I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. Here’s what’s on my mind this week:
Workers in the spotlight, higher ed on the sidelines.
Did you notice what — and who — was missing from all the hullabaloo last week around the White House’s national work-force strategy?
The executive order creating a National Council for the American Worker aims “to ensure that America’s students and workers have access to affordable, relevant, and innovative education and job training.” Even though education is a central pillar of the plan, no college leaders were present at its unveiling. Nor, from what I can tell, were higher-ed leaders asked to provide any input.
This was one of the few times President Trump has invoked higher education without insulting or threatening it. Some of the ideas covered in the order — and a related report from the White House Council of Economic Advisers — touch on concepts I hear all the time at conferences on reinventing higher ed: giving greater weight to industry credentials, for example, and allowing Pell Grants to be used for short-term training programs. Those two actions alone — especially if the Pell Grant expansion came without an increase in overall funding — could seriously reshape the market for higher education.
I’m not exactly surprised that this White House considered college officials irrelevant to its efforts. The administration’s view of higher education seems predominantly focused on its role as a force for training and re-skilling. The need for STEM education gets a single mention in the executive order. (Humanities and social sciences get none at all, but considering the focus on “workers,” that’s more understandable.)
The administration’s decision to bypass college leaders may be a sign of how little influence the major education associations carry with this White House. I had hoped to talk to the heads of the American Council on Education and the Association of American Universities about what this says about the administration’s view of higher ed, but neither Ted Mitchell nor Mary Sue Coleman was available. The groups learned of the efforts only when they were announced, their spokesmen told me. J. Noah Brown, president of the Association of Community College Trustees, noted that federal support for job retraining has been cut over the past decade, and called the order an encouraging sign. But Brown clearly wasn’t in on it either. “We look forward to further details,” his statement said.
Sidelining higher ed seems like a missed opportunity to engage the sector on issues concerning lifelong learning and the role of education in a changing economy. Then again, if this effort proves as a consequential as the administration’s Infrastructure Week and other stalled initiatives, maybe it won’t matter.
As you decide for yourselves about the new council’s prospects, consider this: The order names 12 people to the council and says one of them should be the director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. But 18 months into this administration, the president has yet to nominate anyone to that post.
Book Corner: Living longer, but what will it take to prosper?
As a society, we’re living longer. A lot of what we read and hear on that issue asks whether we’re saving enough to cover the costs of our old age. But longevity has broader implications — for the nature of work, for our family structures, and of course, for the shape of education.
That idea was driven home to me recently in a conversation with Rovy Branon, vice provost at the University of Washington’s Continuum College, who told me he’s begun almost religiously recommending a book called The 100-Year Life: Living and Working in an Age of Longevity to colleagues. So I ordered it. Now I get why he recommends it.
