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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 (00:05):
Hello and welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire, and today we are going to talk to Ben Wildavsky. He is the visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education, and his work is right in the wheelhouse of this podcast. He's the award-winning author of The Great Brain Race. He was co-editor of Reinventing Higher Education and Measuring Success. He has his own podcast, which is called Higher Ed Spotlight, and we're going to talk to him today about his new book, came out earlier this year, called The Career Arts: Making the Most of College Credentials and Connections. So Ben, thank you for being with us.
Ben Wildavsky (00:50):
Well, thank you very much for having me, Jason.
Jason Altmire (00:52):
I saw the notice of your book. It came out earlier this year and I was struck by how consistent what you talk about is with what we focus on quite a bit, not only in our association but on this podcast. So I'm really excited to have the conversation with you. And you talk about how young people when they come out of high school today, they hold many jobs over the course of a career lifetime, whereas in the past, of course, people used to stay in one job for much longer. And in your book, you try to correct the widespread notion that there's a direct trade-off between going to college and acquiring practical job skills. And you take a very innovative approach in the way you evaluate those two things. Maybe talk a little bit about what motivated you to write the book and what your hypothesis is?
Ben Wildavsky (01:47):
Yeah, absolutely. Well, thanks for asking. And I was a journalist for many years, writing about higher education, mostly some K-12 as well. I ended up getting into the world of non-profits and think tanks and a couple of university affiliations. So for many years, I had really been focusing on what was happening on campus, but I had not been focusing so much on the reason many people go to college, which is to get jobs and to build careers, and I started getting more and more interested in that. I worked at a large organization called Strada Education Network. It's now called Strada Education Foundation. And that really got me thinking a lot more about the whole question of what do you really get out of college? Is it really worthwhile? What about all the alternatives to college that we keep on hearing so much about?
(02:30)
And really, what I came up with was what became the framework of the book is basically, there's been a false dichotomy between the idea that you can go out and get a college degree and you're just learning and you're in the ivory tower learning about these big ideas, or you can go out and do something really practical, hands-on, that's really going to be useful in your life. So the idea is sometimes people talk about the philosopher versus the welder. The idea of there's this totally two extremes, and I guess the real world is just so different. What I've really come up with is that we've gotten into this either/or trade-off between the idea that college is all theory and that real careers are all about practice.
(03:09)
But what I came to is that really, what it takes to build a career is to really have a mixture of things, which is there's a lot of value in broad skills, the kind of skills that help you learn and adapt and adjust and navigate over a lifetime. We're all living longer, having many more jobs as you mentioned, but that's absolutely consistent with yes, you absolutely do need targeted skills. You do need to have specific skills that are in demand for a particular job at a particular time, but that what you need to be doing is getting away from this idea of an either/or, a trade-off, and much more of a both/and approach, that you need broad education, you need targeted skills.
(03:46)
And then the third factor that I got really interested in is called social capital, and that's just a way of talking about the importance of networks to careers, that when you're trying to build a career, you need to of course, have the skills yourself, have the education yourself, but you need to learn what's out there. You need to find out about what's available. You need to have people who know you, have seen you in action, who can vouch for you, and that's social capital. And it's really the combination of those three things, the broad skills, the targeted skills and the social capital that makes for a successful career.
Jason Altmire (04:16):
Do you find, when you talk about social capital, is there a difference in the type of student, the background, where they come from, maybe they come from a socioeconomic circumstance that is less desirable compared to others? Does that affect that social capital aspect? I would think that their network, their social network would be more limited probably, going into school and even coming out of school.
Ben Wildavsky (04:42):
Absolutely. That's absolutely true. Look, on the one hand, there's no question. People from all backgrounds of course, have families and friends and networks, and that's a source of strength. And I think people, they should feel good about that going into their job search. But no question, there's some people who have a lot more inherited advantages than others. So if you're a first gen college student, if you're from a disadvantaged background, maybe your family didn't have a lot of people who have navigated the world of college or navigated the world of white collar careers, it really makes a big difference if you know people who can not only tell you about opportunities, but who can coach you, who can tell you about, "Here's how you do interviews, here's how you stay in touch with people. Here's how you ask follow-ups." In the context of college, it's sometimes called the hidden curriculum. It's like, how do people get ahead? And it's like that old line that we've all heard, "It's not just what you know. It's who you know." That's not just something your parents tell you.
