Education Pipeline

The enrollment cliff arrives in 2026, and the pandemic has worsened the problem. Meanwhile, gaps in reading and math skills grow, as more American adults fall into the lowest skill categories. Also, launchpad jobs for nondegree workers and a dropped bid to update the apprenticeship system.

A 15-Year Enrollment Slide

Fewer students will graduate from U.S. high schools after next year. The pandemic has worsened the crisis, which poses serious challenges for a generation of students, as well as for colleges and the workforce.

Just 3.4M high school students are expected to graduate in 2041, a decline of 13% from the 2025 peak of 3.9M, according to a new report from the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education.

The group predicts that 38 states will see dips. Eight states will struggle with declines of more than 20%, while five large states (California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, and Pennsylvania) will account for roughly three-quarters of the total drop. Bucking the trend will be most states in the South, which will see gains or no change.

WICHE and others have long warned of higher education’s looming enrollment cliff. The math is simple: A dramatic decline in U.S. birth rates began 17 years ago, during the Great Recession. Few doubters remain, as most colleges brace for tough times with fewer traditional-age students and expiring federal subsidies.

Yet as with many societal challenges, the pandemic continues to complicate the problem. It also contributed to a wave of baby boomer retirements. This two-pronged demographic drought will lead to more labor shortages in the U.S., according to a recent Lightcast report.

The total number of high school graduates beyond next year will be smaller than expected, WICHE says. Elementary school student numbers in particular fell short of projections amid reduced enrollments across public and private K-12 schools.

Many students have disengaged from school, notes the WICHE report. Chronic absenteeism more than doubled during the pandemic and remains elevated. 

Meanwhile, millions of children struggle to make up lost ground. And the learning loss can hold back students when they leave high school to pursue jobs or enroll in college.

State and federal policymakers have done little to get kids back into classrooms, as Alec MacGillis wrote in The New Yorker, while journalists and political campaigns have focused far more on culture war fights in education.

This year the crisis began to get the attention it deserves, WICHE says: “Whether school districts and states can engage and re-engage all learners remains to be seen.”

The Dwindling Middle: The U.S. can’t afford for more students to fall behind. The nation already has the widest cognitive and workplace skills gap among 31 industrialized countries that participate in a major annual study. 

The average reading literacy skills of American adults were in the middle of the pack compared to economic peer countries, according to the just-released results of the 2023 survey from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. But the U.S.’s scores in numeracy and adaptive problem solving were lower than the international averages.

And the average numbers mask the widening divide between high performers and those who struggle with reading and math.

Numeracy has long been the weakest area for the U.S., for example. But the percentage of Americans who reached the top level of proficiency in numeracy has risen over the past decade and is now comparable with some of the top-performing economies in the world. Meanwhile, the percentage of low-performing adults in numeracy increased in recent years, creating the widest gap among all countries studied.

A growing share of Americans also were low performers in literacy, while 32% scored below the baseline proficiency level in adaptive problem-solving skills.

“There is a dwindling middle in the U.S. in terms of skills,” Peggy Carr, commissioner of the National Center for Education Statistics, told reporters this week. “Over time, we’ve seen more Americans clustered at the bottom levels of proficiency.”

The widening of the gap has been consistent across skills assessments of K-12 students as well as adults, Carr said, and is a “distinguishing” characteristic for the U.S.

A long-term, sustained effort is needed to help students catch up in their academics, says Patrick Lane, vice president of policy analysis and research for WICHE.

A big question is how states and schools can make progress on learning loss amid competing priorities and as pandemic relief money dries up, he says. Higher education will have to reckon with the problem in coming years, particularly as students from lower-income backgrounds face steeper levels of learning loss and are likely to have less academic preparation than students did before the pandemic.

“Education policymakers and leaders can’t be in the dark on this. Barely a week goes by without news or data points that are relevant,” Lane says. “What is really important at this point is a focus on sharing and disseminating research around what’s working at the local, regional, and state level.”

Launchpad Jobs for Nondegree Workers

For Americans who go straight to work after high school, a recent report from the Burning Glass Institute shows which paths lead to well-paying jobs. It found more than 3.5M entry-level job openings in careers that offer workers without college degrees either strong pathways up or solid wages and stability.

These 73 occupations are in the top quintile of job-quality measures. The roles, not surprisingly, are more concentrated in industries that skew toward technical work. Maintenance and manufacturing jobs stand out, the report says, including electrical engineering technicians. So do many utility-related and military jobs, as well as healthcare roles such as EMTs, surgical technologists, and many kinds of nurses.

Workers in these jobs are four times more likely than those in the lowest-quintile occupations to enter the ranks of top earners by the age of 40 (earning at least $89K annually). Conversely, those who enter the labor market in the lowest-quality jobs are four times more likely to wind up in or near poverty. 

“How you start matters,” says Matt Sigelman, the institute’s president. “This research shows there are wide divergences in outcomes based on what job you start out in.”

