Watching this unfold, my mind went immediately to 1968, the summer I turned 11 and watched, in shock, as the police beat political protesters live on television. Seeing similar images this week — as well as arrests of news reporters — was a painful reminder of the work still to be done in America. I’m sad, and honestly, a little scared for our future. But I’ve seen the scenes of solidarity, too, and I’m not curled up into a little ball under my covers just yet. I hope you’re not either.
Colleges, along with governments, civic organizations, and business groups, have a duty to fully examine the fractures in our society — and to give us tools to mend them. It’s a daunting challenge, especially in the midst of a worldwide health and economic crisis. Still, if ever there were a need for colleges to stand up and show the best of what higher education can be, the time is now.
A new online hiring tool emphasizes skills over degrees.
The latest statistics estimate joblessness in the United States at 20 percent. It’s still possible the economy will recover quickly, but if recent history repeats itself, the benefits of that recovery won’t be evenly distributed. After the last recession, people with bachelor’s degrees fared much better than those without, and that wasn’t necessarily because the degree holders were more qualified. In many cases, as economists and equity advocates have documented (including in this study), employers simply used the bachelor’s degree as a screening mechanism.
This time around, however, the movement for “skills-based hiring” is growing. One of the groups at the forefront of this cause, Opportunity@Work, just opened a new online tool to facilitate hiring based on actual skills rather than academic pedigrees or social connections. The Opportunity Marketplace is a software platform for hiring that matches approved training providers and their students directly to employers who have indicated their willingness to hire qualified applicants. The idea, says Byron Auguste, chief executive and co-founder of Opportunity@Work, is to make inclusive hiring “just as easy and just as widespread” as screening based on degrees.
The tool is designed for people “skilled through alternative routes” (STARs) like IT training programs. It’s still in a pilot stage, with just two nonprofit training providers and three employers using it. But it could expand significantly this fall, now that it has signed its first college, Calbright College, as a partner — that is, of course, if Calbright itself survives legislative proposals for deep cuts in its budget.
Calbright, an online community college, is in many ways a good fit. It was created to help low-wage, working adults move up economically, and it offers coaching and other support. Its interim president and chief executive, Ajita Menon, knows Auguste from their days in the Obama administration. (As for the proposed budget cuts, she argues that Calbright’s model is vital: “It’s really hard for incumbent systems to understand that what they’re doing is not enough.”)
The college is still evaluating which of its programs are best suited for the marketplace, but as Menon told me last week, they’re likely to be in health care and IT. She also plans to work with two other institutions in California’s community-college system, Compton and Baker Colleges, so that students’ credentials could eventually stack into an associate degree. “We don’t want people perpetually stuck,” Menon said.
Despite the uncertainty about Calbright, and the marketplace’s modest start, I’m eager to follow how it develops. One reason is pure fairness. As Opportunity@Work has noted, when employers screen out applicants based solely on whether they have a bachelor’s degree, they exclude 76 percent of African Americans, 83 percent of Hispanics, 81 percent of rural Americans, and two-thirds of military veterans. These are some of the same populations hardest hit by the pandemic.
The argument about economic opportunity is compelling. As Auguste told me, millions of people have the skills to earn 50 percent more than they do now, if only they could get hired.
I first spoke with him in 2018, when researching a report on “Career-Ready Education.” He argued that employers had “weaponized” the four-year degree by using it to sort people and exclude qualified candidates. “It’s not physics that made us do that,” he said. “It’s not gravity.”
But will employers change? This tool makes it easier for them to connect directly with training providers and search for suitable candidates, taking away some of the barriers to skills-based hiring. But I wonder how many will come aboard, especially if the user base gets larger and the matching algorithm doesn’t sufficiently distinguish between applicants.
Still, I can see how some features of the Opportunity Marketplace, like the ability for an employer to designate certain training providers as trusted sources for particular kinds of job openings, could make it far more useful than sites like the Credential Registry, a huge repository of degree and credential descriptions that has been criticized for being agnostic about the quality of the programs it lists.
One more thing: When I decided to write about this hiring tool, I was thinking a lot about rising unemployment. Protests and looting weren’t part of the picture. Then I saw this in a New York Times report on street violence over the weekend: “Unemployment is gasoline and then abuse of power is the match,” one protester said after looters had smashed the windows of a Duane Reade drugstore in Lower Manhattan. “In the right circumstances, ka-boom. People don’t have anything to lose.””
I’m still digesting this, but I think the protester is onto something. And if you buy Auguste’s argument that college degrees have been weaponized by employers to the point of driving income inequality, then colleges will have to deal with this challenge, too, even if it’s not a problem of their own making.
Please join me for a virtual forum on Thursday on “the remote institution.”
When higher education made its big pivot in March, classes weren’t all that went into remote mode. Colleges also had to adapt things like advising, campus programming, and personnel matters. Now, with most institutions planning to keep some activities virtual through the fall at least, college leaders are wondering how this might forever change the way they operate.
What does it take to replicate the unique character of campus life when there is no campus? Will institutions discover new approaches or efficiencies they should incorporate once the pandemic passes? Could experiences from the private sector prove useful to colleges right now?
Those are some of the questions I’ll be posing to three panelists who bring expertise from public and private colleges and a rich mix of roles: Amy Hecht, vice president for student affairs at Florida State University; Maeesha Merchant, senior vice president for finance and operations at California Institute of the Arts; and John Whelan, vice president for human resources at Indiana University. They’ll be sharing advice and taking questions on Thursday at 2 p.m. Eastern time. Sign up here to view the program live, or watch later on demand.
