People are struggling right now to find jobs, pay bills, and care for family. Located within those struggles is the need to upskill or reskill to be equipped for available jobs and better opportunities. Community-based organizations (CBOs) provide a critical means of support. They create new pathways to education and employment and help fill gaps for career guidance and navigation for institutions with limited capacity. They are helping meet adult learners’ needs, especially now when they are most urgent.
When Lumina Foundation decided to put $15 million toward fighting systemic racism in response to the killing of George Floyd, we imagined funding the efforts of leaders like Dr. Ruth Simmons and institutions like Prairie View A&M University in Texas.
Everyone supports apprenticeships. Whenever the economy suffers, interest in them spikes, and both the outgoing and incoming administrations have called for a big expansion. In a recent survey, 92 percent of Americans had a favorable view of apprenticeships—an approval rating that’s almost unheard of.
Even before COVID-19 hit, higher education was falling short of providing the skills needed for good jobs, a recent study shows. Now, amid the global pandemic and economic crisis, those skills gaps are growing wider.
Aggies Elevated is a two-year program at Utah State University that is designed to serve students with intellectual disabilities well – not merely by providing opportunities for learning, but also by helping students land competitive, “real-world” employment after they graduate. The staff-intensive Aggies Elevated program typically serves about 15 students at a time. As of a few weeks after the 2019 class graduated, 93 percent of its graduates had found jobs.
What would happen to education in the United States if we moved to a system of competency-based education, where we measured people’s knowledge, skills, abilities and intellectual behaviors rather than what courses they’ve taken or how many credit hours they’ve accrued?
Melvin Hines Jr. is an entrepreneur on a mission. As a teen in Albany, Georgia, Hines was disturbed by the high dropout rate among his high school classmates. That unease persisted when he went to college and saw scores of his fellow students hampered by economic and social inequities. It took a while, but Hines did something to address his concerns. Once he earned three degrees of his own, Hines and a partner founded a Texas-based educational software firm called Upswing. Today, Upswing’s online products are helping more than 80 colleges and universities boost students’ success by connecting them to peer tutoring, intensive advising, and other services.
Linda Thayer lives – and essentially works three jobs – in the lake country of far-northern Wisconsin, in tiny town 22 miles from the nearest McDonald’s. To advance her career in health care, she knew she needed to upgrade her credentials by earning a Bachelor of Science in Nursing degree. But lack of time and her remote location complicated that quest – that is, until she discovered a program with the right kind of “Flex.”
In 2018, American Institutes for Research, in partnership with Eduventures Research surveyed institutions
of higher education across the United States to better understand how they are adopting and using competency-based education (CBE).
Important changes in our approaches to learning after high school are being led by many college educators and urgently demanded by lawmakers, policy leaders, and the public.