Diamonds in the Rough

Alamo Colleges clear criminal records for students and connect them with employers and career counseling. Also, a new book on how community colleges are extending guided pathways to career success, the new Microsoft AI Economy Institute, and an essay on how careful design is needed for Workforce Pell in rural states. (Subscribe here.)

Clearing Records, Building Careers

Seven years ago, Toyotetsu was struggling with hiring and retaining skilled workers in the competitive San Antonio market. 

The automotive parts company turned to a new initiative run by Bexar County and TX FAME, a manufacturing industry training program that offers short-term bootcamps that pay people while they learn. The county was testing whether the program could help residents with criminal records, and Toyotetsu ended up training someone with a past violent offense. Leslie Cantu, vice president of administration at Toyotetsu, thought the worker would be with the company for six weeks and that would be the end of it. 

But when a permanent role opened up in the maintenance department, the manager wanted to hire him full-time. Today, he’s still with the company and in a leadership position.

“That experience got us thinking,” Cantu says. “We found a diamond in the rough that we probably would have overlooked had we not had this very chance opportunity.”

From there, Toyotetsu built a partnership with the Bexar County Reentry Center—and over the years, it has enrolled in its training program more than 275 people with criminal backgrounds, many of whom have stayed long-term. 

The Big Idea: Toyotetsu is now one of several employers in talks with Alamo Colleges as they expand their support for students with criminal backgrounds. The effort is part of a larger push to broaden the colleges’ role in lifting up their cities and regions. Alamo Colleges is one of 15 institutions participating in Achieving the Dream’s Community Vibrancy Cohort, which encourages community colleges to reimagine their role in the health and economic success of their communities.

Before joining the Achieving the Dream cohort, San Antonio College was already establishing an associate degree program at Dominguez State Jail. Julia Stotts, director of strategic planning and partnerships for the Alamo Colleges Foundation, says the initiative spurred leaders to think about how to also help those kinds of students after release.

“The earlier we can catch these students who are having these challenges, the better off they’re going to be,” Stotts says

Full Package of Supports: Nearly one in three American adults has a criminal record—just shy of the number of adults who have four-year college degrees. And many are effectively locked out of living-wage jobs as a result.

The federal government restored access to Pell Grants for incarcerated people to pursue degrees or other credentials in 2023, in part with an eye toward improving employment. But people who’ve been involved with the justice system still encounter many hurdles in finding good jobs—including restrictive workplace policies, gaps in résumés, and the knock-on effects of arrests and imprisonment like trouble finding housing and transportation. 

Reducing those barriers has become an increasing focus of many philanthropies and colleges. Jobs for the Future and Ascendium Education Group, for example, just announced a $19.5M initiative that will support four states in improving employment connections for people with records.

At Alamo Colleges, staff work with Easy Expunctions to clear students’ records and also provide career counseling and connect students with employers willing to give them a second chance.

One of the first challenges to the work was simply finding the students with records—a question the colleges had never asked. Staff started with targeted outreach and then held an open workshop to reach a broader audience. A task force is now considering how to ask whether students have criminal records earlier in the enrollment process.

In the first pilot with Easy Expunctions, 300 charges were identified among 56 students. More than a third of those charges were eligible to be removed, and 16 students had their entire records cleared. 

First Person: Ramiro, 45, is one of them. He lost his job when the architecture and engineering company he worked for went out of business. With a criminal record, Ramiro struggled to find a new job and eventually lost his apartment and started living in his truck. He finally turned to Alamo Colleges.

“One day, I just woke up and said, ‘I’m going to go to school and see what they can help me with,’” says Ramiro, who asked to be identified by only his first name. 

Ramiro enrolled at San Antonio College to study civil engineering, and through support from the college, his record is now clean. He got help securing housing and ongoing tutoring support, and he plans to eventually pursue a bachelor’s. With his record wiped, Ramiro also landed an internship at the county clerk’s office, which provides both experience and income.  

For students whose records can’t be expunged, the colleges are training career counselors to provide targeted advice. Several careers with licensing requirements bar people with certain charges on their record, so specialized coaches can better guide students on what courses to take. 

These kinds of wraparound services set Alamo Colleges apart from most other higher education institutions, says Allan Wachendorfer, associate director of the Vera Institute of Justice. 

The Kicker: “A lot of colleges offer career counseling and some might offer an expungement clinic,” Wachendorfer says. “But Alamo Colleges is tying it all together by providing that targeted career guidance, partnering to clear up people’s records, and then directly engaging the employers to help students land jobs.” —By Colleen Connolly

Click over to Work Shift to read the full story, including more detail on Toyotetsu’s approach and thoughts on how to engage employers.

Pathways From Community College to Good Jobs

While higher education is taking plenty of lumps these days, the bipartisan consensus among workforce pros is that community colleges need to be a big part of strategies to boost the economic mobility of meaningful numbers of Americans.

With roughly 1,600 colleges and branch campuses located in every corner of the country, no other sector can match the potential of two-year colleges to serve as regional hubs that connect working learners with career opportunities. 

Community colleges are more essential than ever, argues a new book by five researchers from the Community College Research Center at Columbia University’s Teachers College.