(05:38)
It's true, but the good news is if you didn't grow up with a lot of those particular connections, that is something that you can learn and you can build. And so one of the things I had fun with for the book was just doing a lot of interviews, site visits, talking to people at some organizations that are really doing great work, trying to build that kind of social capital for students who really need it.
Jason Altmire (05:58):
And it is so much easier now. You and I both remember the days before the internet, and certainly before social media, LinkedIn and opportunities. You would go to a conference or you would meet somebody at an event and you would want to follow up with them, and you literally had to ask them or get a card, "What's your contact information?" And you had to either call them on the telephone or write them a note, and it's so much different now. You just touch your phones and you're connected, and you can send emails and message and text back and forth. So I would think that students could equalize pretty quickly once they get the higher education when they need to do that social networking.
Ben Wildavsky (06:42):
The technology definitely helps, but I still think just really doing... Sometimes it's being in a class and just paying out after a class and passing the professor a question or going to office hours or the usual kind of things. People talk about joining clubs, joining activities, getting a job, getting a summer job, getting a part-time job, getting an internship, anything where you're out there putting your skills into action and you're getting to know people and you're getting a chance to show what's your work ethic like, not just how smart you are, but do you show up every day? Do you show up on time? Do you do the job correctly? Do you care about quality control? Those are all things where if you're in an environment with other people, that's really a very natural way to build that social capital because people can really see what you're good at.
Jason Altmire (07:26):
And you talked earlier, and you certainly talked in-depth in your book about the difference between the more philosophical part of higher education, the learning aspect versus the skills, the definable skills. What you're talking about now is teaching people how to seek work, how to get a job, how to network. So how does that factor into the difference between the two aspects of higher education?
Ben Wildavsky (07:54):
Honestly, I think those kinds of networking skills are really important, no matter what you're doing, whether you're going to community college or maybe you're doing some kind of an alternative credential, maybe life is busy. Maybe you're a working adult, you've got a job, maybe you've got kids. This is true of more and more college students who don't fit the stereotype of the 18 to 22-year-old, but I think that whatever you're doing, if you think of yourself as somebody who's got something to contribute, you've got some abilities. You also got that curiosity, the ability to learn and you get to meet people along the way, the people that you meet are really valuable to you, and you don't have to be calculating about it. It can be a natural thing. You just try to be open to people and get along with people you're working with.
(08:36)
But those connections, it's just really important to remember that whether you're getting a traditional degree or whether you're taking a few classes, maybe trying to get a degree later or trying to get some kind of a part-time credential, all of those connections that you're making along the way are really going to be part of the recipe for success that you're going to need to keep on getting ahead over the long term.
Jason Altmire (08:57):
Your book is a very interesting mix of... You have evidence-based research, both social science research and scientific research. You have specific case studies, you have in-depth interviews and you bring it all together in a way that, again, you make the case that it's okay to have a combination of the different educational experiences. Can you talk about how that comes together for somebody, let's say they do want to go either direction, they want to go on a traditional four-year academic course, but it's worthwhile to have skills in something or they're just going to go into a skill-based training profession and having a more rounded academic experience? I think maybe explain both sides of that.
Ben Wildavsky (09:47):
Yeah, I do try and use some stories in the book as well as having some statistics and talking to academics and so forth, but I talked to a guy early on in my research who's an economist, and I was ready to jump right in about what the research shows about the economic benefits of college. And he said, "Hey, wait a second. Step back, and before you decide whether you should go to college or maybe go to some alternative to college, let's look at what people are really going to need in their lives." And what he basically talked about is this theme I touched on a little bit, adaptability. People sometimes talk about durable skills. That's a very popular term these days, and that really has to do with... Could be something like learning how to be a good writer, not because you're going to be writing novels necessarily, but you're going to be in the workforce. You need to communicate with people. You need to write, whether it's emails or memos. Just clear succinct communication is a really vital broad skill.
