Joe Fuller: Community colleges are in the spotlight. This election cycle, the affordability and efficacy of postsecondary education is being questioned like never before, but the link between effective education, national competitiveness, and economic independence remains indisputable.

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast. I’m Harvard Business school Professor and Visiting Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. Today I’m joined by Josh Wyner, Founder and Executive Director of the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program, and by Senior Program Manager, Brittney Davidson. Since 2011, Aspen has sought to cultivate best practices and innovation in community college administration and crucially in programs that link employers and educators. Aspen has recently published its Workforce Playbook, which highlights what leading community colleges are doing to connect the communities they serve with emerging employment and lifelong learning opportunities. How can these often overlooked and financially strained institutions bridge the gap between the ambitions of aspiring workers and the changing needs of employers? Josh and Brittany, welcome to Harvard Business School.

Josh Wyner: Thanks for having us.

Brittney Davidson: Thank you.

Fuller: You recently published your Workforce Playbook about how community colleges can engage with employers most effectively. That’s part of a broader program at Aspen called the College Excellence Program, which has been around for quite some time. Josh, maybe you could talk a little bit about the program and what its goals are.

Wyner: Sure. Aspen started its higher-education presence nine years ago with the College Excellence Program. And the goal of the program is to identify which colleges in our country, including community colleges, are achieving the best student success rates and try to replicate those activities and those practices and leadership associated with excellent community colleges and excellent four-year colleges and universities. The program now has a dozen different programs that range from one, actually, that Harvard is a part of—called the American Talent Initiative, aiming to increase socioeconomic diversity at top colleges in the country—and about two-thirds of our work is with community colleges—the 1,100 colleges that are serving the majority of low-income students, students of color, first-generation students and do the primary workforce development work in our country, in the educational system.

Fuller: Is this just a chronological anomaly, because we’re coming up on an election, or are community colleges getting more attention than they have historically, which is a little bit my sense?

Wyner: Absolutely. I think we’ve woken up to the realities of these institutions, which were founded at the early part of the 20th century but really grew after World War II and then in the ’60s with the GI bill and then Pell Grants. And I think sometime around the turn of the 21st century, about 20 years ago, people woke up and realized that 40 percent of all the undergraduates in our country are in community colleges. And I think a lot of folks realized that we had done great work improving access to college, and now we needed to improve student success.

Fuller: Half the system is focused on more of what I would think of as traditional academic training and creating opportunities for people to go on from the community college to a traditional four-year degree-granting program. But another half seems to be much more career and technically oriented. Brittany, what accounts for that split?

Davidson: It’s in part the way that the community colleges were set up. In a lot of these community colleges, there are silos between people who we call, they’ll sometimes refer to it as being on the academic side of the house vs. what they might call the CTE or the career and technical education sides of the house. And oftentimes, they’re run by completely different people who don’t often collaborate. And I think at Aspen, what we’ve been seeing is, among the best community colleges, they really value both areas. We look at practices that are going to improve things both on the technical side through things like The Workforce Playbook, but we’re also doing research on the other side of the house, too. So we’re looking at what makes a community college really great at setting students up for transfer. And we’ve done a body of research around that. And then, increasingly, we’re asking schools, when we think about workforce education, there are certainly a lot of jobs that do require bachelor’s degrees. So how do we start to bring those two things together and think about pathways for people who might start studying technical skills and then go on to get a bachelor’s degree and become a manager potentially in that field?

Fuller: Now, Aspen awards a prize to an outstanding community college in the United States. Could you tell me a little bit about the history of that and the selection criteria?

Wyner: It’s $1 million every other year that’s given out, and really it’s an excuse for a deep research project. Community colleges have not received the recognition that they deserve, and in a field of 1,100 or 1,200 institutions, surely there’s differentiation. Some are doing better than others. So we want to recognize the excellence of community colleges through the best of them. Second, we need to figure out how community colleges can get better. And thirdly, we need to do research into how that happens and replicate it. The Aspen prize sets us up to do all of those things. We start with looking at over 1,000 community colleges every year. We gather every data set we can to figure out who’s doing the best in student access and success, including equitable outcomes for students of color. We then narrow it down to 150, which we invite to apply for the prize. And, ultimately, we choose a single winner after gathering not just typical education data, but we are looking at the workforce outcomes of the students. So we know among the finalist colleges how many students have jobs, what the average wages are for those students relative to the wages in their service area. So the idea here is, let’s recognize exceptional colleges, unpack what they’re doing, and then teach it to others.

