With nearly 7 million unfilled jobs, technology and associated required skills advancing at breakneck pace, and postsecondary education and workforce development systems that have refused to budge, we need unprecedented innovation in order to sustain the American Dream of continued growth and shared opportunity. While traditional colleges and universities must play a leading role, solutions won’t only come from higher education, but from a range of public, not-for-profit, and private actors, and via new pathways that aren’t immediately recognizable as education or training.
This biweekly letter aspires to keep readers apprised of the latest ideas and developments in closing the skills gap with the same bracing perspective you’ve come to expect on Friday mornings. I hope you continue to value it and correspond with me.
- Ryan Craig
There’s a reason these schools are failing: they’re failing students. So boundless nostalgia is not helpful.
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Ryan Craig is the author of College Disrupted (2015) and A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (2018), which was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. His commentary on the skills gap appears regularly in Forbes, TechCrunch, Inside Higher Education, Fortune, HR Dive, and VentureBeat, among others. His passion is trailblazing new pathways from education to employment and imagining a more student-centric future for higher education.
Ryan is Managing Director of University Ventures. Prior to UV, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus where he was the founding Director of Bridgepoint Education (NYSE: BPI), one of the largest online universities in the United States. His prior experience in online education was at Columbia University. From 2004 to 2010, Ryan 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.
Ryan lives in Pacific Palisades, CA with his wife Yahlin Chang, and their three boys whose antics are often chronicled in Ryan’s writing.