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Around the country, legislatures are intensely debating funding for public higher education. For #faculty, #staff, #administrators and #boards, It’s important to understand the nuance of public higher education funding, which I have been studying for the past year. Here goes… More and more, states are transitioning from their historical approaches, to models that prioritize ROI and workforce alignment. Driving this narrative, some states argue that they have invested a great

In my experience, too many workforce partnerships are built on individual relationships and personalities that mesh, as opposed to being systematized and formalized, striving for shared outcomes. So what happens is one of the partners moves on, and the program between organizations falls apart. This hurts students and institutions. You start from scratch every time. The goal should be scaled sector-focused partnerships that deliver measurable returns. State workforce councils

This came up in my LinkedIn feed. https://walterwendler.com/2026/03/ideas-not-ideology-a-line-universities-cannot-afford-to-blur/ I wanted to respond on LI, but it was way too long. So here it is. To start, the author is clearly a long-time academic leader, and only those who have sat in the seat understand how hard it is. He has clear and firm convictions, and nothing I say here is meant to offend the author or attack his positions and values in an ad hominem manner. Also, t

We are all too familiar in higher education with unfunded mandates. As there has been so much transition in higher education, with a call to focus on workforce growing evermore intense, it’s also important to clarify that this work cannot happen if funding isn’t there. Without question, establishing formal, dedicated funding streams is critical to success. States must transition away from episodic, program-specific funding, and move to performance-aligned investment. Many st

Almost every state has a workforce council or governance body that is meant to oversee workforce development for the state, and ultimately reports to the Governor. That said, there is great divergence in how these councils—and these systems and operations—function state to state. To be frank, when talking to people, we understand that there is no perfect system. It is hard work to communicate, coordinate, and ultimately execute across multiple units and agencies across states

I have been studying state workforce systems for the past several months now. Shared challenges, to name just a few, persist across many states: 1) Serious skills mismatches in key sectors like advanced manufacturing, healthcare, bioscience, and digital; 2) Continually declining labor force participation among prime-age adults; 3) Demographic aging and out-migration of working-age residents; 4) Regional duplication of workforce functions with inconsistent outcomes. States tha