Learning Without Borders

A new effort to move the U.S. from a “schooled society” to a “learning society,” amid AI and major demographic shifts. Also, Anthropic and congressional Democrats call for job training funded by Big Tech, and the commerce secretary dissolves Natcast, the nonprofit that had been overseeing semiconductor and workforce R&D. (Subscribe here.)

Erasing Education’s Borders

In a certain crowd of education and workforce reformers—the kinds of people who read The Job, for example—it’s become commonplace to hear the word “learner” subbed in for “student.”

The signal: Not all learning is done through formal schooling, and not all students are actually learning. We want learners, wherever they may be.

Lots of trending models—competency-based education, work-based learning, learning and employment records, skills-based hiring—center on this idea. And there’s general consensus that educators and employers can’t make good on the promise of those innovations by just tinkering at the margins.

“Can we weave those efforts into a larger national initiative?” asks Mitchell Stevens, a sociology professor and co-director of the Stanford Center on Longevity. “That is the goal and the vision.”

The Big Idea: A new collaborative effort led by the Stanford center aims to tackle that goal—giving clearer shape to what it would mean to truly build a “learning society.”

As a starting point, the collaborative released a report and set of design principles this week, crafted through a year of discussion and debate among more than 30 fellows in leadership roles in education, industry, government, and research. The fellows landed on nine core principles—including that working is learning and credentials are a means, not an end—designed to transition the U.S. from a “schooled society” to a “learning society.”

“Universal access to K-12 education and the massification of access to college were major accomplishments of 20th-century America,” Stevens says. “But all that schooling also has downsides that only recently have come into common view. Conventional schooling is expensive, bureaucratic, and often inflexible.”

A learning society would be more adaptable, the report asserts—accounting for our longer lives, the more changeable nature of jobs, and new demands on human intelligence, driven by rapid advancements in AI and other technologies. That doesn’t mean, however, throwing out all that works well with schools.

A commitment to schools as an essential anchor of learning and civic life is the No. 1 design principle in the report—but the group argues they can’t be walled off from careers and the demands of securing a livelihood.

“We need to take what we have and then erase the borders,” says Anne Trumbore, one of the fellows and chief digital learning officer at the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at the University of Virginia. 

Looking Forward: In the coming months, the collaborative plans to expand to a wider group and develop a set of action and investment blueprints around questions like:

• What should high school look like after the sunset of “college for all”?

• What is the future of the human resources and learning and development functions?

• As adults need to more regularly upgrade their knowledge and skills, what would it look like if the boundary between education and work disappeared?

Work Shift will be following this effort and asked Stevens some questions about the vision and next steps. Read his answers here. —By Elyse Ashburn

Job Training Funded by Big Tech

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei hasn’t backed off his prediction that AI will fuel a white-collar jobs apocalypse. He’s also calling for ambitious federal job training programs for displaced workers, with funding coming from Anthropic and other AI companies.

“The government is going to need to step in, especially during the transition,” Amodei said Wednesday at an Axios event in Washington.

Amodei and Anthropic’s co-founder, Jack Clark, have been making the rounds in D.C. this week to press that case. They found agreement among some congressional Democrats. But Republicans appear to be a tougher sell.

“You need some kind of policy response at the scale of disruption we expect in the next five years,” said Clark, who oversees the company’s growing policy shop.

Senator Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat, this week unveiled a broad plan for government action on AI. His proposal includes the creation of a federal fund—backed by contributions from leading AI companies—that would pay for investments in workers, infrastructure, and responsible deployment of the tech.

“There is a possibility that we could have millions of people put out of work because of artificial intelligence,” Kelly said.

When asked at the Axios event which part of his public-private plan is the most important—and most likely to attract bipartisan backers—Kelly pointed to upskilling and reskilling, including apprenticeships. “That model could work really well here,” he said.

Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat, also called for an AI jobs vision during the Axios event, and for tax incentives to expand apprenticeships.

However, Kelly’s “AI horizon fund” won’t go anywhere without Republican support. Neither Sriram Kishnam, the White House senior policy advisor on AI, nor Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican, dwelled on workforce issues during their time on stage at the Axios summit. And one key White House nominee dismissed what he described as “top-down” solutions to AI’s potential impacts on jobs.

AI increases worker productivity, said Jacob Helberg, the Trump administration’s nominee for undersecretary of state for economic growth, energy, and the environment. If labor gets more efficient, he said, demand for labor goes up. As with the transition to the personal computer, that means more jobs.

“The notion that the government necessarily has to hold the hands of every single person getting displaced actually underestimates the resourcefulness of people,” Helberg said.

Big Changes for Semiconductor and Workforce R&D

When Congress passed the CHIPS and Science Act with bipartisan support three years ago, it established a new national center focused on semiconductor R&D—not just around technology, but also workforce development.

The National Semiconductor Technology Center, which was legislatively mandated as a public-private consortium, was incubated in the Department of Commerce and then spun out to a separate nonprofit, Natcast, at the end of the Biden administration. Howard Lutnick, Trump’s commerce secretary, is now calling foul on that move—saying it was illegal and designed to install Biden-aligned leadership and wrest control from the incoming administration.

