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Career education is a vital pipeline to high demand jobs in the workforce. Students from all walks of life benefit from the opportunity to pursue their career education goals and find new employment opportunities. Join Dr. Jason Altmire, President and CEO of Career Education Colleges and Universities (CECU), as he discusses the issues and innovations affecting postsecondary career education. Twice monthly, he and his guests discuss politics, business, and current events impacting education and public policy.
Jason Altmire (00:04)
Is a college degree the best way to find a job? We hear about that debate happening across the country. Are there other avenues to find a sustainable career? We have a guest on today who is perfectly equipped to help with that. And we are the Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire. And today our guest is Gad Levanon He is the chief economist at the Burning Glass Institute.
And the Burning Glass Institute is a nationally prominent workforce development research firm that ⁓ studies these issues, not only in the U.S., but in other parts of the world. And Gadd has been involved in that research. So Gadd, are grateful to have you on the show today.
Gad Levanon (00:51)
Thank you very much, Jason, for having me.
Jason Altmire (00:54)
Maybe we can start by just giving an overview of burning glass and the research that you do and the intense focus that you have on these workforce development issues.
Gad Levanon (01:05)
Yeah, so we are a relatively young organization, not even four years yet. But we focus on topics like labor markets, higher education and things in between. Do lately a lot of work related to AI and the impact it has on the labor markets. Labor shortage is also a topic that we're looking at some regional stuff, but yeah, very labor focused.
Jason Altmire (01:33)
And this debate that's occurring in the country about the value of a college degree. And for so long decades, in fact, we have told young people that the four year path is the preferred path. It's the best way to find a job. And if you choose a different way, you have taken the lesser course. You've taken the easy way out and you probably won't do quite as well. That has been the perception.
for a long time, but that perception is now starting to change. And you hear so much enthusiasm and excitement about programs in the skilled trades, in healthcare, in ⁓ cybersecurity and other types of programs. Can you talk a little bit about what the research shows about the public sentiment, about the four-year path and higher education generally, but more importantly, the need.
and the skills gap that exists and why employers are having such trouble across America filling the jobs that are available today.
Gad Levanon (02:39)
Sure, I think a lot of it is related to education and demographic trends. So, you know, we are now for the first time, perhaps in history, we have a declining working age population. So that creates the potential for shortages across the board, perhaps less known than that is the educational trends. So more and more in recent decades, more and more, as you mentioned earlier, people
choose to get a bachelor degree. And the people that they are replacing, the baby boomers who are retiring, fewer of the baby boomers have a bachelor degree. So the percent of people with a bachelor degree in the workforce has been growing rapidly, probably beyond the need for a college degree. So we have in recent years a growing glut of people with a college degree and a shortage in many jobs.
They don't require a college degree, including many of the trades. And you know, if people with a college degree, many of them are trying to get a job that requires a bachelor degree and they don't, at least not as a first choice, want to go to the trades after getting a college degree. And that by itself creates additional shortages. So we've seen what I call the blue collar labor shortage already going back to 2018 or so.
several years where the shortage of people without a college degree in trades and such is much higher than the shortage for people with a college degree. And that is also being reflected in wage growth. Wage growth of people in the trades has been much faster than wage growth for people in professional jobs or management.
Jason Altmire (04:28)
And then just to put some color on what you have said to add some data, more than a million trade roles are unfilled right now. Today in America, more than a million trade jobs are available and that's over 500,000 of which are in manufacturing. And when you think about the data centers, the distribution warehouses, energy and bringing back manufacturing to America.
500,000 jobs right now, that's going to grow. And to your point about the baby boomers retirement, which is this demographic tsunami that we knew was coming, it's going to be happening and you're going to see the effects of this. And for every five trades people retiring, only two are stepping up to replace them. And that is not a sustainable path. We already have a million jobs that are vacant.
and for every five retirements only two are stepping into that. That is a problem that needs to be solved. But as you said, that pushes up wages and makes those fields more financially attractive to students. But what can we do to bring more people into the trades to generate more excitement and get more people onto that pathway?
Gad Levanon (05:46)
You know, ⁓ markets will eventually solve the problem, but it could take many years for it to happen. So we could help quicken it. I think there is, as you said earlier, an issue of stigma of the preferred way in America is to get a bachelor degree. And I hope that there's a kind of the gap between wages of... ⁓
people with a bachelor degree and people without. As it shrinks, the stigma will partly go away. There is a very interesting and unfortunate trend happening right now that the unemployment rate among young college grads is growing rapidly. It's now higher than 70 % of the months since this century.
And while at the same time, the overall unemployment rate is not high by historical standards, so something unusually bad is happening to young college degrees. And I think when you're now, if you're 18 or 17, a high school senior, and if you're looking at your older friends struggling to get a job, I think that could push them to a decision to go to other channels.