(10:42)
But that's not the same thing as, let's say learn could be a computer coder. Now, you may need to learn to be a computer coder for certain jobs, and we know computer science has gotten to be a really popular major, but we all know that those languages change really quickly. So some of these very targeted skills have what's called a short half-life. They don't last that long. I think back to back when I was in college when dinosaurs roamed the earth 40 years ago, I was like a liberal arts guy. I was studying literature, but I also was very much doing that well-rounded thing where I took a little bit of calculus, I took a little bit of statistics and computer science, but I took the Intro to Programming class back in the 80s. I was learning to program in BASIC, which was back then a pretty popular computer programming language. By the time I graduated, I'm pretty sure nobody was using BASIC anymore. Just like four or five years later, that language had cycled out.
(11:33)
So to go back to the question of building the combination, I think you need to think about, it's like, yeah, some of the most popular majors are things like business and all kinds of things like accounting, marketing. There's also people who are very interested in things like nursing, people who are very interested in teaching. There's a lot of very practical undergraduate majors, which you might need for a specific career, but if you're also learning the things that we associate with broad education, writing, communicating, critical thinking, those are things that you're going to take with you throughout your career because you're going to be in new situations, you're going to have to absorb new information. You're going to have to learn new things. You're going to have to communicate to others. So I think that you just need to always be aware that you're offering your employer a portfolio of things. Hopefully you're a good reliable employee. Also, you have some specific things that that employer needs right now, but you also have the ability to learn and the ability to be flexible and to do different things over time.
Jason Altmire (12:32):
You talk about the value of a four-year college degree, but you also recognize that that is not the most desirable or appropriate path for everybody. And you offer in your book some high-quality supplements and alternatives to college that can help learners combine both general and job-specific skills. Can you talk about what that looks like?
Ben Wildavsky (12:54):
Absolutely. I have a whole section. As you mentioned, the subtitle is Making the Most of College Credentials and Connections. So the whole Credentials chapter in some discussion I have is really all about what should you look for if you're not getting a traditional college degree? And there's been just an explosion of credentials. There's an organization called... A non-profit called Credential Engine, and they're up to well over 1,000,000 different credentials in the United States, and I believe something like 750,000 or so are not traditional college degrees. So there's a huge amount to choose from, but it's very hard to know what's high quality and what's not? People will often say, "It's the Wild West out there."
(13:33)
So one of the things that people I think have to think about is there's a bunch of credentials that are sometimes known as sectoral training programs that have been studied very carefully and they get very good results. And the idea is that they offer a clear path to success, and that means they're focused on high demand sectors, things like information technology and financial services. They include training and very specific skills, but also, some of those long-term career skills that I mentioned, like critical thinking. And what makes the good ones good is that they can be building blocks to better paying positions in the same sector. So I'll give you an example. I interviewed somebody from my book who told me about how you could go to Bunker Hill Community College up in Boston. You can get an IT certification, and that leads to help desk jobs that pay about 60% more than the typical wage in the area. And also, those help desk jobs position you for better jobs in other parts of IT. But unfortunately, there are also a lot of short-term programs that are just much more problematic.
(14:34)
So the problem is that you want to avoid stuff that's basically a dead end, that's one and done. And so same community college. You can go to Bunker Hill Community College, take the same number of credits and you can become a certified nursing assistant, but that's a credential that does not give you a big earnings boost, and it doesn't have a lot of prospects for advancement. So one person I talked to said that, "That's a complete island." So basically, you take that credential and you might get a little short-term boost, but you're stuck. It's not really clear where it's going to take you.
(15:05)
So this is a real concern, to broaden out a little bit. We hear a lot about how degrees... Some people argue degrees have become a barrier and they've especially become a barrier for people from low-income backgrounds or racial and ethnic minorities. But I really worry about that argument because I feel like we have so much more we could do about opening up education, opening up degrees to people and groups that have not always had the opportunities that they should have. If you say you should go to some non-degree alternatives, a lot of those less effective short-term credentials are dominated by minorities and by women. And so they're not necessarily being well-positioned for the kinds of credentials that have the best chances of giving them upward mobility.
Jason Altmire (15:49):
Are you concerned about, primarily states, but government entities that have withdrawn the requirement to have a four-year degree to get government jobs?
Ben Wildavsky (16:01):
There's been a big campaign to get rid of degree requirements. There's some very well-organized and very effective groups like Opportunity@Work and others that have really said, "Degrees are a barrier," rather than, my view is these are really a gateway to opportunity. But there's a lot of people who will say, "Well, there's a lot of people who don't get four-year degrees, particularly a lot of racial and ethnic minorities. So we need to have lots of opportunities for non-degree achievement." And it's not that I really care that much about what employers... I think it's a free market and employers should do what they want in terms of requirements, but it's a little bit like getting the causality backward.
