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Dec 20, 2024
Instead of responding seriously to a Congressional directive to evaluate changing the way we fund apprenticeships, the U.S. Department of Labor opted to troll the American people.
For colleges and universities, the next few years will be a steel cage match against the federal government. As Mrs. McMahon enters the ring – strange as it seems – we now live in a world where higher education leaders who wish to avoid getting bodyslammed would do well to familiarize themselves with seminal moments in professional wrestling.
Nov 15, 2024
Our schools already recognize that students with digitally-determined attention spans can’t read books. But rather than meet the problem head on, they’re attempting to meet students where they are. It’s an abdication of responsibility.
Nov 1, 2024
In education, our revealed preferences now vary radically from our stated preferences for one simple reason: we fear for our children’s economic future. So while we continue to say one thing, we’re making choices that seem safer.
Oct 18, 2024
Since we’re not likely to change our biology or behavior, the only way to close education’s growing gender gap is to change our college-for-all environment.
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.
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