An Analysis: Workforce, Early College, Funding, and Public Higher Education in Connecticut
In July 2025, as Special Advisor to the Board of Regents, I was asked to provide “strategic guidance and research-driven insight to inform Board deliberations and long-term planning.” It was meant to be a year-long project focusing on four areas: 1) workforce development, 2) public higher education funding models, 3) early college models, and 4) system office structure, function and alignment.
I delivered the final analysis in late June 2026, and I am proud to say that the year’s work, I believe, yielded several significant findings.
These six themes cut across workforce development, funding, and early college initiatives:
Connecticut has built strong programs; it has not yet built a strong system.
Connecticut’s progress has mostly been funded by a one-time windfall. A durable future requires a durable funding architecture.
Connecticut has data infrastructure. It does not yet have cohesion across data silos, much less a data-driven decision culture.
Connecticut funds institutions. It should fund missions, and hold institutions accountable for delivering them.
Equity is not a program. It must be a funding weight, an eligibility standard, and an accountability metric.
Connecticut’s partnerships produce results when they are formal and obligated. Informality produces inconsistency.
The analysis also shows the need for:
Governance centralization: single accountable lead entity with statutory authority
Workforce alignment of credentials: funding tied to labor market outcomes
Understanding the demographic cliff: enrollment decline as an existential threat requiring proactive response
Legacy cost reform: structural costs cannibalizing operating capacity
Navigational burden on students: complexity of systems falling disproportionately on vulnerable populations
In future posts, I will go into more detail re: each section of the 100 page report, but you can also download the entire report, and its nearly 2,000 pages of source materials, here.
It’s also important to recognize some of the negative reaction to the analysis in local media—which has not been in response to the findings, but about using AI. I will also talk about this in future posts.
All that said, the narrative and organizational shape of the analysis, and the recommendations are mine. I hope the takeaway here is that Connecticut and CSCU are in a position to increase impact, streamline efficiency, and eventually reach operational excellence—but a great deal of work remains.
#highereducation #workforcedevelopment #earlycollege #funding #students #faculty #academicprograms #highereducationleadership
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