Regional Connector

A training provider takes a turn as regional talent ecosystem coordinator. Also, another busy week on AI and jobs, an upstart college network for learning analytics builders, and essays on sensemaking in a rapidly expanding credential ecosystem and how broad-access colleges can lead higher ed’s AI future. (Subscribe here.)

Coordinating on Life Sciences Careers

Greater Boston is adding thousands of jobs in the life sciences industry, many of them well-paying technician roles that don’t require a four-year degree. To help meet that demand, the workforce group Year Up United is playing an unusual coordinating role, connecting employers, training providers, and jobseekers.

The Life Sciences Career Alliance is a public-private partnership, kicked off in 2024 with $4.7M in startup funding from the City of Boston. The city backed Year Up United as a workforce intermediary, operating in partnership with MassBio, a nonprofit industry group.

Serving as connector is a new turn for Year Up United, a prominent sectoral training provider. The group isn’t offering job training itself, but helping to manage a messy and complex talent pipeline.

“Boston has a robust but fragmented life sciences training ecosystem, shaped by a diverse set of providers and government funding that encouraged rapid program growth,” says Mae Tobin-Hochstadt, the nonprofit’s senior director of solution development.

She says the region’s hiring needs across life sciences have shifted since the pandemic, with more demand for flexible roles like clinical research coordinators, quality control analysts, and patient service reps. Skills increasingly are being sought in data entry and troubleshooting. Hospitals and labs also continue to need more phlebotomists. 

“Employers are overwhelmed with partnership requests,” says Tobin-Hochstadt, “while educators need consistent industry engagement and feedback on curriculum.”

Collaboration among training providers is made trickier by perceived competition for funding, students, and job placements. And graduates of those programs often don’t get enough help in finding job networks or the next step in their education.

That’s where the Life Sciences Career Alliance comes in. It reduces friction for employers by coordinating partnerships and has helped to establish trusted metrics on talent readiness and training provider quality. The alliance also works with community colleges and nonprofit training providers to prevent program duplication and to help build ties with employers.

Just as importantly, the alliance helps community college students with job placement and career advising, including one-on-one coaching, workshops, and structured access to employer networks. Meanwhile, students can access a digital hub featuring job-search and career-readiness tools, as well as peer networking.

For example, the alliance recently ran job-search workshops for phlebotomy students at Bunker Hill Community College, while providing coaching to graduates of that program.

Funding from the City of Boston unlocked important doors, says Tobin-Hochstadt. And she says the alliance model could work for other governments that are looking to invest in systems change and flexibility in filling talent-pipeline gaps.

Playing the intermediary role in Greater Boston also is a learning experience for Year Up United.

“While direct training remains central to our mission,” says Tobin-Hochstadt, “we also look for innovative ways to connect more young adults with meaningful career opportunities, especially in industries where employers, educators, and graduates all benefit from a more coordinated ecosystem.”

The Latest on AI, Jobs, and Education

In a new essay for Work Shift, Stephanie Khurana and Philipp Schmidt of Axim Collaborative argue that the community colleges, regional public universities, and online institutions that educate the vast majority of undergraduates are well suited to adapt and lead on AI—but that they urgently need more support from tech companies and philanthropies. If they don’t get it, the authors write, “The risk is not only slow adoption, but misalignment at scale.”

That call for investment comes at a time when popular attention around AI has swung hard toward productivity and the implications for jobs. Topping the news this week was Anthropic’s move to push deeper into knowledge work with its Claude Cowork tool. And a Citrini Research piece went viral with a vision of 2028 in which the unemployment rate sits above 10% and the economy is in a death spiral because its biggest consumers—America’s white collar workers—have been hardest hit. The investment advisory was clear the piece was a thought exercise rather than a prediction, but that didn’t stop it from moving markets.

In Silicon Valley and the pages of Wired, the platform de jour is the online marketplace RentAHuman, where AI agents can, well, rent a human to do tasks that are difficult without arms and legs. Allison Dulin Salisbury, formerly of Guild and now at Humanist Venture Studio, suggests we might be heading toward a “bot sandwich” economy where human workers sit above and below a vast middle of AI agents. The question then would be: Can we create enough jobs—and prepare people for them—in the upper layer, or will most people find themselves for rent on the bottom?

