When You Think Anyone Can Do Workforce Development

Read the Strada Institute report cited in this Inside Higher Ed article and try to reconcile the embarrassingly clunky way mid-tier tuition-dependent private universities are responding to the significant growth and demand for "real" workforce development programs and services.

Not surprising to anyone, the report noted that less selective institutions, public and private alike, retain far more graduates in state than elite ones do, which means these schools already have a natural advantage sitting untapped. And they already have the unit built to capture the opportunity. Schools and colleges of professional & continuing education have spent decades doing exactly the kind of industry facing, market responsive, program development work that is required right now.

My disappointment, again, is the abject failure we're seeing of leadership at so many private universities who make glittery pronouncements about how workforce development is strategic (which it is), only to then hand the work to a traditional academic school or some back office administrative unit led by sales people and transactional unimaginative robotic staff. Predictably, workforce development will wither and die at these privates. Deans and department chairs are trained and organized toward incentives that don't align with workforce development programming. Hack administrators, who function like consultants and talk wildly about entrepreneurial thinking but are hard-pressed to explain what that is, are woefully ill-equipped to do any actual work. When a non-credit workforce pathway program takes eighteen months to get through a Senate committee, you can guarantee that the employer has moved on and signed with the community college across town that spun up a program in 3 months. 

The better and smarter response for mid-tier tuition-dependent privates is to appropriately fund their schools and colleges of professional & continuing education. Let these units build the required alternative credentials, programs and pathways without routing everything through a curriculum committee in the School of Aspirational Networking. Treat these units as the institutional growth engines they are.