Unfinished Work

When I look back on my career and the winding path that led me to the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce (CEW), I think of my childhood during the early 1970s. My parents had started a school in West Virginia to ensure that local students could have access to a high-quality education. Consistent with the era’s movements for social change and heightened social consciousness, my parents believed that education was the key to economic mobility. This belief that education has the potential to be the great equalizer would become a throughline of my life’s work.

Perhaps also reflecting the zeitgeist, I promptly bombed in college and—like many young men of my generation—began a career in the construction trades. Working in construction, I learned firsthand that good opportunities exist in the labor market for workers without a four-year degree, but these opportunities are the exception, not the rule. Too many people get stuck in place, working their bodies to exhaustion. The many who are informally employed or nonunionized tend to end up without good retirement savings or pensions, working well into “retirement” if they can still work.

My experiences helped motivate my work investigating the dynamic intersections between education, work, and economic opportunity at CEW. I am proud of the research we’ve published to clarify how education can improve people’s lives—and where it has fallen short. Now, as I move into retirement, I want to share a few reflections about the current frontiers of education and workforce research.

First, some CEW history: When we launched the center in 2008, education and workforce research were seldom part of the same conversation. From the beginning, our work focused on using career outcomes as a yardstick to judge educational outcomes and to connect the dots between the labor market and education. 

Critically, our research highlighted American education’s failure to be the promised great equalizer—a failure that CEW’s founding director, Anthony P. Carnevale, and I spent much of our careers exploring. Too often in life, we found, personal background overshadows individual talent in determining people’s access to opportunity. Like economist Jesse Rothstein, we saw that social class predicts SAT scores just as SAT scores predict social class. As we reported in our early publication Separate and Unequal, students whose parents have no more than a high school diploma have a 13 percent chance of obtaining a bachelor’s degree, compared with a 73 percent chance for students whose parents have a professional or doctoral degree. 

In other words, the American educational system is one in which privilege begets privilege. It is not a level playing field. And solutions are elusive: Pronouncing the United States a meritocracy doesn’t make it so. Educators and policymakers have made much progress over recent decades, but we still have a long way to go to realize education’s full potential.

At its founding, CEW’s focus on the junctures between education and work was arguably novel. The fact that this focus has become so commonplace in public discussion and policy debate is one marker of CEW’s impact. But we—both CEW and the broader field—have been far less successful in dismantling the inequalities and structural barriers to prosperity our work identifies. That failure is why unbiased, robust research that pulls back the curtains on our assumptions about upward mobility remains so important. 

Even as inequality remains a persistent hurdle, new challenges are raising difficult questions about the future of postsecondary education and the workforce. I’ll highlight two of them here.

Challenge 1: Skepticism about the value of the bachelor’s degree

Our research has consistently shown that earning a bachelor’s degree or higher is the most reliable pathway to labor-market opportunity. There was a time when this finding was uncontroversial. But the public no longer trusts claims about the value of college—or, to be more specific, they are no longer convinced that the payoff associated with having a four-year degree is worth the high costs of earning a degree. 

I believe that the current debate about the value of college is important, as it challenges us to check our assumptions about the college-for-all movement. The college-for-all movement began with good intentions: to ensure that all students were adequately prepared to enroll in college, thereby dismantling the pernicious practice of tracking students toward college or trade school by race, gender, and class. But the college-for-all movement also minimized the importance of non-college pathways. Some backlash is understandable, particularly in light of a challenging labor market for college graduates. And yet, I feel the pendulum may be swinging too far from the degree, with little evidence suggesting that shorter-term credentials are the panacea to concerns about the value of postsecondary education. 

Individuals can achieve economic opportunity without a bachelor’s degree, as our research on “good jobs” has demonstrated. However, the evidence suggests that opportunities will plateau or shrink for workers with a high school diploma or middle-skills credential (a postsecondary certificate or associate’s degree). Because much service-oriented work—such as home construction, repair and maintenance, and auto repair—is directly related to population size, opportunities in the middle will likely be constrained by flattening population growth. Additionally, the career and technical education sector has increasingly recognized the importance of embracing education pathways and training programs beyond high school.

Ultimately, we need good data to generate good public policy. Without clear, unbiased assessment and thoughtful research, confidence in postsecondary education as a vehicle for social and economic mobility will continue to erode, while viable, empirically supported alternatives to college will be unlikely to emerge. Future research should investigate the degree to which middle-skills work can offer wider access to economic opportunity, mobility, and prosperity.

Challenge 2: The impact of AI on education and work

No forward-looking policy research can avoid the study of AI. Frontier AI models are evolving quickly, and we do not yet have a clear understanding of how AI is affecting the workplace. Arguably, many of its effects to date—such as layoffs at tech companies—represent shifts in companies’ investment priorities toward building capital and infrastructure (data centers) to sustain long-term AI growth. In other words, layoffs don’t necessarily suggest that companies have successfully integrated AI into their workflows, though such integration may be on the horizon. At this stage of development, the effects of AI on education and the workplace most likely have yet to play out. 

As AI evolves and timely data emerge, policy researchers will need to address many questions. Will AI demolish work as we know it, substituting for human labor and driving mass unemployment, even or especially among the most-educated workers? Will postsecondary education become little more than a consumption good pursued for enjoyment and entertainment by those who can afford it? Or will education grow in importance as AI becomes a complement to labor, with well-educated people best equipped to use AI as a tool to enhance productivity? 

The bottom line is that AI will engender change in a host of ways we can’t yet predict. Understanding AI’s impact on the evolving labor-market value of education will require ongoing research on the value of credentials, as well as improved understanding of the knowledge and skills that credentials represent. I suspect that AI will primarily affect work at the task level, increasing the importance of both AI competency skills (that is, workers’ ability to use AI) and “human” skills such as creativity and critical thinking. Ultimately, we will need to wrestle with how institutions can better prepare students and what accountability for graduates’ labor-market outcomes means as change accelerates.

These topics have been on my mind as I turn the corner into retirement, and I look forward to seeing how my colleagues at CEW engage with them in future work. In no small part, CEW’s success reflects the dedication and professionalism of our past and present staff, who have created a nonpartisan reporting model by building clear narratives from robust empirical analysis of quantitative data. I am happy to announce that Dr. Zack Mabel, CEW’s director of research, will lead this continuing work as interim director.

I’m proud to look back in the rearview mirror at the good work CEW has done and the impact it has had on policy conversations. I have learned much from the research and policy communities over the years—that is, from you—and I continue to be impressed by your wide and varied commitments to promoting economic opportunity, mobility, and the potential for self-fulfillment. I look forward to seeing where CEW and the rest of the field go next.