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

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