Digital Wallets and Career Readiness

A coalition of higher education groups wants to accelerate the adoption of skill-focused digital credentials, as similar moves emerge in K-12. Also, community colleges seek input from businesses on AI skills, and a call for an independent data center to track how AI is changing jobs.

Higher Ed’s Interest in Digital Credentials

As the skills-forward push has gathered steam in recent years, some have cast it in opposition to traditional higher education. Unproven alternative credentials pose a challenge to the four-year degree, they argue, while skills-based hiring is doomed to fail.

A recently formed coalition of a dozen higher education associations has a different take. The groups say digital credentials that display the skills of learners are an opportunity the industry should jump on. And they believe digital wallets or learning and employment records (LERs) could even help change the narrative around higher education.

Lynn Pasquerella, president of the American Association of Colleges and Universities, said the project “signals how higher education can come together to catalyze support for advancing students’ career readiness for a future that will benefit all of us.”

The coalition includes AACC, AACRAO, AAC&U, ACE, AIR, C-BEN, DCC, Educause, NACADA, NACE, UPCEA, and 1EdTech. Its focus will be:

• Raising awareness of LERs and innovative credentials among learners, educators, employers, and institutions.

• Advocating for policy changes that give a boost to LERs.

• Integrating the tools into courses and curricula, including general education.

• Developing resources and guidelines for colleges.

• Measuring the impact of LERs on student learning, retention, graduation, and postgraduation career success.

The Walmart-funded Accelerator project seeks to help students understand and represent themselves based on the experiences they’re having in higher education, says Mike Simmons, associate executive director of strategic partnerships and business development for the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

“It’s about modernizing how learning achievements and job skills are documented and recognized,” he says, and “helping to create a more transparent, efficient, and equitable system for both learners and employers.”

Higher education has been slow to move on digital credentialing, the groups acknowledge. And Simmons says the work by colleges on LERs tends to be siloed and confined to a single department or academic unit. The way those projects are rolled out varies widely as well, with some being led by a continuing professional education group while others are an IT initiative or offered through the career center or as part of a specific degree. 

As a result, Simmons says “LER work is constrained and doesn’t scale within institutions, much less spreading across them.” Click over to Work Shift to read a Q&A with Simmons.

Several states have made progress with LERs, including on challenges around the technology infrastructure. Simmons points to the Alabama Talent Triad, for example, which offers every citizen in the state access to a digital wallet. Higher education should be a key part of how people fill their digital wallets, but the industry’s ability to engage with the tools remains a work in progress.

“Right now, the processes we use to issue grades and transcripts are not very well in sync with the concept and processes of digital wallets,” he says. The Accelerator project seeks to change that, by offering resources and modeling the sorts of collaboration on LERs that can occur at colleges.

Simmons says the most important driver of the coalition’s work on digital credentialing is the expanding crisis of confidence in higher education.

The Kicker: “If we can’t adequately demonstrate and show relevance of education more appropriately and with greater clarity, we face a challenge to the validity of the entire enterprise,” says Simmons. “A digital wallet by itself does not solve all problems. But it is one way of opening a broader connection between what happens at an institution and what happens with a student when they leave.”

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Knowledge Versus Skills

Other major education organizations have jumped on the skills bandwagon. For example, ETS and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have partnered on skills-based assessment, with a goal of moving beyond the Carnegie Unit.

The initial rollout of that effort will be focused on K-12 education, with pilot projects beginning next year in five states: Indiana, Nevada, North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Wisconsin.

The Mastery Transcript Consortium, which ETS recently acquired, will be a key component of that work. The testing firm says the goal is to empower both K-12 and higher ed to “implement competency-based systems and reliably validate that learners demonstrate the development of durable skills.”

Indiana is all in on skills, says Katie Jenner, the state’s secretary of education. For example, Indiana is moving toward a skills-focused redesign and streamlining of its high school diplomas. The Indiana Department of Education says the proposed Indiana Graduates Prepared to Succeed (GPS) diplomas focus on career and college readiness, as well as the knowledge, skills, and competencies that matter most to students.

“We’re leaning-in, big-time, on how to measure work-based learning,” Jenner says.

The push has generated controversy. For example, several public universities in the state say the diplomas wouldn’t meet their admissions requirements.

Jenner says the department has heard from parents, students, businesses, and policymakers who back the emphasis on skills with diplomas.

“Every single stakeholder was skills-heavy,” she says, “other than higher education, which was more knowledge-heavy.”

Workforce-Ready Graduates in AI

A group of three large community colleges has received $2.8M from the National Science Foundation to help the two-year sector develop programs to prepare students for technician-level jobs in AI-related fields.

