Free College and Jobs

SUNY and CUNY gear up for a state push on two-year degrees in growth industries. Also, helping Chicago community college students thrive in internships for high-demand fields, an essay on under-funded digital skills training, Trump’s plan on AI and jobs, and data on hiring requirements for AI skills. (Was this newsletter forwarded to you? Subscribe here.)

Prioritizing High-Demand Degrees

New York is the latest state to direct new funding to community college programs that prepare students for growth industries, joining similar moves by Virginia, Massachusetts, Texas, North Carolina, and Indiana.

The Empire State’s take on free community college, dubbed Reconnect, applies to both the State University of New York and City University of New York systems, which together include 37 two-year colleges. The state will spend $47M this year on the last-dollar grants, which will cover tuition, fees, and books for students who are 25-55 years old and don’t hold a degree.

The new money is targeted to associate degree programs across four core areas: healthcare, advanced manufacturing, renewable energy, and IT and cybersecurity. Prioritizing those industries was a helpful selling point, says John King, SUNY’s chancellor.

“The pitch that we made to the governor and to the legislature was, if you make this investment, we can produce the workforce that New York employers need,” he says. “Folks want to know, ‘Is this investment going to have a significant economic return for the state?’ And we could show that very clearly here.”

The two systems will track the employment and wage results for Reconnect students. And King says the program includes wiggle room to adjust the list of eligible fields and programs.

New York has open jobs across the four prioritized categories of occupations, with looming shortages of nurses and 50K projected jobs in the semiconductor industry and its supply chain companies. The new money seeks to boost student interest in those fields.

“If you're driving for Uber right now and you are barely making ends meet to cover your rent and essential needs, you can come to one of our programs and end up in two years with a job, let's say as a nurse making $70K-$80K,” says King, a former U.S. Education Secretary during the Obama administration, who also led the Education Trust.

SUNY is confident it can do two things at once—retain a commitment to general education and transfer, with community college students continuing on to earn four-year, and also prioritize workforce-aligned degrees.

King says higher education generally hasn’t done enough to ensure that graduating students are ready for a good job. Reconnect is part of SUNY’s broader strategy on upward mobility, which includes a systemwide effort for all undergraduates to have an internship experience.

“Our goal is to create skills that are aligned to growing industries and not necessarily specific to one company,” says King. “Our task is to create value for the students. If they leave us with the skills to find a great job, then we've done our work.”

View from Upstate: Awareness and interest in Reconnect is high among prospective students who are considering enrolling at Mohawk Valley Community College, which is located in Utica. The college says health sciences is the clear frontrunner so far, with programs in cybersecurity and for chemical dependency practitioners as distant followers.

New York this year tapped the college as one of three sites for a planned network of workforce development centers focused on advanced manufacturing. The state’s $200M One Network for Regional Advanced Manufacturing Partnerships (ON-RAMP) program seeks to offer free or low-cost training, apprenticeships, internships, and job placement at those centers.

Randall VanWagoner, MVCC’s president, says ON-RAMP will create capacity for the college’s recently created FastTrack workforce model, which offers short-term courses and credentials (both credit-bearing and noncredit) at no cost to students. More than 3K students have enrolled in those courses since the program was created in 2023.

The collective outreach by SUNY and the college around Reconnect is resonating in the Utica region, VanWagoner says:

“Coupled with the ON-RAMP designation and many employer-validated micro-credentials, we’re giving adult and Pell-eligible learners real earn-while-you-learn pathways that strengthen Mohawk Valley’s workforce and talent pipeline.”

Changing Employers’ Hearts and Minds

A Chicago-based nonprofit has rolled out a project to connect students who are attending the city’s two-year colleges with career opportunities in high-growth industries.

One Million Degrees has an unusually deep partnership with City Colleges of Chicago. It supports students financially, academically, personally, and professionally. The approach, which draws heavily from volunteer tutors and coaches, has been proven to improve student success. The group is working with more than 3K students this year, up from 600 in 2022.

The new, multi-year OMD Works experiment was designed in collaboration with top regional employers across the legal, finance, and IT industries. It aims to remove barriers to meaningful work experiences by providing holistic support to students who participate in internships and apprenticeships with five employer partners.

Many intermediary organizations are trying to convince employers to create more work-based learning opportunities, says Josh Hoen, the CEO of One Million Degrees.

Far less common are efforts to “get community college students ready for the internships and apprenticeships that are there,” he says. “We need intensive career readiness so community college students are competitive.”

Hoen’s argument echoes what Verizon’s Tara Orlando told me last year. The talent development executive pleaded with philanthropies and training providers to put more resources into helping lower-income students thrive in internships.

OMD Works is an extension of the group’s employer engagement work. And Hoen says companies where employees participate in coaching and mentoring through One Million Degrees are more likely to be confident about creating career connections for students who attend City Colleges.

“You’re changing the hearts and minds of employers from within,” he says.

