The Edge

I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what I’m thinking about this week.

Is there more than self-interest behind employers’ interest in education?

Employers aren’t shy when it comes to complaining about colleges’ faults in preparing students for the workplace. Isn’t that more than a little tiresome sometimes? The lack of specificity. The nostalgia for the days when college grads supposedly showed up at their first jobs fully ready to tackle their assignments. And when did all of this become the job of colleges? Don’t employers have some responsibility, too?

I wrestled with these issues in writing the new Chronicle report, “Career Ready Education: Beyond the Skills Gap, Tools and Tactics for an Evolving Economy.” Even if I weren’t the author, I would tell you that this report is a really useful guide for understanding and responding to the changing landscape of hiring and credentials, with practical advice for college leaders and employers alike on how to collaborate on programs, services, and even facilities that will improve students’ employability. My bottom line: Colleges can make these adaptations without becoming overly reactive or reductive. And they need to.

That doesn’t mean employers should be let off the hook. But I’m not holding my breath.

For a section of the report called “Voices of Employers,” we asked business leaders to weigh in on how colleges could work more effectively with employers.That’s in the report. But I also wondered what they were doing on their own.

So with the help of Sara Lipka, a Chronicle senior editor (and the editor of the report), we also posed this question: What one thing should employers do to ensure that new hires and existing staff members get the skills they need to be successful?

Here’s what we heard.

Michael Bokina, vice president and head of human resources, Siemens USA:Employers should invest in their people and provide platforms that help employees own their careers. Siemens does this by investing $50 million annually in continuing education for U.S. employees. We also leverage our advanced manufacturing apprenticeship program to help both new and existing staff access technical and classroom training.

Scot McLemore, manager of talent acquisition and deployment, Honda:Employers must actively engage their employees and provide learning opportunities that allow their employees to continue to develop higher-level skills. The learning should be aligned with skills and knowledge required in positions within the organization. If possible, an industry-recognized certificate or credential should be an outcome of the learning.

Glenn E. Johnson, head of work-force development, BASF North America: Provide a structured training program that is based on competency modeling and job and task analysis instead of learn-as-you-go training that is wholly time-based, and provide those analyses and models to the education programs in their community that develop future workers.

Mohamad Ali, president and chief executive officer, Carbonite: Providing ongoing employer-sponsored skills training both internally and externally not only helps develop and retain talent, but it also helps drive innovation within those companies to remain competitive on a local and global scale.

Marie Artim, vice president for talent acquisition, Enterprise Holdings: Employers must prove their commitment to developing employees and providing internal opportunities for growth. As a promote-from-within organization, we believe in the concept of building versus buying talent, and we recognize the importance of consistently training and developing individuals as they take on new roles.

Obviously, that is a small sample, but the self-interest implicit in the answers is telling. Likewise, even as companies like Starbucks, McDonald’s, Uber, and Walmart pay for college courses for employees (and as colleges maneuver to capture a slice of that market), it’s clear that many employers see investing in education as a way to benefit themselves — improving employee retention, for example. No crime in that, but let’s also be clear about how significant it really is.

Tuition benefits for employees are nice, but they go only so far. I was reminded of that this weekend when I spotted a stream of comments that lit up Twitter from Abigail Disney, a documentarian who is a granddaughter and grandniece of the Disney Company’s two founders. As part of a longer thread that criticized the inequity of the company’ overall salary structure, she highlighted just how difficult it can be for low-wage workers to take advantage of the company’s tuition benefit.

What’s more, only about half of all employers even cover the cost of college tuition for their employees, per the latest survey from the Society for Human Resource Management. And according to Ryan Craig, an author and investor, half of all spending on education for people over the age of 25 comes from a select group of large companies; employees who work elsewhere are on their own.

Many in the education world paint a sunnier picture. At the ASU GSV Summit this month, I heard Frank Britt, CEO of the education company Penn Foster, declare that employer-providing training for middle-skills workers is now “the new normal.” OK, but that’s a sector where job openings now exceed the supply of job seekers.

I found myself agreeing much more with one of his fellow panelists, Deval Patrick, a former governor of Massachusetts, who recalled how the last recession had shown so many people how vulnerable they were to job losses and wage stagnation. He reminded the audience that all this talk about employer-provided training wouldn’t help workers who don’t have an employer “or may no longer have one.”

All of which is to say, employers may continue to play a role in promoting education and training, and the more of that the better. But let’s not fool ourselves into counting on that support as any kind of replacement for the public commitment to broad education that we need, as a society, to keep our democracy strong. As useful as employers can be in helping to shape curricula and services (as I learned in reporting “Career-Ready Education”) their interests can also be narrow. And if economic conditions darken, employers can become fickle patrons.

When we talk about college parents, often that means students, too

Is it any wonder we’re hearing more and more about a “two generation” strategy designed to improve access to higher education for older students by providing child care and other assistance?

More than one in five college students — 22 percent of all undergraduates — are parents, according to new analysis of data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study. Of the 3.8 million students who are raising children while in college, roughly 2.7 million are mothers and 1.1 million are fathers. Among the mothers, 62 percent are single parents.

The number of students who are parents has declined since 2011-12 by 20 percent — more than the decline in enrollment overall during the same period. But as this report from the Ascend program at the Aspen Institute and the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows, the reasons are mixed.

Some parents, it says, probably chose not to enroll because they found jobs after the recession and were deterred by “the rising cost of college in combination with the continued high cost of non-tuition expenses like child care, housing, and transportation.” For them, the benefits of working won out over college.

Also, the report notes, “the closure of more than 100 for-profit colleges between 2012 and 2016 probably also contributed to parents’ decreased share of the student body.” For more, click here to download the full analysis.

Got a tip you’d like to share or a question you’d like me to answer? Let me know at goldie@chronicle.com.