Jason Altmire (07:01)
What's the reason for the difficulty that young people, recent college graduates are having finding work. We see these stories. It's expected to get even worse this year in 2026. And there seems to be no projection for the problem to solve itself. So what, what's driving this phenomenon?
Gad Levanon (07:22)
Yeah. So in addition to the demographic story that I told earlier about the glut of college grads, there is also AI, which I believe is contributing to that. AI is replacing more and more jobs, but it's better at replacing ⁓ entry-level positions where judgment and relationships and
management abilities are less important and the more technical skills are more important. So we definitely see, for example, in job postings that entry level job postings are declining employers. When they cut hiring, it's mostly for those ⁓ young new entrants positions. And as you said, that is likely to continue. The adoption of AI is progressing and more and more jobs in more and more industries.
are going to be affected. And I wouldn't say we are in a crisis situation yet, but if those trends continue, it's going to be very, very difficult for young college grads to find a job. It's almost going to be like periods of recession, even though the economy is not in a recession right now. So this combination of educational demographic trends on the one side and AI on the other, that's kind of squeezing the demand for
for college grads.
Jason Altmire (08:47)
And if you think about the job displacements that are driven by AI, many of them, as you mentioned, are entry level or lower skilled jobs, and they're often white collar professions. And the skilled trades by contrast are very hard to automate. If you think about electricians, plumbers, pipe fitters, welders, aviation, auto technicians, those are jobs that
are not going to be automated in the near term and AI will have less impact. And in fact, many of those jobs can use AI for their benefit in diagnosing issues and solving problems that they haven't been seen before and offering advice to the technician on things to consider. Do you think that this is something that will be evident to the population and especially to young people when they're thinking through their career path?
Gad Levanon (09:45)
I can see how it wouldn't. The difficulties of young college grads are becoming very evident. And I think when people start looking at what kind of jobs are at a higher risk from AI, they see it's not the planners. It's not the places where you need robots that can operate in an unfamiliar territory, do things that they never did before that.
You know, it may come one day for those jobs too, but that day is still very far away. And in the meantime, it's much easier to automate office related cognitive, especially things related to writing, text, coding. Those are things that large language quarters are fantastic at.
Jason Altmire (10:28)
I saw a report that Burning Glass did, I believe it came out back in December, talking about the role of women in filling skilled trades. And I believe that I saw was that less than 5 % of jobs in these blue collar skilled trades are held by women. And in order to help solve the problem of the skills gap more generally, if we were to...
double that number, get more women involved and excited about the possibility of working in some of these jobs, it would make a huge difference in filling some of this gap. What do you think are some of the ways to get more women interested and what would be the effect of that if we were able to do that as a country?
Gad Levanon (11:11)
I think in many of those jobs, there is no reason why women should not be involved. Again, it's a matter of stigma and kind of changing the way things have been for a long period of time. But I do think there are, for example, in truck driving, it may be awkward to team a man and a woman together in a truck for ⁓ many days that can sound like unappealing.
to some women perhaps, but if you have a crew that both of the drivers are women, then it's much more receptive. So things like that, changing shifts, changing scheduling, ⁓ those are things that I think employers, if they really wanted to do that, they could find ways.
Jason Altmire (11:56)
And we're talking about the skilled trades, but another area where there's huge workforce shortages are in healthcare. If you think especially nursing, registered nursing, and I know you have looked at that. I believe the number I saw was there are approximately 190,000 job vacancies per year expected over the next decade. And they have the same type of demographic issue that we were talking about, an aging.
workforce, people are going to be retiring, not enough nurses in the pipeline to replace them. And of course that has enormous consequences to the American healthcare system generally, rising costs and patient care implications. What can we do as a country to address the issues related to the workforce shortages in healthcare and in particular with nurses?
Gad Levanon (12:47)
Yeah, another thing, in healthcare in general, we created a labor shortage index starting when I was in my old job at the conference board and we continue to do it here in the Burning Glass Institute where we rank all jobs by the likelihood that they will be in shortage in the coming decades. And many jobs in healthcare were at the top. As people get older, unfortunately, they have a larger demand for health services.
And the huge baby boom generation is already entering and will continue to enter an age where there is a larger demand for health services and also expansions of life also will create an even growing demand. So in the last year or so, only industry almost that is continuing to rapidly grow in terms of the number of jobs is the healthcare and social assistance, which is connected to that.
It's also a problem with the shift to remote work. A lot of people want to work from home and healthcare is one of the industries that is hard to work from home in healthcare. For some people it makes it even less attractive and that increases the shortage. I think we need the markets to price it correctly and see a faster wage growth in healthcare positions. I think it is happening to some degree.