Fuller: There are lots of different types of schools there—schools serving rural constituencies, major metro areas, everything in between. How do you get on any kind of like-to-like basis?

Wyner: The colleges fundamentally have to achieve the same thing. Number one: Are students learning? Do they know if students are learning? Are they closing learning gaps? Number two: Do students finish what they start? Do they get their degrees? And number three: Are they successful after they graduate? Do they get good jobs? Or if they’re transferring, did they get their bachelor’s degrees efficiently and effectively?

Fuller: Now, here on the Managing the Future of Work podcast, of course we’re disproportionately interested in employment outcomes, how employers source talent, the skills gap, and what we can do to fill it. When you started to look at that specific set of outcomes, Brittany, how did you start isolating who were the schools that really stood out in terms of their performance?

Davidson: Well, it was a mix. We looked at some quantitative measures, and we also did some qualitative research. We started, as we did with the Aspen prize, by looking at outcomes. So we thought about which are the schools that overall are driving strong employment and earning outcomes for their graduates. And then we did a bunch of qualitative research, too. And then, finally, we called them up, and we did some research interviews to figure out whether or not these outcomes were truly driven by practice, or whether it was just the convenience of being in an economically prosperous area. And from there, we just narrowed it down to about six schools that were diverse in their own means. So we visited parts of Texas, we visited parts of Florida, we visited parts of Rochester, New York, and we talked to them to try to figure out what were the common patterns across these schools that were all in very different areas, serving very different students, but all driving really strong outcomes.

Fuller: You’ve got multiple recommendations in your report, but are there four or five key themes that are consistent and indicate excellent outcomes for students across these very diverse campuses, serving not only different student populations but who are located in areas with very divergent employer bases and work opportunities?

Wyner: I think community colleges are unique in higher ed in their ability to be nimble and respond to opportunities when they arise. At the same time, community colleges are public entities, and they really have two jobs on the career and technical education side. Number one: They’ve got to serve the population that really needs education. The populations that go to community college look different than those that go to four-year institutions across our country. They’re more likely to be low income. They’re more likely to be people of color. They’re more likely to be unemployed or underemployed as adults than are people who start education at a bachelor’s-granting institution. So they’ve got to keep their finger on the pulse of the population in their region to figure out who needs education. The second is: They’ve got to make sure they’re preparing those people for the jobs that exist.

Fuller: That actually are out there.

Wyner: Yeah, exactly. So they’ve got to look at the data regularly. Where are the jobs going? They’ve got to see whether those jobs are in particular sectors. They’ve got to see at what level those jobs are and identify what the skills are that students need in order to be successful in those jobs. But they also have to talk to employers. The workplace is changing rapidly. So I think what we see from the best colleges is they’re strategic. They’re keeping an eye on what’s happening in the workplace. They’re keeping an eye on what the demographic changes are in their community. And they’re planning their programs and assessing their programs regularly.

Fuller: How do you balance the traditional rights and privileges and organizational construct of higher ed with a need to be nimble, especially in an economy where the rate of technological change has been accelerating markedly in the last decade?

Wyner: The same problems that exist in universities also exist in community colleges, where it’s hard to change things. There’s an infrastructure, there are contracts—sometimes tenure—with faculty, and they may even be unionized faculty. But community colleges are more nimble than other kinds of institutions. What you see community colleges doing is they have a willingness to actually move their programs onto the factory floor. We’ve seen at Monroe Community College that they actually work with one of their employers to provide leadership training to existing teams on the factory floor. Valencia College in Orlando, Florida, is training day laborers to do skilled construction trades in parking lots next to where they are waiting to be day laborers. They’re willing to move off campus. They’re willing to use non-traditional means and they can hire faculty from industry. The last thing I will say is that community colleges offer a lot more non-credit training than do four-year colleges.

Fuller: So credit would be toward earning a degree, and non-credit would be an educational experience but doesn’t count toward degree requirements.

Wyner: Exactly, Joe. And that’s a really important distinction, because when you’re going to offer something for credit, you need all kinds of approval, sometimes from your accreditors, your regional accreditors. You need faculty approval of what the program’s going to look like in that department through which it will be offered. On the non-credit side, you can do all kinds of things very quickly.

