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What if the great AI-in-school debate is a distraction from a more fundamental problem? Focusing on how AI can or should be used to help students learn is trivial in comparison to solving for how to give students experience using AI to actually do things.
May 2, 2025
Last week’s executive order marks the first time an administration has set an apprenticeship goal rather than simply continuing to shell out apprenticeship dollars to workforce boards and community colleges. More important, the order signals a culling of ineffective "train-and-pray" workforce development programs and a redirecting of those dollars to apprenticeships.
Apr 20, 2025
There’s a fundamental connection between America’s imbalanced approach to economic mobility and the populist consensus on erecting trade barriers to protect manufacturing. Protectionism is a mistake that’s attempting to correct for the mistake of college for all.
If the American public is inundated with mixed messages regarding the value of college, there’s a good reason for it: results are decidedly mixed. College is worth it for many, but not for all, or – when you add the growing legions of underemployed to stop-outs and drop-outs – even most. As currently constructed, college is an increasingly risky proposition.
Mar 21, 2025
The biggest education story of the 2020s isn’t the Trump administration’s capricious crackdowns, the fall of college for all, or the rise of apprenticeships and earn-and-learn pathways, but rather the sudden shift in K-12 education from false agency to real agency.
Why is there a shortage of air traffic controllers? Because the FAA hasn't been serious about apprenticeship and, for a generation, every new controller had to pick up and move to Oklahoma City.
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