Economic Stabilizers

Bipartisan calls for industrial policy aimed at helping vulnerable white-collar workers. Also, CodePath and Social Finance on the new Claude Corps; colleges grapple with how to get the timing right for training in emerging fields; an op-ed on how one of those industries, quantum, will be built by community college grads; and an essay on why job postings aren’t the same as jobs. (Subscribe here.)

Industrial Policy for White-Collar Workers

The rise of AI has yet to be linked to substantial job displacement across the U.S. economy, even with signals of depressed entry-level hiring in exposed occupations. Yet a handful of experts have been warning about risks to nondegree workers in office jobs, and they’re starting to get traction in policy discussions.

“If you can do your job locked in a closet with a computer, eventually you will be in trouble” is the soundbite from Molly Kinder during recent interviews.

Earlier this month, Kinder left her senior-fellow role at the Brookings Institution, where she helped lead a multiyear research project focused on the potential displacement of clerical workers without four-year degrees—the vulnerable lower-middle class.

The U.S. safety net for displaced workers is threadbare, Kinder told Casey Newton from Platformer News earlier this month. Yet she doesn’t favor universal basic income as a solution. Instead, Kinder argued for policy moves to encourage employers to retain workers, and for a workforce reinvestment fund that would back white-collar apprenticeships for young people.

“We have industrial policy to try to create infrastructure jobs to help men who lost jobs in manufacturing. What’s the version of that for white-collar work?” said Kinder, who teased that she may create a new organization focused on these questions and recently launched a Substack.

Gina Raimondo shares Kinder’s skepticism about UBI, and her concern about labor-market disruptions during the AI transition. Raimondo, the former commerce secretary and Democratic governor of Rhode Island, is co-chairing the newly launched Commission on Artificial Intelligence and the American Workforce. Paul Ryan, the former Republican Speaker of the House, is leading the bipartisan effort with her.

The commission from the Urban Institute and the American Enterprise Institute is focused solely on work and taps leaders from business, labor, academia, and government. Over the next year it will assess how AI is reshaping jobs, skills, and earnings, with policy recommendations to follow on how to help workers, employers, and government adapt.

“There is a hunger for practical solutions,” Raimondo said during a launch event last week. “This is an all-hands-on-deck moment.”

While she pushed back on predictions about a jobs apocalypse, Raimondo said a majority of corporate leaders are concerned about AI being capable of effectively doing the jobs of their midlevel, white-collar employees in clerical, administrative, financial, and analytical roles.

“The CEOs I speak with are worried about that,” she said, citing the risk of large-scale layoffs. “They understand that’s bad for America. They don’t want to do it.”

Ryan said corporate executives are both excited about and intimidated by the AI transition. Most want to move toward augmenting labor, he said, not replacing workers. Ryan also agreed with Raimondo about the slice of workers who are most vulnerable. And despite his free-market orientation, he supports policy solutions aimed at helping workers through the AI transition and developing the workforce pipeline for the skilled trades.

“We can do a lot more industrial policy,” Ryan said.

Both Ryan and Raimondo think current job training, workforce development, and safety net systems won’t be up to the task if millions of workers need to be reskilled for new roles. “Our economic stabilizers that we have, from state, local, and federal government, are 100 years old,” Ryan said. “They were written and built for a different time.”

Raimondo said the data is clear that most federal and state job training investments have not been successful, calling for outcomes-based funding for both job training and college education programs.

The Kicker: “To me, that is not an argument for giving up on noncollege forms of workforce training. It’s an argument for figuring out how to get it right,” she said. “Let’s use this moment to make them more effective.”

Planning for Economic Disruption

Forty experts with economics, tech, and policy backgrounds gathered behind closed doors last week in D.C. to work through plausible scenarios of AI-driven economic disruption.

The group was convened by the Windfall Trust, a nonprofit network including researchers and strategists, that describes itself as a “policy accelerator” focused on AI’s impacts and averting potential mass joblessness. The Brookings Institution and the Peterson Institute for International Economics also participated in the workshop, which sought to develop practical policy responses.

Worker reskilling came up often during the discussion, Lauren Weber reports for The Wall Street Journal. And the group agreed that political polarization will make ambitious changes difficult, but that inaction will be far more costly.

Policy Moves and Claude Corps: Both Google and Anthropic last week released policy recommendations for preparing the U.S. workforce for AI-driven change.

• Google called for a “new era of partnership” across government, industry, and civil society to ensure all Americans benefit from the AI transition. The company endorsed eight bipartisan policy proposals to help scale training efforts and support workers. One bill calls for gathering high-quality data on AI’s impacts on the labor market; another would incentivize the development of AI skills in the workforce through tax credits and public outreach.

• Anthropic’s new policy framework said AI would generate unprecedented abundance—if the tech delivers on a fraction of its potential. But it also would likely act as a “general substitute” for labor. Under a less aggressive unemployment scenario, the company called for workforce training grants, occupational licensing reform, and wage insurance, all aimed at making it easier for workers to find new roles and enter new industries.

Anthropic also rolled out Claude Corps, a new partnership with CodePath and Social Finance—two nonprofits Work Shift has written about often.