I know there are a lot of opinions about immigration, but regardless of the political position about it, there are many immigrants, for example, people for immigrants from the Philippines that are very prominent in nursing and jobs like that. That's another way. But yeah, it is a growing problem. There are especially in rural areas. It's even tougher than in others. The number one labor shortage problem in the U.S. is in health care.
Jason Altmire (14:41)
What I find interesting about that is when you see these surveys of young people and what they want to do with their careers, you know, what do you want to do when you grow up? Nursing is always very high on the list. Healthcare generally is high on the list. These are jobs that people want and aspire to and can see themselves doing, which is a little bit different, unfortunately, than the skilled trades. I think that's starting to change, but that doesn't usually
work its way up to the top of the list when ⁓ young high school kids are thinking about what they want to do. So why is it that this is a job that pays well? You get personal satisfaction from helping people. People aspire to it. They have it high on their list of things that they can see themselves doing and would enjoy doing. But yet, there's not enough people getting in to the healthcare fields and especially nursing. Why is that?
Gad Levanon (15:39)
I think the main difference between the trades and healthcare is simply the job growth. So in the trades, the demand is still there, but it's not rapidly growing. It's in some positions, it's growing as fast as the rest of the economy, in some positions even slower. But in healthcare, we just see a dramatic growth. So every year we need more and more people. So even if there is a
If people are willing to do that, sometimes it's not growing fast enough, especially in areas where there are, for example, retirement destinations where older people go to retire. There the demand for LHS is especially rocketing. So I think that's one of the main differences is that just simply the demand is continuously growing and hospitals and other providers, they just play catch up.
Jason Altmire (16:36)
The Burning Glass Institute spends a lot of time and publishes reports and attends conferences and speaks on the subject of the future of work. And I think that's an incredibly interesting topic, very hard to predict given the changing technology and how rapidly we are moving forward in a direction that is somewhat unpredictable. But given that this is your area of expertise,
as an institute and you're the chief economist at Burning Glass, what would you advise educators and employers to think about when they're thinking about the future of work?
Gad Levanon (17:17)
So my first advice is to take AI very seriously. There is still a big debate in the country and there are a lot of people who think that AI is not a big deal and it's not that smart and it will not have a big impact on jobs and that reduces the urgency in which people operate if they believe that. I think that the truth is that AI is a very big deal that will have a transformational
impact in many, many industries and that we need to ring the alarm bells already and prepare for such a world. I think simply like just understanding that this is something that is starting to happen and it would be a very big deal in the future and reacting to it. Sometimes educational systems react very slowly to the changing labor market. Some are doing better than others, but
I think every university should have an AI major and many AI related courses. And in five years, probably no one anywhere will code from scratch by hand. They will all use AI to do that. They will need to learn how to work with AI to code. So it's not like they wouldn't need to know any coding, but it's going to be different.
And then its AI is going to be in writing. don't think in five years, I don't think anyone would write from scratch either. There is a bit of a stigma around it, but AI writing is getting better and better and it will be foolish at some point. Most people will feel it's foolish not to use it for writing.
Jason Altmire (18:59)
Yeah, that would be the equivalent of when calculators came along and people just stubbornly saying, you know what, I'm going to do this myself. I'm going to work out the long form mathematical calculation with pen and paper. And that at some point, as you said, that just becomes an unwise decision. And I think AI and writing and coding are going to be the same way.
Gad Levanon (19:22)
Yeah, exactly. So I think it's just a kind of a mind shift to understanding that it is a big deal and it's going to change a lot. And, know, once you accept it, I think it's much easier to move forward and change things. you know, I feel that there is kind of in large groups of populations, there is kind of an attitude of anti AI. can tell you, I have three daughters, two of them are in liberal arts colleges and
They're both, them and their friends are anti-AI and I'm not sure where they're getting it exactly, but you know, I think it's coming whether you want it or not and you just need to kind of prepare for that.
Jason Altmire (20:07)
Well, this has been incredibly insightful and interesting. Gad can't thank you enough. Our guest today has been Gad Levanon. He is the chief economist at Burning Glass Institute. And if somebody wanted to get in touch with you or learn more about Burning Glass and its work, how would they do that?
Gad Levanon (20:24)
I think the best way, almost everything I do gets into LinkedIn at some point. So just kind of finding me on LinkedIn is the best way both for my work and my rest of my teammates at the Burning Glass Institute. We also have a website and if you Google Burning Glass Institute, you'll find us.
Jason Altmire (20:45)
Gad Levanon, thank you for being with us.
Gad Levanon (20:47)
My pleasure. Thank you, Jason, for having me.
Jason Altmire (20:53)
Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Career Education Report. Subscribe and rate us on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. For more information, visit our website at career.org and follow us on Twitter @CECUED. That's at C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.