By Larry A. Good.
Last week, our friend Mary Alice McCarthy of the New America Foundation put out a new report, Beyond the Skills Gap: Making Education Work for Students, Employers, and Communities. It contains some great, readable stuff about the importance of education beyond high school and how credentials, systems, and funding need to change.
McCarthy starts with a concrete example of the eye glazing choices someone interested in becoming a “medical assistant” faces in Michigan as the start of a career path – including how to choose among 57 programs within the state, with widely varying cost, whether/which credentials/credits are involved, and questions about whether financial aid is/isn’t available. She uses this illustration to make the point that current systems leave people with a lot of difficult decisions to make with limited information, and that some of the choices are made worse because of policy gaps we have in the U.S.
At any rate, the piece is a solid contribution to the work we’re part of advancing through our competency-based credentialing, sustainable communities, and transforming postsecondary education work.
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