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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?
Jul 14, 2024
With recent Supreme Court decisions, the golden era of regulation appears to be at an end. But regulation’s demise has the potential to shift higher education and workforce policy and funding from the ideological to the practical.
Jun 28, 2024
With all the AI attention on teaching and tutoring, with major budget challenges ahead, and with most of the spending outside the classroom, colleges need to embrace AI in order to shrink.
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