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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)
Welcome to another edition of Career Education Report. I'm Jason Altmire, and today we are honored to have as our guest, former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift. She is now the CEO of Education at Work and a longtime leader in education, both in the public and private sector and now in the nonprofit world. as many people will remember, she served as both Lieutenant Governor and Governor
in Massachusetts from 1999 to 2003 was the tenure. And she was the youngest Massachusetts state senator ever. I believe that is still true, right? 25 years old at the time.
Jane Swift (00:50)
Youngest female because Massachusetts has such a long history pretty sure there were some younger men in like the probably 19 early 1800 1900s, but
Jason Altmire (01:04)
Youngest female 25 year old state.
Jane Swift (01:06)
That introduction, right? Long time, you were saying I'm old now. So ⁓ I like those references back to the time when I was young.
Jason Altmire (01:16)
You're not old. That's the thing. not, I'm not going to out you, but it's amazing what you have accomplished and you still have so much left. and, know, some other things that you've done when, when you left the governorship, you became an education executive, a consultant, you've been a venture capital partner with special expertise in education technology. And I saw that you have six honorary doctorates.
You've served as a fellow at Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and done many other things. So we are very honored to have you here, Governor. Thank you for being with us.
Jane Swift (01:57)
Well, thank you for having me. This is an issue that I'm passionate about and I appreciate the opportunity to talk more about how we fix our ⁓ workforce system, particularly for early career professionals.
Jason Altmire (02:11)
Yeah, and maybe let's start there. Let's talk about education at work. What does the organization do?
Jane Swift (02:17)
So we work with students to help them get the experience and the skills that they need in order to get a good first job. Back when I was in politics, it's actually a story that resonates with many folks ⁓ my generation. I miss a baby boom by a year. So I'm technically not in the baby boom. for many of us, going to college and finishing college was the ticket to upward mobility.
economic, social mobility, getting a good first job. And certainly my experience speaks to that. I was a Pell Grant student. I did an internship for my local state senator. And as they say, the rest is history. A lot of hard work, the harder I worked, the luckier I got. But my education helped me get the internship. My internship helped me figure out what I was passionate about. And then through a lot of hard work, I was given great opportunities. And as I always tell folks,
I want to come back in my next life as one of my children, because at least from a financial standpoint, their lives were very different than the life that I led. They were not Pell Grant recipients, but they had a lot of friends who were, and they're wonderful, kind, and now employed young adults. But what I noticed from their experiences, and now the work I've been doing for several years, is that, and this is just so obvious as to sound trite, the workforce system has changed dramatically.
And now it's harder to find an internship. ⁓ I equate finding an internship in many ways to the college admissions process. It's as much about who you know as what you know and how hard you work. And that makes the system sometimes not as accessible to folks who are like me, a Pell Grant student, right? My dad ran his family's plumbing company. My mom was a first-generation college student who
She will tell you because she was terrible at typing. There were two paths available to her. She could have been a secretary or she could have been a teacher. And by her senior year in high school, they're like, you need to be a teacher. And by the way, she was an awesome teacher. And so the pathways were clear. And then for my siblings and I getting a college degree helped us find our pathway. My brother worked in the plumbing shop, went and got a mechanical engineering degree, and he's done very well with that.
My sister discovered a passion in nursing and went on to get a advanced degree in nursing. Those things all happen, but today, then you see it in the news every day, right? Just getting a college degree is not enough to get a good first job. Employers and the workforce demands more, and finding those pathways, getting the experience that employers need is often not obvious or easily accessible for students like my siblings and I were.
And I saw that with my daughter's friends, with friends' children, and realized that, and I'm sure you feel this way because you've been in public service, for those of us who public funding, like Pell Grants, opportunity was made available to us, I think there's a responsibility to make sure we're finding and creating and opening those pathways to others. Certainly, as a practicing Catholic, I find that as a
⁓ obligation that my religion and values point to. I just think as citizens, we need every one of our young people to find a productive pathway that they can give their gifts, right, or their industry, their hard work, and find a path of success. That's the American dream. That's what our country's built on, and that's what our economy depends on.
for us to be successful, but it is complicated today. And so what we do at Education at Work is we're trying to fix that broken pipeline by matching employers with students who want to work and making it possible for those students to both get a degree and get experience and get paid so they can manage all of the things they need to. And increasingly, now we're working with high school students in states like New Mexico to start exposing them
to what those pathways might be and figuring out how they're gonna chart that path to opportunity.