Fuller: So, Brittney, a community college that is investing in being aware of the demand side of the equation locally has studied what population it has to work with. The population they’re serving is looking to make a match between that supply and demand side. What more do they have to do to be a high performer like the ones you identified in the report?

Davidson: It’s about looking at this, not just in one single program where there’s a one-off really strong relationship with x employer. It’s about how do we do this in a way that is strategic so that all of our programs are keeping in mind that supply-and-demand equation. All of our programs are ensuring that they have work-based learning that is not just an internship that’s optional, but something that, if you are a student in that program, you do not graduate unless you have actually gotten a chance to do some hands-on work-based experience.

Fuller: Work-based learning environments. It’s a phrase that’s getting used more often—I think happily so. But, like a lot of terms in the skills and employment area, it has a rather elastic definition. I hear people talking about it, and when I asked for details, they’re actually talking about things that are quite distinct. So what does it mean to you? And what are the important attributes of a successful work-based learning program?

Davidson: I think the most successful work-based learning programs start with what are the skills our students actually need to learn by the time they leave in order to be successful. And then, from there, they back into what are the delivery mechanisms in which we need to kind of create this experience for students. And what part of that can be delivered in the classroom? And what part of that absolutely must be delivered in a work-based setting? And how do we create that? So in a maritime setting, for example, they had a group of employers come together and sponsor this simulation lab, where students can come in, they can see what the job looks like, they can see the inner workings of the ship, they can run a ship aground if they need to just to see what that might look like and what the warning signs are like, and learn all of those things before they actually get out onto the water.

Fuller: Soft skills or professional skills—skills that have to do more with being in a workplace—and the actual technical skills and knowledge you need to fulfill the requirements of a job … how is that affected by work-based learning?

Davidson: So, for example, at Ozarks Technical College, they have a dental program where students will have an on-campus clinic, and they serve some of the underserved people in their population to practice on their skills. It’s videotaped. They watch themselves back. And when they watch themselves back, they’re not just looking for how well they performed their dental exam, they’re also looking at how they treated the patient. And that’s kind of the soft skills that applies there. The ones that do it really well work very closely with their employer as defined what that means in their context.

Fuller: What do employers have to do to make this work?

Wyner: It’s really important for them not to show up on the doorstep of a community college or the president’s office and say, “I need 20 workers next quarter. Deliver them, and I’ll be satisfied.” Number one: Some three to five of those employees may need ultimately to be managers. Number two: A year and a half from now, you may need another 20 or 40. And so really thinking about this as a long-term strategy, just like with any other input, you’d understand the regulatory environment and the incentives of your supplier.

Fuller: The supplier, in this case, being the community college.

Wyner: Being the community college. The community college has access to populations that the employer may not, right? So they help the community college invest in outreach programs to the populations that they’re interested in working with. They’ll actually invest in materials and marketing material—even sending people from the employer out into the community to work with the community college to say to prospective students, “If you get this degree, I’ve got a $40,000 to $50,000 a year job waiting for you.” Number two: They invest in equipment and in faculty. Community colleges need highly trained faculty who understand how to teach—the community college can help them learn how to do that—but who really understand the technical skills. And finally, they invest in scholarships for students and in internships for students and work-based learning, as Brittney was talking about earlier. So they’re really taking a long game to understand what’s needed. The second point is that exceptional employers that get what they need understand that often they need to work with other employers to do this. You may not be able to invest enough to make it worthwhile for the community college to turn out the 10, 20, 30 employees that you need over the coming few years. If you aggregate demand for those employees with other employers in your sector, you can invest what the community college needs to turn out 100 people per year—or 200 or 300.

Fuller: How does this logic apply to the huge employment base that works for small and medium businesses? How do you get them to support a system like this and to be supported by a system like this?

