Industry-Led Education

The two-year college sector taps a strategy developed after the dot-com bust to help tech training stay current. Also, the Rockefeller Foundation makes a $100M bet on good jobs, an essay urging philanthropy to move faster amid AI, a deep dive on lessons learned from CHIPS hubs, and researchers on why it’s so hard to define outcomes for short-term credentials. (Subscribe here.)

Keeping on the Cutting Edge

As shifts in the job market accelerate, community colleges are feeling more pressure to actively include employers in the design of academic programs. But how?

One approach that’s gaining momentum is an industry-led strategy developed in the early ’00s. The Business & Industry Leadership Team (BILT) Model insists that employers co-lead programs and validate the job skills students learn. BILT has been endorsed by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Labor.

Ann Beheler was dean of engineering and emerging technologies at Collin College in the wake of the dot-com bust. She developed BILT to help the Texas community college revitalize its IT program. That experience is reminiscent of the challenges two-year colleges face now as they scramble to embed fast-moving AI skills into certificate and degree programs.

BILT flips the approach of a traditional industry advisory committee, South Florida–based reporter Matthew Arrojas writes in Work Shift. Instead of the college presenting a curriculum for business reps to review, this model instead requires the educators to provide a list of career-relevant skills, which the industry advisers rate. Faculty members then incorporate the top-rated skills into the curriculum.

Beheler tells Arrojas that BILT is particularly well suited to local partnerships. And she stresses that first-line hiring managers and high-level technical experts should lead the industry committees.

“I want the busiest people on the cutting edge of tech,” says Beheler.

BILT is far from the norm across the two-year sector, in part because it’s labor intensive and costs money. But the approach is having a moment, several experts say.

“We see every day how productively the BILT model embeds industry leadership directly into program development—ensuring that community colleges can deliver STEM technician education that drives real-time workforce impact and supports the nation’s advanced technological economy,” says DeRionne Pollard, president and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges.

Scot McLemore told me about BILT. McLemore is a former Honda executive who currently leads Columbus State Community College’s Office of Talent Strategy. The college uses BILT across several programs, including through its role as the host of the National IT Innovation Center, which is supported by a $7.5M NSF grant.

The center helps IT faculty and programs at community colleges across the country stay connected, innovative, and industry-aligned, says Stephanie Schuler, the center’s assistant director. The BILT members prioritize and validate job skills for specific IT disciplines, while also discussing trends and forecasting across disciplines.

“The insights from these meetings are shared with a network of over 160+ community colleges,” Schuler says. “Colleges, like Columbus State, then use these nationally validated job skills as a starting point and adapt them to local needs through their own BILTs.”

Miami Dade College is at the forefront of applying this approach to AI-related credential programs. As Arrojas reports, the college is co-leading an ambitious consortium of community colleges that created a BILT committee filled with AI leaders from companies like Microsoft and Intel.

Click over to Work Shift to read Arrojas’s article on how MDC is helping two-year colleges stay on the cutting edge of AI skills.

Investing $100M in Good Jobs

The Rockefeller Foundation is making one of the biggest economic mobility investments by a foundation in recent years, with a $100M commitment over three years to help communities connect more people to good jobs and adapt to rapid economic and technological change.

The strategy will focus on high-demand industries, including healthcare, energy, food systems, and AI-enabled sectors. It seeks to enable the creation of good jobs while lifting up about 250 of the nation’s most distressed communities. 

Rockefeller hopes the investment also will generate more “aligned capital” through collaboration with employers and public, private, and philanthropic funders. The foundation will partner with local groups and policymakers to test new policies and programs, Ashley Gold reports for Axios, including job-training pathways, expanded childcare access, and easing credential requirements.

AI’s looming impacts on the economy will be a key emphasis of the grants. The foundation says the technology could leave more people behind if workforce and economic systems do not adapt.

Philanthropic funding isn’t keeping pace with AI-driven change, Ellie Bertani, CEO of the GitLab Foundation, writes in an essay for Work Shift. She says funders face gaps in technical expertise, a low risk tolerance, and internal bureaucracy, all of which slows down capital.

“We need funding to go beyond the application layer,” writes Bertani. “That means investing in shared infrastructure—data systems, standards, and platforms—while continuing to support point solutions that demonstrate what’s possible.”

It’s good to see philanthropy making big bets, says Annelies Goger, director of research for Upskill America at the Aspen Institute. And the Rockefeller Foundation’s sector focus is a great choice. But she says these types of investments too often lead to competition and friction at a regional level.

“How do we move from one foundation making big grants here and there to a streamlined national strategy that philanthropy, government, and the private sector can all get behind?” Goger says.

More coordination is needed to boost the regional, state, and national infrastructure, she says, and to drive a policy focus from pockets of innovation to lasting changes in legislation.

The Kicker: “We don’t have a lack of innovation or a lack of good ideas, we have a lack of urgency,” Goger says. “We need an all-hands-on-deck approach to building better systems and shared frameworks, where everyone gets behind a big-picture vision to invest in talent to drive economic development and opportunity.”

Open Tabs

Labor Secretary Departs
The White House announced that Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the U.S. secretary of labor, is leaving her position. Chavez-DeRemer had faced widening scandals related to allegations of misconduct, including a whistleblower’s claims that she misused department funds to pay for personal travel. She pushed back on the allegations. Deputy Secretary Keith Sonderling is serving as acting labor secretary.

Apprenticeship Grades
The Trump administration deserves an overall B+ grade on apprenticeship, according to Apprenticeships for America. The nonprofit’s grading arrives one year after the Trump administration issued an executive order on apprenticeship that set a goal for reaching 1M active apprentices. While AFA gives generally good marks, the administration gets dinged with a C for “appropriately scaled funding” as its budget requests call for flat support for apprenticeship.

Hiring Grads
Employers expect to hire 5.6% more new college graduates this year, finds an annual survey from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, even though more than half of employers have discussed using AI to replace early-career work. The job market for the Class of 2026 appears to be improving, reports The Wall Street Journal. And unemployment among 20- to 24-year-olds with bachelor’s degrees dropped sharply to 5.3% in March.

AI and Job Vulnerability
Under a median-adoption projection, 9.3M U.S. jobs are vulnerable to job loss due to AI over the next two to five years, according to a new American job-risk index from Tufts University. The index ranks occupations, industries, regions, and states by AI vulnerability. It also associates those projections with the economic impact of lost income and helps translate the findings into potential actions, many of which would need to be implemented at the local level.

Digital WPA
An AI investment crash could contribute to substantial job loss, including through the general pressure of an economic downturn that forces companies to further reduce staffing, according to a report by Asad Ramzanali, director of AI and technology policy at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator. If an AI crash is associated with mass unemployment, he calls for the creation of a mass employment program—a Digital Works Progress Administration.

Pay-It-Forward Loans
Outcomes-based repayment models can help fill financing shortfalls in workforce training, particularly for short-term and noncredit programs, finds a paper by Harry Holzer and David Socolow. However, design choices help determine whether these programs are fair, understandable, and sustainable. The paper says governments and philanthropies can offer financial backstops to absorb risk and give other investors incentives to contribute.

Re-Enrollment and Earnings
Among former students who left college without earning a credential, almost three-quarters (73%) say that re-enrolling and completing a degree would improve their career earnings and potential, found a survey conducted by Trellis Strategies. Top reasons cited for leaving college by the survey’s respondents, who included students who attended community colleges and four-year institutions, were personal finances, family responsibilities, and employment.

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