Jason Altmire (06:43)
Yeah, I wanted to mention that I don't think I mentioned that in the intro that Education Network is a national organization doing great work all across the country. And I also did it mention when you hear a political affiliation in Massachusetts, I think most people assume they can guess what affiliation that is. However, I did want to point out you served as a Republican, you were Republican governor. So I wanted to
mentioned that we would do that with any public official, but I want to mention you were a Republican, are a Republican. And with regard to what you learned about workforce development and the way you're translating that into the work that you're currently doing, there is widespread agreement that apprenticeships, hands-on learning are a key focal point of solving the workforce shortages, the skills gap that we hear so much about.
in the blue collar trades, even in the healthcare professions, you're seeing more and more apprenticeships. There's clinical service hours that are required for nursing as well. With regard to Education Network, you're not doing registered apprenticeships, or are you?
Jane Swift (07:58)
We're not yet, and I've talked to the folks at the state level and the national level. I think, first of all, I support the move for more apprenticeships. I think the program as it had been designed was way overly bureaucratic in my mind when I looked at that program. And this has been, I believe, a failure of our workforce training systems for decades. They were fiefdoms often that
really benefited more the people who were running workforce training programs than the folks who would benefit from gaining skills and experience. That wasn't the case in every single program, but in general, they were way too bureaucratic, way too overly organized and overly scripted and bureaucratic. And so, most of the people who had been benefiting from apprenticeship programs were the people who helped
companies or entities to get registered as apprenticeships who are charging six figures to help organizations like mine to get registered. was like, if I had six figures cash laying around as a nonprofit, I wouldn't spend it on some consultant in Washington, DC. I'd be using it to pay a bunch of students to get the skills they needed to get a good first job. I think that's changing. I think the ⁓ efforts to, some are happening in places like Colorado.
We just saw the governor announce that he is twining together education and workforce dollars. There's a move to do that at the federal level as well. You have to do that and take down the barriers. So as you well know, one of the big moves in education has been competency based education, where we move people through these systems. And one way to make both education and workforce more efficient and less expensive is to move people through as they learn what they need to be successful.
The apprenticeship program should be based on a competency based model. Previously, it had been very structured that you must do this many hours of study. You must do this many hours of technical skills training. You must do this many hours of work, which listen, I'm all for accountability, but we have hundreds of students who work for us in a program with Intuit, students who are becoming tax preparers. have hundreds working today, 700 students.
So if you call into it today with a question about your taxes, you may speak with one of our students. We have a hundred percent pass rate on the tax preparation exam. So we are killing it. But guess what? Some of our students do not need help passing the math piece of the tax certification program. They might need help with some of the soft skills, durable skills. Everybody calls them something different. Learning how to be
on camera with people who are maybe 70 years old that they have to verify their identity, who may be nervous about showing a young person their license on camera. Now, those are security things that you and I, because we're not old, would understand why that's happening. you know, empathy, communication, how you communicate with somebody of a different age with a different understanding of technology.
Those are some of the skills that we're helping our students in this work-based learning context to learn, not math skills, not, you know, how to fill out line 72 on the 1040 form. The apprenticeship program and our INTOA program is a perfect candidate. Talked to folks at the Department of Labor who said to me, why are you not making that an apprenticeship type program so you can, you know, spread it further faster? And I said,
because I can't fit a square peg into a round hole. I'm not gonna keep my students studying for an exam because you want it to be 80 hours, I forget what the right number is, when they can master that in 40 hours. And I want them to be doing something different, which is learning some of these other softer skills that they'll get no credit for, but really will help them to be successful. If you look at what a lot of employers are saying, it is very similar to that, right?
