The promise of the vaccine may bring back many aspects of our life from The Before Time — concerts, gyms, restaurants, and the movies. Many Americans are also hoping that herd immunity brings with it something else: the promise of work.
Over the past year, the pandemic has decimated jobs across the country, especially low-wage occupations in industries like hospitality, travel, and oil and gas drilling. The job losses have hit women and nonwhite workers particularly hard.
Many unemployed workers have said that they might not return to their fields after the pandemic is over, which means they will require retraining. Though many of them have yet to flock to retraining programs, some experts believe that dynamic could change this year. At the same time, the nation has seen a shortage of candidates in skilled labor like nursing and the trades. And in May, another class of undergraduates will walk across a real or virtual stage to collect a diploma and prepare to step out into the real world to look for a career. With an unemployment rate among recent graduates that’s worse than what it was after the Great Recession, some may seek additional certifications or training just to be competitive in the job market.
For all of these reasons, the public pressure on colleges to educate and retrain workers could be even more intense than it was during the crisis 12 years ago. And colleges have been eager to signal how they are preparing to meet that role.
Last week, for example, more than three dozen institutions announced their participation in the Taskforce on Higher Education and Opportunity, a coalition of colleges that is swapping ideas and sharing information about how to pursue career-oriented initiatives. The University of California at Los Angeles, for example, is offering career workshops and courses for alumni, while Baylor University would focus on certificates for students who drop out and career services for students with financial needs.
Northern Virginia Community College, one of the few two-year institutions in the task force, is focused on high-demand credential programs. “We’re trying to make our pathways a little clearer for people who want to get reskilled quickly,” says Steven Partridge, the vice president for strategic partnerships and work-force innovation there. “A lot of people want to switch careers, but they don’t have a degree. Sometimes going back to school for two to four-plus years is something that’s just not in the cards right now.”
A lot of people want to switch careers, but they don’t have a degree. Sometimes going back to school for two to four-plus years is something that’s just not in the cards right now.
NoVa’s reskilling and retraining efforts are centered on two strategies: apprenticeships, in fields like information technology, and stackable credentials, which offer some early currency in the job market, and the ability to transfer to a four-year program later. Apprenticeships and stackable credentials aren’t new or revolutionary ideas; they’re just difficult to pull off in a sector as misaligned and slow-moving as higher education can be. Partridge says that NoVa spent years hammering out transfer agreements with other institutions in the state to make these programs happen.
But finding new ideas is not the sticking point for most institutions. “It’s all good that we all share information,” Partridge says, “but I think information sharing is less of an issue than the action of getting it done at scale.”
Experts on higher education and the work force see a number of other job-training and career-oriented initiatives that colleges could quickly adopt in the wake of the pandemic. Many of them — described below — are well-researched and have been long discussed, but they’ve still not caught on at many institutions.
Cutting Up Space, Time, and the Degree
The pandemic has suspended some of our notions of time, related to when we work, eat, and sleep. But how we learn could become the change that sticks with us, long after we go back to normal. Hybrid learning was always a feature at colleges, and our widespread use of Zoom and other videoconferencing features has trained us to interact remotely. This opens up enormous possibilities to scale training programs and reach remote and marginalized populations (if those populations have their own technology to plug in).
The pandemic also brought to light unusual and innovative semester models that were often carried out in person — in particular, the eight-week semesters, which emerged at a number of colleges during the pandemic as a way to limit exposure across courses. But they may be a better way for distracted adults to learn. Institutions like Ivy Tech Community College have found that short, eight-week courses also led to higher success rates among students, perhaps because they can concentrate on subjects more intensely and reduce the chance that a challenge at work or at home would knock them off the path.
“It is a worker-centered model better than other things that we’ve seen,” says Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of the Lumina Foundation. Shorter semesters are “really sort of giving it to the learners in much more bite-sized chunks.”
Workers who already have skills will want to use those to accelerate their certification, and they could do that through competency-based education, another long-discussed innovation that now “seems well-suited to the times,” Merisotis says.
“We’re going to see a long tail of Covid-oriented realignment in the labor force,” he says. He believes colleges should push retraining based more on career adjacency — displaced truckers, for example, might find more to identify with in a familiar career, like logistics, than in something blandly popular, like coding. “Competency-based learning just seems like a model that we’ve got to build faster and better.”
Merisotis is also betting on “credentialing as you go,” the concept of a “nationally recognized, transferrable, incremental credential system” under development at the State University of New York Empire State College and supported by Lumina.
In general, work-force and education experts agreed that higher education should break down the credentials they offer — and allow students more freedom in where they get them. “The turf wars between two-year colleges and four-year colleges over degrees must be overcome in the interests of the entire system,” says Anthony P. Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “Community colleges should increasingly offer bachelor’s degrees, and, reciprocally, more four-year colleges should offer A.A.s, especially to students who complete more than two years of credits but never finish the bachelor’s.”
Transfer, he says, should be a universally easy and sure path up the higher-ed system. “All four-year public colleges should start to reserve 20 percent of incoming seats for transfer students,” Carnevale says.
Helping Students See Possibilities
Most experts on higher education and training say that advising and career counseling are key ways to help students. But many academic-advising and career-counseling functions operate entirely separately. Academic advisers aren’t always informed about the career outcomes for certain majors, and career counselors on campus are often outnumbered by academic advisers and relative to the scores of students they need to reach.
“Let’s take a big state school and give an average: 100 to 150 academic advisers, and 15 to 25 career advisers,” says Jeremy Podany, the founder of the Career Leadership Collective, which advises colleges on career-oriented strategies. “Where’s the structural priority?” Podany is not sure if that disparity exists because colleges favor retention over career outcomes, because colleges are uncomfortable with vocationally oriented training, or because it’s an artifact of the college bureaucracy. “But, you know, there’s a disconnect.”
Colleges could help this situation by tracking the career outcomes of students in various majors, says Michelle R. Weise, the author of Long Life Learning: Preparing for Jobs That Don’t Even Exist Yet (Wiley, 2020). Many faculty advisers are not deeply connected to the world of work outside of academe and don’t have a sense of what students in their programs do after graduation. What can you do with a history or philosophy degree? If the answer to that question is “anything,” without any guidance or real-world examples, both students and their advisers won’t know where to start.
What can you do with a history or philosophy degree? If the answer is “anything,” both students and their advisers won’t know where to start.
If advisers could see the careers that students enter and the difficulty they have in transitioning into the work force, Weise says, they would have a better sense of how to advise those students and what elements they should add to the programs to ensure success.
“That would help with integrating more market-oriented pieces into the curriculum earlier,” Weise says. It could also help colleges set up new and innovative ways for students to pay for college. “If they truly believe in the outcomes of these learners, why don’t we have more tuition-deferred opportunities or income-share agreements or career-impact bonds, where we’re betting on their future outcomes?”
Tracking students may be an inevitability anyway, says Carnevale. He believes that policy makers will eventually require colleges to closely track economic outcomes by program, a process already underway with the College Scorecard.
“This is not something that will happen in the short term,” he says, “but I would advise colleges that are struggling to maintain their value proposition to get out in front of this issue and start talking as often as possible about what students can expect in very specific terms if they attend there.”