The report’s so-called launchpad jobs also tend to have a lower risk of being displaced by AI or automation. Many of these roles feature hands-on work that’s difficult to automate, such as electrical power installers or EMTs.

However, at least five of the jobs that the report found create the most consistent paths to higher-paying roles for workers without college degrees (new accounts clerks, procurement clerks, insurance sales agents, tellers, and computer network support specialists) are significantly threatened by AI-based automation.

Gaining a clearer sense of why these jobs seem to drive toward generally better outcomes should help to better anticipate AI’s impacts, says Sigelman, noting that this dynamic poses a challenge for employers as well as jobseekers.

“Forward-thinking employers can and should think about the skills held by workers in these roles and identify adjacent roles within the firm that may be good fits for these workers with some degree of upskilling,” he says. “It is often cheaper to train for specific skills than to hire for them externally.” 

Policymakers and workers themselves tend to focus on short-term outcomes with careers, evaluating what makes a good job based on the wages they pay today. Longer-term results are at least as important, Sigelman says, and should be used to guide individuals and influence policy.

“The data make a compelling case,” he says, pointing to the below table.

Apprenticeship System Update Dropped

The U.S. Department of Labor has withdrawn an 800-page proposal to update the registered apprenticeship system that was unlikely to stand in the new administration.

The rule changes would have been the first regulatory update to the system since 2008. They aimed to improve worker protections and apprenticeship quality through a host of changes.

Apprenticeship experts and providers believe the system is in dire need of modernizing, but many of those same stakeholders worried that the proposed changes in their totality would hamstring growth. Republicans in Congress were also opposed to specific provisions that would have barred competency-based apprenticeships by requiring a minimum of 2K hours of on-the-job training.

What Now: Any changes will now fall to the Trump administration and the Republican-led Congress. To address what it saw as the limitations of the registered apprenticeship system, the first Trump administration simply did an end run around it by setting up a second employer-led system, the Industry-Recognized Apprenticeship Program (IRAP). But that program never really got off the ground before the Biden administration ended it.

National groups like Apprenticeships for America and Jobs for the Future would like to avoid a repeat of that. Vanessa Bennett and Taylor Maag of JFF lay out the case for modernizing and expanding the existing registered apprenticeship system in an essay in Work Shift this week. John Colborn, executive director of AFA, hopes the administration will work with Congress to update the National Apprenticeship Act, which hasn’t been reauthorized since it passed in 1937. 

The Kicker: “The possibility here is to work with the administration and say, ‘What was IRAP trying to solve for, and how do we do that in the mainstream system?’” Colborn says. —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Industrial Policy
Roughly $41B in federal place-based industrial policy funding has been awarded, with most of the money targeting company-level investment incentives for semiconductors, batteries, and clean energy, according to a new brief from Brookings Metro. However, the experiment remains unfinished and underfunded relative to its potential, write the researchers, who call on the U.S. Congress to fully appropriate an additional $17B in authorized industrial policy funding.

Tech Hubs
The U.S. Senate has approved up to $500M to preserve and expand the Tech Hubs program, which was created under the CHIPS and Science Act, according to a statement from Senator Maria Cantwell, a Washington Democrat. Congress authorized $13B for Tech Hubs over five years, but only 10% of the first two years of that money has been appropriated, Cantwell said, leaving 19 of the 31 hubs without enough implementation funds.

Industry Partnerships
While strong majorities of leaders from higher education and business agree that partnerships between their sectors are a priority, just 22% of higher education leaders say they are fully executing a partnership strategy, according to a survey conducted by the Business–Higher Education Forum. Business leaders were twice as likely as their higher ed counterparts to value low-intensity work-based learning, like job shadowing and microinternships.

Women in the Workforce
Melinda French Gates announced $150M in gifts, through her nonprofit Pivotal, to organizations focused on advancing women in the workplace. Axios reported that $45M will be specifically focused on women in AI and the tech industry, going to groups like the Center for Inclusive Computing, Rewriting the Code, and Break Through Tech. And the Aspen Institute will receive $75M to set up a workplace innovation council next year.

Men in the Workforce
Men in California without a four-year college degree are increasingly less likely to be in the labor force, writes the Public Policy Institute of California. Policy levers to boost the labor force participation of this group of men, according to experts convened by the institute, include expanding nondegree and noncredit education programs, improving student services, and supporting pathways into nontraditional fields for men, like education and healthcare.

Tech Jobs
To grow and diversify its tech workforce, Ohio should invest in traditional higher education—with a focus on building comprehensive services needed to help more women, Black, and Latino students complete longer-term credentials, according to research from Rand. Short-term certificates in computer science and IT generally provided zero wage returns in Ohio. However, long-term certificates and degrees did provide returns, with computer science programs providing the biggest gains.

Believe it or not, I failed to include several newsy items. We’ll try to get there next week, which will be the newsletter’s last full edition of 2024. Thanks for reading. —PF