The National Applied Artificial Intelligence Consortium will be led by Miami Dade College, Houston Community College, and Maricopa County Community College District. The three institutions have created some of the first AI-focused associate degrees and bachelor’s degrees from community colleges.

“As the need from companies for AI talent continues to grow exponentially, MDC, HCC, and MCCCD believe that community colleges will be the main driver to develop a new AI workforce that doesn’t require graduate-level degrees,” says Antonio Delgado Fornaguera, vice president of innovation and tech partnerships at Miami Dade College.

The consortium will work to grow and improve the quality of the sector’s AI and workforce training, says Shalin Jyotishi, the founder and managing director of the Future of Work and Innovation Economy initiative at New America. 

Jyotishi cites the promise of an employer-engagement strategy from the coalition, which seeks to bring together industry leaders to get a better understanding of the knowledge and skills that will be required of workforce-ready graduates from two-year programs in applied AI.

“As with any nascent labor market development, colleges will need to navigate hype traps carefully to ensure that their programs do, in fact, lead to gainful employment,” he says. “That goes for newcomers in the workforce as well as those coming back to the college to upskill or reskill.”

Big Tech is investing in the capacity of the two-year sector to prepare students for AI-related jobs. For example, California governor Gavin Newsom last week announced an AI education partnership between Nvidia and the state’s community colleges. But relatively few community college grads will go work for those huge companies.

“Most will likely stay in their local labor market working for small and medium-sized employers,” says Jyotishi. “The consortium will hopefully be able to help colleges navigate the needs of Big Tech while also staying grounded in the reality of actual hiring employers.”

Avoiding the Pain of a Tech Boom

A national center for data and evidence is needed to accurately measure how AI is changing the labor market, according to Julia Lane, an economist, expert on data systems, and professor at New York University. 

“Understanding AI’s impact on jobs is crucial for shaping policies that ensure economic stability and workforce readiness,” Lane writes in The MIT Press Reader. 

Expert predictions vary wildly. And Lane says federal data is woefully inadequate for measuring how AI is changing jobs.

“For fast-moving areas such as AI, private and nonprofit sectors outside of government need to take the lead on innovation and let the government benefit by later incorporating what is learned into the data series they produce,” writes Lane.

Such a center should be independently funded and nonpartisan, she says, with bottom-up, demand-driving tools and insights for businesses, workers, and governments. She cites the approach and funding structure of the Urban Institute and MDRC as potential models.

The U.S. lacked information and policies to help millions of workers who lost factory jobs in the 1990s and early 2000s, as automation and trade transformed the American economy and the labor market, writes Brent Orrell, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. 

Orrell says Lane’s proposal “can help us avoid a labor market Groundhog Day by maximizing the gains of the emerging technology boom while avoiding some of the pain.”

Open Tabs

Funding Formulas
All U.S. states fund credit-bearing programs at community colleges, while 35 back dual enrollment and 27 support noncredit education, according to a new analysis from the Association of Community College Trustees’ Center for Policy and Practice. Just 22 states fund community colleges for all three activities. The funding analysis notes that noncredit and dual-enrollment programs are gaining in popularity.

Pentagon Support
The U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding capacity is in its worst state in 25 years, partially due to the struggle to hire and retain workers as veteran shipbuilders retire, reports the AP’s David Sharp. To close labor gaps, the Navy has partnered with submarine builders to promote manufacturing careers, and shipyards are offering perks to retain workers. For example, a shipyard in Wisconsin is using part of $100M in Navy funding for retention bonuses.

AI and Diversity
Algorithms and artificial intelligence that are designed with fairness-and-diversity constraints can guide companies to interview a more diverse set of job candidates and extend opportunities to a broader range of people, according to researchers from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Yale University. The cost to companies for this approach, which would achieve fairer employment outcomes, is likely minimal.

AI and Job Applications
Artificial intelligence appears to be fueling a spike in job applications. Arizona State University’s Tech Hubs, a technology support service, saw a 300% increase in student applications last year, Megan Workmon Larsen, ASU’s director of learning experience design, said during an interview with SmartResume’s Ian Davidson. “A large portion of students were using AI tools to generate, refine, and curate their career materials,” she said.

Job Moves
Brent Parton has been named president of CareerWise, a youth apprenticeship provider. Parton previously was acting assistant secretary for the Employment and Training Administration at the U.S. Department of Labor.

Taylor Maag is the new director of workforce policy at Jobs for the Future. Maag leaves her role as director of workforce development policy for the Progressive Policy Institute.

As Julia Lane notes above, it’s hard to get a handle on how AI is changing jobs. While surveys and prognostications abound, publicly available intel about what’s happening in the labor market is rare. And I’ve heard little from companies themselves. We welcome your tips. —PF