Wyner: Yeah, we saw this in a lot of different places. Valencia College in Orlando had a system for developing property managers. There was no property management agency that was huge there, but one of the property management agencies really was struggling with various tiers of employees to do property management. It was anything from management to maintenance—and maintenance requires up-to-date skills because of technology, et cetera. So that smaller employer came to Valencia, and they said, “Would you help us with this?” Valencia understood that this one employer didn’t have enough demand in order to make it worthwhile for them to build a program, but they also understood in Orlando there were 20 or 30 or 40 significantly sized property management companies that it could work with. And so it brought them all together. One of the things that we see happening when you don’t work with community colleges is that, as a smaller employer, you’re trying to recruit, and you are fishing in the same ponds as every other employer. So what ends up happening? You bid up the cost of labor. You can’t afford to compete with the bigger employers who may be able to try to corner the market by offering more in the early stages of employment and then not provide the same kind of ladder of opportunity for individuals.

Fuller: What are the leading indicators we’re getting this right? How should we be keeping score? And how should we be evaluating community colleges in terms of their performance?

Wyner: We have a program with Stanford University for aspiring community college presidents. And what we teach is that you need to hold yourself accountable for access. Do you provide equitable access, particularly to high-value programs? Number two: graduation rates. Are students graduating efficiently, on time? And number three: Are they employed? And do they have family sustaining wages when they graduate? You can graduate students and provide access and they can be earning minimum wage, no more than they would have earned if they had never come to the college. And then, finally, are you achieving equitable outcomes for all student groups who come to you—students of color and majority students, lower income, first generation students?

Fuller: What are the types of thing a community-college-aspiring student ought to be asking about, looking for, and deciding, “Should I be going to community college? And is this the right school for me?” if they’re served by more than one in an area.

Wyner: If you have an interest, make sure that the college is offering a decent program in that area, is graduating students in that program, and that those students are getting jobs. What’s interesting from research done by Tony Carnevale at Georgetown University is he’s actually showing that program matters as much—or more—than the college that you go to. This is true in the four-year sector as well. So if you are an engineering major at a four-year university, it doesn’t really matter that much where you go in terms of your ability to get a job that pays well after you finish your four-year degree. Similarly, from a community college. If you are in an HVAC program or you’re in a nursing program or you’re in an advanced manufacturing program, you’re likely to get a good job. So I think students need to be really thinking about not just, “What am I interested in?” but “Among those things I’m interested in, which pathways enable me to have a family-sustaining wage?”

Davidson: And I also say, understanding what that program and what that career path means. To Josh’s point, certainly there are some students who might want to go into culinary arts and understand what it is to have a career in that field, including what the pay is, including what the day-to-day looks like.

Fuller: Employers have lots of options for finding workers. In fact, one of the things our research shows is that the advent of online job boards has in some ways made employers pretty lazy. I mean, they can just go out there and post a job, and they set up an algorithm that captures hundreds, if not thousands, of candidates, and then they winnow it down. Why should employers make community colleges integral to their talent search?

Wyner: Talent—not just from high schools, but also from work-based workforce organizations. Number two: community colleges. We’ve invested billions of dollars. They have a physical infrastructure. They have classrooms. They have faculty. They have access to federal dollars and Pell Grants and state dollars. These are entities that bring real assets to the table. And I think the last component is that they have a history of working with employers. Community colleges may know some things about what your—particularly entry-level—employees are facing that you may not. Why is that? Community colleges will provide social services to individuals who are struggling. You may not understand that as an employer.

Here’s a great example. Northern Virginia Community College wanted to work with Inova and a lot of the other hospitals in the DC metro area to try to close the nursing shortfall and also the sonography shortfall, which was a real pain point for the hospitals. They created a program where they enabled incumbent workers to be upskilled to become sonographers: $60,000, $70,000, $80,000 a year entry-level jobs. They couldn’t get people to sign on. Northern Virginia Community College was able to get out to the community to understand why. It turned out that they weren’t getting health insurance—that in order to sign up for this 18-month program, the incumbent workers had to go back to part-time. The hospital had a system where, when you went to part-time, you did not get health insurance. So what they did in partnership, because of the knowledge that Northern Virginia Community College had about the impediments to completing the program, what they are able to do is keep incumbent workers at a number of hours needed to—21 hours instead of 19—in order to hold onto their health insurance. People completed the program, literally, 18 months later. They were well on their way to eliminating the shortage of sonographers. That knowledge base that community colleges have about the population and the relationships they have with people who are honest with them about the challenges they face is something that community colleges uniquely can provide.

Fuller: What’s your vision of the role of community colleges in lifelong learning, upskilling adults, and what have you found, in terms of best practices, and what might need to happen to make better use of the system?

