Grasping for Pathways in an Uncertain Economy
College degrees, short-term credentials, and navigating education and work in an AI-driven economy
It’s natural to look for silver bullets. To want X policy or program to predictably result in Y outcome. But policies and programs land in a complex, adaptive system. Culture and behaviors shift in response to an intervention. The outcome is rarely a linear resolution to a problem.
I’m guilty myself at times of jumping too quickly to what seems like a sure answer. And I try to be conscious of this type of thinking across areas of policy – including education and workforce development.
But the pull toward simple answers is strong – particularly in the face of uncertainty.
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As I wrote in my first newsletter, my grandfather followed a stable path to a secure future in the post-WWII era – working for 35 years at a union job in a steel mill. But that pathway was never open to many workers, and it was crumbling by the 1970s. A high school graduate who entered the Fairless Works mill in 1973 – instead of 1953 like my grandfather – had the economic rug pulled out from underneath them with the collapse of the U.S. steel industry in the 1980s.
Amid a shift to a knowledge-based economy, college seemed like a sure bet to many policymakers. This led to a well-intentioned push to expand college access – which often got too narrowly translated into a push for “a traditional four-year bachelor’s degree for all.”
What’s gotten lost in recent debates is that encouraging more students to get four-year degree paid off for many. But it also had unintended consequences. It led to a devaluing of non-college pathways – including to good jobs essential to a functioning society. Some students found colleges didn’t meet their needs, or it wasn’t the right path for them. Too many students were left with debt and no degree – sometimes at the hands of bad actors that federal and state officials failed to rein in.
Education and workforce development practitioners always recognized that the answer wasn’t so simple as “go to college.” They sought to build multiple pathways to careers and innovated on new models. But this wasn’t the dominant narrative.
And like steelworkers in the 1980s, many college graduates have felt the economic rug being pulled out from underneath them — during the Great Recession, then the pandemic, and today. Many knowledge economy jobs are most at risk from AI. Current trends could lead to too many college graduates in coming years – and a potential further erosion in the return on a four-year degree.
What many young people (and their caregivers) are left with is uncertainty. Kyla Scanlon captured the current vibes in Gen Z compellingly in her newsletter on “the end of predictable progress.” As the mother of a child in elementary school, I feel this instability. AI looms over everything, and in my immediate policy world, I worry that some policymakers are now landing on a new and oversimplified solution: short-term credentials.
Workforce Pell, a longstanding bipartisan workforce proposal, passed in the Republicans’ mega-bill. This legislation will allow Pell Grants to be used for career-focused programs as short as 8 weeks long. (The minimum length had been 15 weeks, which is already pretty short.)
Many in the workforce development community see it as a glimmer of hope amid a raft of many very troubling policy changes in the bill. I wholeheartedly agree with the need for more funding for job training and for a wide range of career pathways, but Workforce Pell comes with significant risk.
Short-term credentials have a very mixed track record. For example, a recent study found that only 12% of credentials resulted in higher wages. That means that nearly 9 in 10 students see no return from short-term credentials.
High-quality short-term credentials – developed with employers and aligned to their specific skill needs – can deliver a real return. But they’re not the norm – and just providing access to a training program is insufficient. The best programs offer a comprehensive services – from career navigation to coaching to supportive services like transportation. The Trump Administration is dismantling many of the public systems and programs that deliver these kinds of supports – and leaving states without the resources to fill in the gaps.
The Workforce Pell legislation includes complicated but somehow still weak quality safeguards. It doesn’t include a measure I would have preferred: requiring eligible programs to prove that completers earn at least as much as a high school graduate in the same state. It gives states a few levers – including the authority to define whether a credential meets the requirements for “high-skill, high-wage or in-demand jobs” in their state. (I wish that “or” was an “and” since an “in-demand” job isn’t necessarily a good one.)
But much depends on the Trump Administration’s implementation. I’m skeptical given the track record to date. It will be up to elected officials and policymakers, education and training providers, advocacy groups – and students and workers themselves – to push for a Workforce Pell program – for a broader ecosystem and associated set of services – that delivers positive results.
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Building robust and varied career pathways is a collective endeavor and a complex problem. But right now, many of us are unfortunately left to navigate this uncertainty alone. Even with my professional work and expertise, I’ve been struggling with how we can best prepare young people for the future economy – and what signals to send to my young daughter about education and work.
So I want to end this newsletter with a few of my working assumptions today – which I plan to explore more deeply in future newsletters (and reserve the right to change).
Adaptability – or resilience to change – is the most important skill for young people today. We can’t predict the future – and especially not in workforce development. Better and more continuous use of labor market data can make a big difference. But the workforce implications of rapidly advancing technologies like AI are notoriously tricky to estimate – as are the potential impacts of unpredictable policy and economic changes (tariffs, anyone?).
I want my daughter to learn many things, but most importantly, I want her to learn to roll with the punches. To reinvent herself if she needs to. To recognize that she likely won’t have one path to success, but multiple that stack on top of one another. And most importantly, to understand that nothing is guaranteed.
Young people still need to do things the hard way. I find it amazing how AI promises to allow us – regardless of technical ability – to simply create the things that we imagine. Vibe-coding is amazing. But young people still need to learn how things work and how to think.
A very real risk of AI is that it will weaken our cognitive skills. It has already destroyed the college essay. Writing is hard. Working through difficult problems is uncomfortable. (This essay took way longer than I wanted it to.) The allure of outsourcing our thinking to AI is real. But I still believe that the future will belong to people who cultivate their own ideas – who learn how to use AI to augment their skills, not replace them.
Both assertions above lead to the same place: young people should focus on building the skills that AI can’t easily replace. That includes jobs that require you to work with your hands. But it also means cultivating what are often called “soft skills” – or as Suzanne Towns put it, human intelligence. Critical thinking, the ability to communicate clearly and with empathy, to lead and influence others. For too long, we’ve downplayed and disinvested in these skills – even though they’ve been the difference maker in careers for a long time.
Young people need to cultivate “range.” AI can already produce technical outputs at a pace that humans have no hope of replicating. In this world, I believe that the people who will succeed are likely to be generalists – those with a wide breadth of knowledge and experience who can connect the dots across verticals and disciplines. David Epstein called this “range” in his phenomenal book from several years ago.
Range is also a risk-mitigation strategy. If we don’t know what jobs will be available in the future, young people will be better off if they can imagine themselves doing many things. I worry that our education system is becoming narrower – cutting humanities, theater, the arts – at just the moment it should become broader and more expansive.
But that just might be the wishful thinking of an English and German major. We humanities majors have been waiting patiently for our revenge.
Until next time,
Joanna