The book draws on a decade of research on guided pathways reforms at more than 100 community colleges. The pathways movement has been driven by the need for more structure for students and more intentional support for career choices and educational planning. As that work evolves, the authors say, community colleges must not only remove barriers to completion but also strengthen pathways to student goals after graduation.

Case studies featured in the book include rethinking dual enrollment and how colleges can work with employers and four-year institutions to ensure that all programs lead to living-wage, career-path jobs or seamless transfer.

Three of the book’s coauthors answered our questions about how rising interest in short-term credentials is changing the stakes for the pathways movement, and how dual enrollment can help lead to good careers. Click over to Work Shift to read the exchange.

Independent Research on AI and Jobs

Nobody knows how AI will reshape the labor market and society more broadly. But a growing body of research is trying to address those urgent questions. For example, three new studies are included in the Open Tabs section below.

An emerging player to watch in this effort is the recently launched Microsoft AI Economy Institute. In a July announcement about the company’s pledge to donate $4B in cash and AI and cloud tech to K-12 schools, community colleges, and nonprofits, Microsoft described the institute as a corporate think tank that advances independent research and solutions to economic and social change driven by AI.

“We’re convening multidisciplinary experts—from researchers and international organizations to business leaders and policymakers—to translate this research into positive, lasting impact,” Juan Lavista Ferres, a corporate vice president and chief data scientist at Microsoft, wrote on LinkedIn. 

The first slate of 14 research projects is focused on how colleges can lead the AI transformation. For example, Morgan Frank, a senior fellow with the institute and a professor at the University of Pittsburgh, is exploring the impact of LLMs on college education and career outcomes. Another project, involving the NJ AI Hub, is focused on AI education and workforce development.

“The research we’re doing with the institute is really around what types of training, reskilling, and upskilling are necessary to help people be able to get jobs in the AI-boosted economy,” Jeffrey Oakman, an institute senior fellow and senior strategic AI hub project manager at Princeton University, says in a video about the research projects.

In an interview, Frank says more support is needed for basic research on AI’s impacts on the labor market. He pointed to a study he led, published in April, which tracked how AI exposure predicts unemployment risk. That research, which tapped statewide employment and wage data, will soon be extended to the county level, says Frank.

The institute is seeking proposals for its second round of research grants. Its call includes research on the impact of AI on entry-level jobs and opportunities the tech creates for two-year colleges.

“Part of the real challenge is how do we actually prepare students for a job force where in five years, things are going to change on them?” asks Stephanie Moore, a senior fellow with the institute and a professor at the University of New Mexico.

Open Tabs

Uneven AI Impacts
Just two of eight major industry sectors—tech and media—are showing meaningful structural changes due to AI, finds MIT’s Project NANDA. Surveyed executives were hesitant to reveal the scope of layoffs due to AI, but it was 5 to 20% of customer support and administrative work, which are vulnerable roles due to outsourcing and process standardization. Roughly 80% of tech and media executives anticipated reduced hiring within two years.

Effects on Employment
AI adoption is expected to have only a modest and relatively temporary impact on employment levels, according to Goldman Sachs Research, which found that 2.5% of U.S. employment would be at risk if current AI use cases were expanded across the economy and reduced jobs proportionally to efficiency gains. Most at risk are computer programmers, accountants and auditors, legal and administrative assistants, and customer service workers.

Savings and Job Cuts
Major U.S. corporations could save $920B a year through the use of AI, largely due to employing fewer people, finds Morgan Stanley Research. Those savings represent 40% of the annual compensation expenses across the S&P 500, Axios reports. A mix of job cuts and enabling employees to perform higher-value work will drive projected gains. Companies also may replace workers largely through attrition rather than sweeping layoffs.

Mapping Workforce Training
The Project on Workforce at Harvard University has released an updated version of its Workforce Almanac, cataloging more than 20K short-term training providers across the country. The first version of the almanac informed regional labor market mapping and expansion plans, including for St. Louis City Hall and Year Up United. The latest version shows significant regional variation in training infrastructure and programs’ eligibility for federal WIOA funding.

Stuck in Place
Mobility has stalled amid frozen U.S. housing and job markets, reports The Wall Street Journal. The smallest share of Americans are moving since the federal government began collecting that data, and a measure of workers being hired or leaving their jobs has fallen to its lowest level since 2009. Immobility has broad economic consequences—when companies can’t hire people who live in different states, corporate productivity and profits can suffer.

Short-Term and Online
Investment by colleges in nondegree online credentials has more than doubled since 2018–19, with 65% of chief online learning officers reporting at least some investment, according to a report from Quality Matters, Eduventures, and EDUCAUSE. Major investment quadrupled, reaching 15% of respondents. Community colleges are leading this trend, the report found, with four-year institutions lagging behind despite similar student demand.

Job Alignment
The Aspen Institute College Excellence Program has added 55 community colleges to a network that seeks to ensure that academic programs and student advising are aligned with good jobs and pathways to four-year degrees. The colleges join 10 pilot institutions in the multiyear project and will draw from successful reforms they made, like moves by San Antonio College to address a nursing shortage.

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