminez, president of Utah Valley University. We’ll also save plenty of time for audience questions. Sign up here to watch live or later on demand.
At noon Eastern time on Thursday, my colleague Scott Carlson and the president of Paul Quinn College, Michael Sorrell, will host a conversation on how colleges can address the systemic problems with race and class in the United States. You can sign up here to watch that live or later on demand.
Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know, at goldie@chronicle.com. If you have been forwarded this newsletter and would like to see past issues, or sign up to receive your own copy, you can do so here. If you want to follow me on Twitter, @GoldieStandard is my handle.