(16:38)
I don't think the degrees became valuable. We all know about the statistics. There's a 75% in a wage premium for getting a bachelor's degree compared to somebody who only has a high school diploma. There's a very significant earnings differential on average. In my view, that did not happen because some bureaucrats in state governments, in some corporations said, "Okay, we're going to start putting in a degree requirement to a bunch of our job listings, and that's what's going to make them valuable." The causality was exactly backwards. The 20th century sometimes is called the human capital century. That means that was the century in which suddenly, going to school, whether it was first it was the high school movement, then it was getting more people into college, that became the ticket to opportunity. And that's because the economy changed, the nature of jobs changed, the kinds of skills that people needed to get ahead became much more advanced. Right?
(17:25)
So when you look at the wage premium for college, particularly going up into the 80s, the 90s, the early part of this 20th century, there were more and more people going to college. But rather than diluting the value of college degrees, those degrees kept on getting more valuable. That wage premium kept on increasing, and even though it's leveled off in the last 15 or 20 years, it's still very, very high. So that's just a way to say that I don't think that dropping the degree requirement is necessarily going to make a big difference in terms of... If you're telling people, "Oh, don't worry about going to college. People are dropping their degree requirements," first of all, that's not why college was valuable. It wasn't because of some requirement.
(18:05)
But here's the second part, this is really important, there have been several studies. One was by LinkedIn, another one was by a group called Burning Glass. They did a report, I actually have this in front of me. It was back in February of 2024. The title of the report is Skills-Based Hiring: The Long Road from Pronouncements to Practice. And essentially, what they said, not quite so bluntly, is a lot of employers in state governments and also private companies, they're talking the talk about getting rid of degree requirements, but they're not walking the walk when it actually comes to hiring. So here's a quote from the report. They said that, "These changes, dropping degree requirements, has only translated into new hires for about 97,000 workers annually, and that's out of 77,000,000 yearly hires in the United States." So again, I'm quoting here. "For all its manfare, this skills-based hiring movement has not come true for even one in 700 hires last year."
(19:04)
So I won't go on, but I think you see the point, which is this is an aspiration and people will declare like, "Oh, we're dropping degree requirements. We're all for opportunity and equity," but it's so far, maybe I'll be wrong, maybe a year from now we'll talk and it'll be a different story, but so far, I feel like it's like virtue signaling. Just like the idea is do you want to say, "Oh, we're so great. We're dropping those requirements. We're letting everyone get ahead," but what if the degree actually means something? What if the degree actually means you've learned some of those broad and targeted skills? Maybe you've built up some of that social capital, those networks. If you've done something that's really good for you, I just worry about the message we're sending. If we're telling people, "Oh, don't worry about degrees anymore," I'm like, "Sorry, we do need more degrees and yeah, we give more high-quality alternatives to degrees too."
Jason Altmire (19:49):
If somebody wanted to learn more about your work or the book or check out your podcast, how would they find more information?
Ben Wildavsky (19:57):
The book is called The Career Arts: Making the Most of College Credentials and Connections. Of course, it's on the Princeton University Press, has a great website, which has lots of videos and clips and reviews and things of the book, which is nice. The podcast is also available on all the usual podcast platforms, Apple and Stitcher and so forth. It's called Higher Ed Spotlight, and I have a LinkedIn page, which I try to keep pretty up to date, just Ben Wildavsky. Complicated last name but it's W-I-L-D-A-V-S-K-Y. And on LinkedIn, I post my podcast, new articles that I write, information about the books, speeches, that kind of thing.
Jason Altmire (20:36):
The LinkedIn page is excellent. I was going to mention the book's website. It's great. It does have videos, and anyone who's interested in these ideas, I think you'll be interested in perusing the website as well. Our guest has been Ben Wildavsky. He is the visiting fellow at Harvard Graduate School of Education. Ben, thank you so much for being with us.
Ben Wildavsky (20:59):
Well, Jason, thanks for having me. It's been a great conversation.
Jason Altmire (21:03):
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 @C-E-C-U-E-D. Thank you for listening.
Speaker 3 (21:23):
Voxtopica.