Wyner: Yeah, half or more of many community colleges populations are not traditional age. They’re over 25, they’re between jobs, or they’re in jobs, and they want to get additional opportunities. And so I think employers that work with community colleges that are smart about doing the work will quickly understand that the number of high school graduates every year is dwarfed by the number of adults in the workplace who want to be upskilled and get additional opportunity. There are people right now who are working as technicians on $10 an hour, $11 an hour, and Joe, you mentioned soft skills. These are people who have the soft skills. They’re showing up to work every day. They’re getting along with their peers. They know how to work as part of a team. All they need are the technical skills, which often can be delivered in six months, 12 months, 18 months, in order to get them upskilled into the jobs that are pain points for the industry. So community colleges absolutely need to be thinking about how to do that work, and the best community colleges work not just with high schools but with workforce agencies, with employers themselves, to identify where the latent talent is that can be upskilled into jobs.

Fuller: As enrollment declines, as state governments and the federal government are under constant budget pressure, as the utility of degrees becomes a question of more debate, if not skepticism on some people’s parts, it seems that community colleges and four-year institutions are going to be sailing into some pretty tough headwinds demographically, financially, perhaps even in terms of the societal consensus about the value of post-secondary education. How do you see that unfolding, and how can we make sure we sustain what parts of the system work and need to be invested in?

Wyner: Yeah, community colleges that are successful in the current environment—and already we’ve seen a diminution in state support for higher ed. Nearly half of Americans now don’t trust higher ed; that it’s going to deliver what it is that is good for their families and for their communities and for our country—in this environment, the colleges that succeed deliver value. What do students want? They either want a good job or they want a transfer and get a bachelor’s degree out of community colleges. And so they work really hard to deliver preparation for the next stage. To employers, they’re delivering value. It’s a talent pipeline of diverse students that reflect the society that’s not just of today, but that’s coming in the future. And thirdly, they deliver value to governors and legislatures, because they are the primary funders of higher education in our country, and excellent community colleges understand how to make the case.

Fuller: And sustain or rebuild a consensus about the value that these institutions can bring to our country.

Wyner: Steve van Ausdle, who was the president for a couple of decades at Walla Walla Community College, was exceptional at doing the economic analysis to show if you invest in us, we can triple our nursing output legislature, we can triple the nursing output and deal with the nursing shortage in rural and urban communities in our state. It worked. He said to some private investors, “If you give us $5 million, we can build a wine-making economy in this region that will strengthen the region.” Sure enough, they went from three to over 200 wineries. It’s now a destination site for families. He was able to show the investors that wine tourists spend two and a half times the amount of your average tourists. And so if you invest as somebody in our community, if you invest in this wine-making program, I’m going to be able to deliver an incredible spinoff, which will help hotels, it’ll help restaurants, and it’ll help all the other service industries in our community thrive.

Davidson: It’s really about thinking less competitively and thinking more like an ecosystem for a lot of these community colleges. They’re able to look at the population, look at the employers, and see what’s needed. A lot of the best community colleges we see are helping to bring other institutions together. That includes K–12, that includes other community colleges, that includes the four-year system in order to solve some of these really big problems.

Fuller: It sounds almost like some of the leaders in the community college sector are almost acting like market makers. They’re engaging the community, they’re engaging employers, employer groups, state governments, and taking the ownership over how to get there with the communities they serve into communities of success.

Davidson: Absolutely. They’re playing really central roles, I think. In the best case scenarios, you’ll see a really strong community college leader step forward and really be a leader in that community. For example, in Rochester, New York, Monroe Community College, Todd Oldham, who is a VP of workforce and economic development there, is really a pillar for a lot of the labor market data for that entire community, and he shares it with the K–12 system, he shares it with the four-year institutions, he shares it with the chambers of commerce. And they really do work together to kind of bring Rochester up into the new economy.

Fuller: Well, Josh and Brittany, thanks so much for visiting us here on the Managing the Future of Work podcast and sharing the exciting research from your Workforce Playbook for community colleges, and also for the broader College Excellence Program. It’s been a real pleasure learning from you.

Davidson: Great. Thank you so much.

Wyner: Thanks, Joe.

Fuller: Thanks, everyone, for listening!

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