We don't have a good way. There's been great work from folks like America Succeeds. It's sort of categorizing what those soft skills are, how we measure them and starting to be how we teach them. None of that is embedded, especially for early career professionals. It's probably the most important thing we have to do in workforce readiness. Much of that happens in a work-based learning program. None of that right now fits neatly into an apprenticeship program. So those are the kinds of
flexibility and whether that starts to happen because states can file waivers or some states are more flexible. We're starting to see some of that happen at the state level. And so we're looking for partners. So we're looking for programs at the federal and state level that would help us, but we're not going to go access federal funds for a program that is not helping our students to get where they need to be, which is they need experience.
and to develop the specific skills that will get them a job like I got, like probably you got, that then puts them on a path to be able to live a life of purpose, live a life of passion, and hopefully have upward economic mobility. just like me, 40 years after they enter their career, they can say, geez, I want to come back as my child someday. That to me, that's the dream. Your children live a better life than you do.
One of the saddest results of a poll, besides the ones where the one election I lost, that was the saddest. Next saddest was when I saw that parents didn't believe their children were going to be better off than they were in this country. That is a recipe for disaster in our country. And that's really at the end of the day, the problem we're trying to solve.
Jason Altmire (14:00)
I will say though, the election that you lost, if I'm right about this, that was 1996. But that led you on your path to being Lieutenant Governor and then Governor. So don't you think it was actually to your benefit in retrospect?
Jane Swift (14:06)
Right.
Until the day he died, my dad always used to say that John Oliver did me a huge favor. I hate to lose. I was pretty competitive, but yes. And by the way, this is one of the things you learn, right? In work and in life, learning how to fail fast, that was felt like a long, not the fastest failure ever, but resilience is one of those durable skills. How you come back, how you deal with adversity.
Those are things that help you to be successful in many different contexts. So I hate to admit, I will never admit it was a good thing, but being able to come back from that and frankly, having demonstrated some skills around raising money, which in every job I've had in the private sector since then, pointing to the fact of being able to raise monies, especially when you're working in the nonprofit sector is not a bad thing.
Jason Altmire (15:12)
Yeah, for sure. And the soft skills that you're talking about, and durable skills, the same concept, that is often the forgotten piece when people think about the skills gap. And it's one thing to train somebody to be a plumber or a cosmetologist or a computer ⁓ technician or aviation tech, whatever it might be.
It's another thing to be able to relate to people and communicate effectively. that is something that I think schools are starting to figure out that that's a huge part of people being successful after graduation. So it's good that your organization put such a priority on that. And I was wondering if you could talk about what are the specific types of occupations of fields in which you are placing students?
Jane Swift (16:04)
So a lot of the work that we're placing students into today is in financial services, but we really have most of our work in post-secondary is funded by our clients. And so Intuit First Financial Bank Fidelity, and it just is from a need, right? They have large workforce openings that lend themselves to mid-skill careers, mid-skill jobs that college students can fill.
that we can make flexible so that students can both continue to be on a path to complete their degree, but also earn the money and gain the skills that are needed. And one of the things that we're trying very hard to do, know, Intuit would love it if every single one of our students became a tax preparer or stayed in accounting, because there's many people are predicting that AI will change the accounting profession, and I'm sure it will.
But when you compare what the shortage of tax preparers and accountants will be in the future with the changes AI is going to bring, we are still going to have a shortage of accountants and tax preparers. But what is going to happen is those students are going to need not just the technical skills in accounting, but those durable and soft skills, because it's going to be a higher level of skills. So many of the very entry level skills will be
potentially filled by AI, but you're still gonna need folks to check that work. You're still gonna need folks to deal with people. If those older people are having trouble dealing with a person on a computer, you can imagine that their interactions with a chat bot are not gonna go well. So there will always be a rule for a accountant person or a tax preparer, but those are gonna be higher order skills. And so...
And this is the case in almost every field. so what that also means is the skills that our students are developing, yes, will help them to fill those higher order jobs in tax and accounting, but they're also transferable. Those problem solving skills, those communication skills are transferable to other career pathways as well. And so one of the things that our students come to us because they need money.