Enova, a Chicago-based fin-tech company and longtime OMD partner is contributing money to the project. The program is mutually beneficial, said an HR official at Relativity—a locally-based legal tech company that’s offering work-based learning opportunities—by providing career support to students while building a stronger talent pipeline for companies.

OMD Works is starting small, with 100 student participants this summer. But the goal is to expand employer participation over several phases, Hoen says.

Blackstone has backed the project. The private equity giant is big on widening the hiring funnel and creating career growth opportunities for frontline workers. Good business is the motivation, Blackstone’s leaders say.

Hoen says that philosophy is a key to making programs like OMD Works take off.

The Kicker: “Anyone who is doing this at scale is bottom-line driven,” he says. “This is a lower-cost talent strategy.”

Trump’s AI Action Plan

Artificial intelligence demands a serious workforce response to help workers navigate the looming transition across all jobs and industries, the White House says. And AI skill development should be a core objective of relevant education and workforce funding streams, it says in a new 23-page plan. 

The Trump administration called for federal agencies to study data on the tech’s impact on the labor market. In addition, the U.S. Department of Labor should create a federal AI Workforce Research Hub, which would lead a sustained federal effort to evaluate labor market impacts and the experience of workers.

The Labor Department also should use available discretionary funds to pay for rapid retraining for Americans whose jobs are displaced by AI. And the Labor and Commerce Departments should quickly test new approaches to workforce challenges created by AI.

Likewise, the plan says the Trump administration should support industry-driven training for priority job roles that underpin the AI infrastructure—including ones in energy capacity and semiconductor manufacturing—while expanding early-talent pipelines through CTE and registered apprenticeship programs.

“Models could also be explored that incentivize employer upskilling of incumbent workers into priority occupations,” according to the White House, which says the Department of Commerce, “should integrate these training models as a core workforce component of its infrastructure investment programs.”

Hiring Requirements for AI Skills

AI has fundamentally transformed hiring patterns, including for jobs beyond the tech industry, finds a new report from Lightcast.

The labor market intelligence company analyzed 1.3B job postings, finding explosive growth in generative AI skills requirements for roles outside of IT and computer science. The share of AI jobs in marketing and PR has doubled over five years, for example. The HR and education industries also have seen major growth.

The report includes deep dives on patterns of demand for AI skills in those three career areas, as well as across finance and science and research. Marketing faces immediate AI transformation, Lightcast found, with SEO specialists and product managers requiring the most sophisticated AI capabilities. 

Training in generative AI literacy should be a universal requirement for all marketing roles, the report concludes. “Marketing’s AI landscape changes over the course of weeks, not years.”

Open Tabs

National Skills Currency
The relocation of $2.2B in workforce education programs to the Labor Department from the Education Department will enable the creation of a national “lingua franca” of skills credentialing, where learning is translated into machine-readable, industry-recognized competency statements via learning and employment records (LERs), writes Nick Moore, an acting assistant secretary at the department, who helped develop similar solutions in Alabama. “We can scale these state-level successes massively by building a cohesive national framework.”

Entry-Level Jobs
Several second-tier U.S. cities are among the most promising locations for recent college graduates to land entry-level jobs, according to ADP, a payroll-services provider. Raleigh topped the list, followed by Birmingham, Milwaukee, Baltimore, and Austin, reports The Wall Street Journal. A higher-than-usual concentration of tech, health, and financial firms helps power some of those stronger job markets.

Upskilling
Less than half (45%) of American workers participated in education or training for their current job last year, and finding time away from work was the biggest obstacle, according to new data from Gallup. At the same time, HR leaders are increasingly concerned about employee skill development—with 59% saying it was one of their organization’s biggest struggles, up 16 percentage points from the previous year. 

Work-Based Learning
Students at four-year colleges are turning to work-based learning primarily to gain experience and skills, not to explore careers, according to new survey data from Strada Education Foundation. Only 13% of students surveyed said career exploration was a priority, while the vast majority were focused on experience and skill development (65%) or landing a full-time job (8%). Students rated paid internships and undergraduate research as the top experiences for making them better job candidates.

Workforce Development
A collection of 21 case studies offer a range of options for transforming how workforce development programs are designed, financed, and evaluated. The book, launched at an event this month, was published by the Social Finance Institute in collaboration with four Federal Reserve Banks. The case studies by policymakers, employers, and educators focus on earn-and-learn programs, repayment models, outcomes funds, and community colleges.

Alternative Financing
Purdue University’s income-share agreement program on average appears to have succeeded in providing students with an affordable, accessible, and nondiscriminatory alternative to Parent PLUS loans, write Ethan Pollack and Megan Soetaert from Jobs From the Future, citing a study by a Purdue researcher. The ISA also is linked with higher graduation rates. They write that the research suggests that concerns of critics so far have not come to pass.

Job Moves
Marielena DeSanctis has been named the sole finalist for the chancellor role at the Colorado Community College System. DeSanctis currently is president of the Community College of Denver. She would replace Joe Garcia, who just retired.

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