Maybe, yes: On the Ezra Klein show at The New York Times, Jack Clark, co-founder of Anthropic, was optimistic about the prospects that AI will create more good jobs than it destroys, especially if we humans put our thumb on the scale. And a trio of bold names in labor economics—Daron Acemoglu, David Autor, and Simon Johnson—are out with a paper arguing that we should be building AI with that goal explicitly in mind. They say AI should be pro worker—designed to be a multiplier of human skill and expertise—but that the market is currently in thrall to the god of automation. 

Past waves of technological innovation didn’t just naturally create new jobs, Acemoglu said in a webinar, hosted by The Hamilton Project at Brookings. Society made choices, sometimes belatedly.

The Kicker: “We’re not in favor of slowing down progress, but if a car is going toward the abyss, we are in favor of steering it in a different direction,” Acemoglu said. —By Elyse Ashburn

DIY Learning Analytics in the AI Era

Learning analytics was one of the buzziest innovations in higher education before the pandemic, as educators sought to tap big data and machine learning to develop more personalized learning and to help students get to graduation.

Artificial intelligence later sucked up that oxygen and much more, essentially subsuming predictive and learning analytics. Yet the rapidly advancing technology also has given a boost to this work, which is continuing across higher education, including a growing number of community colleges.

“Much like the MOOC explosion, AI has cornered the dialogue, imagination, angst, and fears of innovators and curmudgeons alike,” says Myk Garn, a consultant and ed-tech expert who served as the University System of Georgia’s assistant vice chancellor for new learning models.

AI helped spark the idea for the Learning Analytics Builders Coalition, an upstart peer network that has been incubated by the 1EdTech Consortium. 

“The promise of what AI could do in combing through ponds of data might make the process more efficient and find insights that we may have not even looked for,” says Kevin Corcoran, assistant vice provost of the Center for Distributed Learning at the University of Central Florida. “It also presents a new challenge as we introduce interactive AI solutions.”

Part of LAB-C’s focus is how to “move from balkanized data swamps to accessible, usable data sources for AI,” Garn says. Learning analytics and competency-based specification of learning outcomes are essential structural elements for making that happen.

A solid data infrastructure needs to be in place for a college to make the most of generative AI, says Suzanne Carbonaro, 1EdTech’s vice president of postsecondary and workforce education programs. “If you don’t have structured data for Claude to look at, there’s going to be a lot of hallucinations. A lot of inaccuracies.”

Learning analytics tends to touch many people on a campus. But it’s rarely anyone’s primary responsibility. LAB-C is trying to help with this conundrum by creating a user community for learning analytics builders on campuses—a convener of conveners, as Garn calls it.

Part of the peer network’s goal is to help community colleges and universities without deep pockets learn from leaders in the field, with an eye toward developing their own homegrown learning analytics systems. AI arguably is helpful here, Garn says, because it can support the “DIY ethos at resource-constrained colleges.”

As it seeks to build awareness, LAB-C is mulling a national survey to better gauge where a college sits on the learning analytics spectrum. The network also is seeking seed funding to get to the next level.

Carbonaro says the project intersects with 1EdTech’s broader work, including the consortium’s efforts around AI, interoperability, and open standards for data on digital credentials. “What is learning analytics in the world of AI?” she says.

Open Tabs

Training Electricians
A national workforce program from the Siemens Foundation seeks to expand access to high-quality training for in-demand electrical careers, beginning with a $9.5M investment in North Carolina. Wake Technical Community College is an anchor partner for the initial project, which has a goal of training 25K North Carolinians. From high school apprenticeships to community college credentials, it aims to create a replicable model with multiple entry points to careers.

Wage Threshold
Lawmakers in Indiana are considering legislation to require the elimination of college programs that fail an emerging federal wage test, reports Ryan Quinn for Inside Higher Ed. The legislation could result in nixed programs at Ivy Tech Community College—Indiana’s statewide two-year college system—and at public universities. The federal earnings threshold would require a program’s graduates to earn more than a state’s typical high school grad.

AI Fluency
Google has released a professional certificate that seeks to bridge AI fluency gaps and to train people in practical AI skills. The program is based on labor market research from the Burning Glass Institute and validated by the Skills-First Workforce Initiative, a coalition of large U.S. employers. Google is offering the certificate to small U.S. businesses for free. Walmart, Colgate-Palmolive, and Deloitte will provide the training to their workforces at no cost.

Degree ROI
More than half of graduates (55%) of two-year degree programs say they landed a good job within six months of completing, compared to 71% of recent four-year graduates, finds research from Gallup and the Lumina Foundation. Strong majorities of respondents reported confidence in the value of their college education, with 75% of current students and 71% of graduates agreeing that their degree is worth the cost.

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