The national program will seek to teach 1K early-career fellows how to use Claude well and then match them with 400+ nonprofits across the country—paying the fellows $85K with benefits for a year of full-time, in-person work for those organizations.

Fellows must have less than two years of work experience to be eligible. No minimum education level is required, and STARS without college degrees are encouraged to apply. Anthropic committed an initial $150M to the program, with plans to grow and replicate it.

The core components of the program will be open source and “built to be borrowed,” says Michael Ellison, CodePath’s founder and CEO.

CodePath served 20K learners in 2025 and is growing 50% year over year. Claude Corps is an expansion of the training provider’s relationship with Anthropic. Ellison says CodePath is entering a new frontier with the program by going beyond college training.

CodePath will be the employer of record for the fellows. Ellison says he hopes participating orgs will hire fellows on a permanent basis. He called for nonprofits to reach out if they’re interested in hosting a fellow.

Social Finance offers interest-free financing for education and training programs. The group will manage the philanthropic capital behind Claude Corps, support expansion through philanthropic and public channels, and lead assessment of the program.

The big picture for Claude Corps in the context of AI’s impact on the economy, says Ellison, is about helping to reimagine the first rung of tech-related careers.

“We see the potential for an entirely new job category,” he says. “We want to be able to scale to the size that is meaningful to the entire country.”

Timing Training for ‘Emerging’ Fields

Technicians trained for cutting-edge fields have enormous career potential, but potential doesn’t pay the bills today. And colleges and local workers alike struggle to time training right for promising-yet-volatile new industries—including semiconductors, EV tech, robotics, and solar in its early days.

It’s true, too, in the emerging lithium industry in California’s Imperial Valley. Colleges there have been training locals to work as plant operators and technicians in the industry since 2024, but most of the promised jobs have yet to materialize, Erin Rode writes this week for The Hechinger Report.

This timing challenge was top of mind for the National Science Foundation when it rolled out its Regional Innovation Engines under the Biden administration. The program is aimed at emerging fields like chip packaging and regenerative medicine, but encourages education providers to focus on “adjacent skills” that enable people to work in existing industries even if they have to wait for the others to take off.

Valencia College, for example, two years ago started an optics technician program that prepares locals for critical roles in semiconductor manufacturing, but also for established jobs in defense and medical technologies. 

Similarly, the College of DuPage is working with the Chicago Quantum Exchange to train residents in the Chicago area to work in quantum—a field that doesn’t get more cutting-edge—and related industries that are more established. Technician roles in quantum don’t necessarily require specialized degrees, Muddassir Siddiqi, the college’s president, writes in an essay in Work Shift this week. Preparation can include just one or two focused courses built into programs in advanced manufacturing, engineering technology, cybersecurity, electronics, and industrial maintenance.

“Quantum systems rely heavily on areas where community colleges already possess deep expertise in workforce preparation,” he writes.

Leveraging that expertise and capacity, Siddiqi says, will be key to ensuring that broad swaths of society don’t miss out on the benefits of quantum’s technological and economic transformation. —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Licensing Reform
More than half of all middle-skills jobs require a government-issued license, yet research suggests that occupational licensing may prevent aspiring workers from entering licensed jobs without providing meaningful benefits, write two fellows for the think tank R Street. State lawmakers should approach licensing policy more cautiously and strategically, by better aligning licensing requirements with needed skills and authorizing new licensure only sparingly.

Talent Platforms
Automated skill-extraction tools are widely deployed across talent management platforms, curriculum development projects, and labor market research. Yet the tools produce widely varying results, finds new research by Amanda Welsh, a professor at Northeastern University. The study benchmarks the performance, quality, and utility of five leading tools. The top performer produced fewer skills per course but more meaningfully differentiated outputs.

Credit for Apprenticeships
Officials in Michigan say 10 trade unions and 24 community colleges have signed up to participate in the state’s new College Credit for Apprenticeship Program, Nate Miller reports for Bridge Michigan. Launched in October 2025, the effort awards college credits to people in certified apprenticeship programs. Michigan currently has more than 23K apprentices actively enrolled across 800 registered programs, the fourth-highest total for a state.

Career Navigation
A dearth of school counselors, information systems, and insight into labor market trends impedes the ability of K–12 schools to provide effective career counseling, journalist Anne Kim writes in a report for FutureEd, a think tank at Georgetown University. Intermediary organizations, like Chicago’s OneGoal, can expand capacity for coaching and advising, she writes. And AI-driven tech platforms, like CareerVillage, can provide reliable data about careers.

Certificate Wages
The new tool from the HEA Group and Open Campus taps federal data to analyze earnings outcomes for 5,592 undergraduate certificate programs offered by federal aid–eligible institutions. To provide an earnings premium estimate, the Certificates Earnings Explorer compares the wages of graduates of specific certificate programs four years after completion to the typical earnings of high school graduates without college experience.

Job Moves
Ángel Cabrera has been appointed president and CEO of the Aspen Institute. Since arriving in 2019, Cabrera has led Georgia Tech through a period of strong growth. The new College of Lifetime Learning, launched in 2024, is a cornerstone of Georgia Tech’s goal to double the number of degrees granted and nondegree learners reached by 2030.

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