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Oct 4, 2024
Government grants make sense when we have no idea what works. But where outcomes are easily defined and measured, government should stop trying to pick winners and simply fund outcomes.
Sep 20, 2024
Since no one knows how much they’ll owe once this all shakes out, it shouldn’t be surprising that nearly half of all borrowers are not making payments. Our current approach to costly college tempered by loan forgiveness is a confusing combination of control and lenience.
Sep 6, 2024
It’s high time we recognized college rankings for what they are: clickbait, no better than those slideshows advertised with alluring photos at the bottom of less-than-reputable news sites.
The decline and fall of ERP has transformed entry-level jobs and is driving the experience inflation afflicting millions of new and recent grads.
Aug 10, 2024
American higher education doesn’t merit the fit-of-spite punishments envisioned by J.D. Vance. Colleges and universities are like big, beautiful butterflies that shouldn’t be broken on a wheel.
Jul 26, 2024
College admissions consultants are taking a human and social toll. They are developmentally detrimental, send the wrong messages to teens, and fuel inequality. Why do college admissions offices continue to put up with them?
Ryan is a Managing Director at Achieve Partners and was formerly an MD at University Ventures. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in education and workforce regularly appears in the biweekly Gap Letter, Forbes, and Inside Higher Education. He is the author of the book Apprentice Nation: How the "Earn and Learn" Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America (2023). He is also author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. Ryan’s first book was College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring. Ryan is a co-founder of Apprenticeships for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to scaling apprenticeships across the U.S. economy and is a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Previously, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus. His prior experience in higher education was at Columbia University. Ryan also founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.
Ryan received bachelor's degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.
With millions of unfilled jobs, technology skill requirements advancing at a breakneck pace, tens of millions of workers out of position relative to what employers are seeking, and postsecondary education and workforce development systems that have largely refused to budge, we need unprecedented innovation in order to rekindle the American Dream of continued growth and shared opportunity. While traditional colleges and universities must play a leading role, the socioeconomic solutions we need won’t only come from higher education, but from a range of public, not-for-profit, and private actors, and via new pathways that may not be immediately recognizable as education or training.
The biweekly Gap Letter, successor to the UV Letter (2011-18), aspires to keep readers apprised of the latest ideas and developments in higher education and at the intersection of education and employment with a perspective that aims for candid and never boring. Thanks for your consideration.
- Ryan Craig