How can the United States raise job quality and skills for American workers through more effective education and workforce development within states? In particular:
- How can we fix the misalignment between the skills of Americans without college degrees and the workforce needs of well-paying industries that do not necessarily require a college degree?
- And how can we create a learning strategy where we incentivize states to produce better outcomes for community college graduates and then learn what works among state approaches?
We get insights into those questions from Harry Holzer, a leading thinker on workforce issues. He is the former Chief Economist at the U.S. Department of Labor and is today a professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University.
In the interview, we discuss Harry Holzer’s policy recommendations, including 1) Providing more resources to community colleges but also creating incentives and accountability by basing state subsidies on student completion rates and earnings of graduates; 2) Expanding high-quality career and technical education plus work-based learning models like apprenticeship; and 3) Assisting and incentivizing employers to create more good jobs.