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Jul 11, 2025
The demise of Grad PLUS loans marks the end of the Golden Age of Master’s Degrees.
Jun 27, 2025
Contrary to conventional wisdom, manufacturing jobs aren’t good jobs. But they can be good entry-level jobs.
Jun 13, 2025
Unemployment and underemployment of college graduates were already at record levels. Now the Class of 2025 is taking on water.
Both education and housing have become games rigged in favor of wealthy, older Americans. One way to kill two birds with one stone is to scale investment in earn-and-learn pathways to careers in the building trades.
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.
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, a member of the Los Angeles County Workforce Development Board, and 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