In a letter to Natcast’s CEO late last month, Lutnick severed the government’s ties with Natcast and effectively dissolved the organization.

“From the very beginning Natcast served as a semiconductor slush fund that did nothing but line the pockets of Biden loyalists with American tax dollars,” Lutnick said in a press release.

In a letter to its stakeholders following Lutnick’s decision, Natcast emphasized the qualifications of its leadership and staff, many of whom have extensive industry experience, and it outlined the ways in which the organization was required to be accountable to the Commerce Department—including weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews of its programming and approval of its operating budget and major project outlays. It also emphasized that its trustees are not paid.

“Natcast operates with multiple levels of oversight and disciplined fiscal management,” the letter said.

The stated intent of Natcast’s structure was to position industry as an equal player with the government when it came to semiconductor and workforce R&D. Industry leaders had made it clear that for the NSTC to succeed, it had to be seen as a “neutral, trusted, and science-driven player.”

The Bottom Line: The immediate impact of the administration’s decision will be at least a period of disruption for the NSTC and its workforce center, as the work transitions to Commerce’s National Institute of Standards and Technology, without existing staff or structures. But it’s not clear what the move means for the center’s workforce agenda longer term—including research, coordination, and guidance that regional leaders have said is badly needed in some form. Nobody we reached seemed to know, or be willing to talk if they did. 

Natcast put out an overview of its work to date, and some leaders in the NSTC’s Workforce Center of Excellence publicly shared what they had been working on.

Adam Leonard joined the workforce center in February to stand up its data analytics team, after 22 years at the Texas Workforce Commission. He said in a public post that his team and others had been making progress: developing products, issuing competitive funding, and attracting blue-chip membership.

Leonard said he was attracted by the opportunity to build a new workforce development model that actually achieved industry alignment, an area where so many other efforts had come up short.

“The work focused on one industry, but what we were building could have been replicated across others—especially for emerging technologies like quantum computing,” he wrote. “It could have helped inform a replacement for WIOA in the years ahead.”

A Playbook: Natcast’s dismantling follows a pattern of Trump administration moves to renege on agreements, including those under the CHIPS and Science Act, made by the previous administration. In May, for example, the Commerce Department announced it was rescinding six awards for regional Tech Hubs made during the Biden administration, and that it would revamp the grant program.

The new administration is not backing off federal involvement in industrial policy, though. If anything, it’s demanding more direct control with new equity stakes in chipmakers like Intel and a rare earths mining firm.

“The Trump administration’s implementation approach looks significantly different from the Biden administration’s,” says Shalin Jyotishi, founder and managing director of the Future of Work & Innovation Economy Initiative at New America. “But it’s becoming clearer that the second Trump term will be doubling down on and even expanding the toolbox of government influence of markets and actions to spur public-private partnerships, as well as investments—especially in sectors strategic for national competitiveness.”

What that means for workforce development remains to be seen. —By Elyse Ashburn

Open Tabs

Unemployment and Resignations
College-educated Americans increasingly are driving growth in long-term unemployment and now account for one-third of those who have been out of work for more than six months, Noam Scheiber reports for The New York Times, citing federal data. Meanwhile, younger workers are quitting their jobs at relatively low rates, writes the Burning Glass Institute’s Gad Levanon, with resignation rates for college graduates having reached historically low levels.

Wraparound Supports
Four Maryland community colleges have received an award totaling more than $14M from Arnold Ventures to replicate the CUNY ASAP model, a proven support program for lower-income students that includes academic, financial, and personal components. The matching gift came through the Maryland Partnership for Proven Models. Arnold Ventures has made similar recent awards aimed at bringing ASAP to two-year colleges in Colorado and North Carolina.

Apprenticeships in Arkansas
The Arkansas Division of Workforce Services has received a grant of roughly $36M from the U.S. Department of Labor to expand registered apprenticeship, Nick Beadle reports in his newsletter, Jobs hat Work. With the massive award, Beadle calculates that the state has about 13% of 2025 congressionally appropriated funds for apprenticeship. Arkansas recently made the legal change to be able to directly register and oversee apprenticeship programs.

Apprenticeship Degrees
Because of a lack of consistent funding for apprenticeships, colleges often seek multiple funding sources—including Pell Grants—to cover tuition for apprenticeship degrees, according to a report from Apprenticeships for America. Some states are providing the sort of support that can take apprenticeship degrees beyond niche programs, including California and Indiana. The nonprofit’s report also describes how to improve the transferability of apprenticeship degrees.

Accreditation and Apprenticeship
OpenClassrooms, an apprenticeship platform, has received initial approval from a college accrediting agency. Accreditation by the WASC Senior College and University Commission means that students enrolled in OpenClassrooms can earn an accredited degree when they complete employer-sponsored apprenticeships and online skills training. OpenClassrooms, which is a B-Corp, currently enrolls degree-seeking students across more than 100 countries.

To support our work, donate here. If this newsletter was forwarded to you, subscribe here. —PF