They need to work. I always say when my children were little, there was this concept that you could get kids to eat kale if you hid it in the chocolate chip cookie. You my kids, of course, are brilliant, but they're like, what is that green crap in our chocolate chip cookies? And stop. So they didn't fall for it. Our students, the kale, right? The chocolate chip cookie is the wage. The kale is the skill development. Now, they'll come to realize later that
The skill development is probably the chocolate chip and the cookie is the money. in who wants a chocolate chip cookie without chocolate chips. But in reality, those are transferable, but they also need to be able to talk to a recruiter, a hiring manager and demonstrate how those skills are transferable. That may be obvious to you and I at this point in our career, but it's not intuitive to a early career student, a student who's, you
just out of high school or just coming out of college or in their third year in college and going for an internship that has a pathway into a career they're very interested in. And so some of what we're doing is teaching them the skills, giving them insight into some really interesting careers, but also teaching them how to talk about how you apply those skills in other career, in other pathways.
I don't know if I'm allowed to swear and I probably shouldn't because. So I always say to folks, know, our program is for every student who didn't have a bitch mother like me. Right. So like the first day your kids had their first babysitting job and you're like, did you brush your teeth? Are you leaving 10 minutes early? Right. Like how are you going to negotiate your pay? And I joke, but there are incremental advantages for children who have parents who know what's ahead. Right.
Jason Altmire (19:57)
I have it.
Jane Swift (20:23)
The American dream is that those opportunities aren't just available. ⁓ My parents knew intuitively that college was how we would get a better life, but they didn't know the difference between Trinity College and UMass Amherst. And when I ended up at Trinity, I might as well have been dropped on Mars. But I got there. I figured out how to work some extra hours and where to buy tree torn sneakers. There was no internet, right? Had to adjust my wardrobe, but I worked a lot of jobs.
I did a lot of things to sort of navigate my way. These pathways are much more complicated today because as I said, it's not just going to college or going to the right college, finding the right major. And so for a kid who was like me, where my parents just knew, her to college and then make sure she finishes in four years, that's not the only formula. so...
Yes, like I want my kids to be successful and they are and they did internships to actually help them find their path. But it also has to be available for every student and every child. Anybody who wants to work hard in this country and find a path to success should be able to do it. And we're not doing well by our young adults today on that measure. So whether it's work-based learning like I run, high school exploration,
and career exploration of passions, apprenticeships, all of the above. We have got to make these pathways more known, both to their parents, but also to students, and make opportunity widely available for the good of our country, for our economy, and for those individuals who we want to be good corporate citizens.
Jason Altmire (22:13)
If
a student wants to get involved, your organization is all over the country and let's say a student wants to find a work-based learning opportunity, how would they find you and what types of students? Is there an income threshold, for example?
Jane Swift (22:29)
So we do not, our students end up being, you know, a lot of Pell Grant students, a lot of how traditional risk measures, but we're open to all. We generally operate out of hubs in partnership with colleges and universities. You know, I would love to do everything for everyone, but in fact, we have to be focused on providing the jobs and the training and the skills. And so we often partner.
with university partners and co-locate close to them because transportation can be a barrier. We reach out and work collaboratively a lot of times with our university partners to provide additional supports to our students. So Arizona State University in Tempe, University of Utah, University of Texas, El Paso, Northern Kentucky University, we're just starting to work in Albuquerque so I don't have a university partner here yet.
Opening Hub with the University of North Texas. Those are all partners, but also you can go to our site, eaw.org. We are often listing, if students ⁓ click on the student tab, you'll see a lot of postings for opportunities. Some of them are virtual, and so there are opportunities. And also you can follow me on LinkedIn. I am not hard to find on LinkedIn, and I often post.
You my algorithm feeds me a lot of paid ⁓ internship opportunities, which I repost, a lot of just training opportunities. Stanford just made their entire AI degree available for free online. I shared it with my own daughter who's employed, but she's a math major who's in the tech field now is like, you should start taking these courses. It's going to be important. So you can actually follow along that bitch mother and what she's telling her own daughters to do.
Jason Altmire (24:20)
Okay, so that is a good way to end. Thank you to former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift. She is now the CEO of Education at Work, and she just told you how to get in touch with her and learn more about the organization. Governor, thank you so much for being with us.
Jane Swift (24:39)
Thank you for having me. Sorry for my language in case my mom finds this somehow.
Jason Altmire (24:43)
Totally fine. Thank you.
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.