“I’m guessing most of you really can’t tell who is the Democrat and who’s the Republican, and you shouldn't, because this is not a Democratic/Republican issue,” Jack Markell, former governor of Delaware and former U.S. ambassador to the Italian Republic, said. “I mean, this is something that every one of us should be pretty aligned on.”
BUILDING WORKFORCE PREPAREDNESS WITH DATA
Former U.S. Senator Kyrsten Sinema, who has taught at Arizona State University for more than two decades, described a notable negative shift in student preparedness for the workforce. However, panelists pointed out, data on market needs and trends has shifted the opposite way.
“We have better labor market information now than we’ve ever had before,” Markell said. “The part that we need to focus on is who is going to help these kids understand what it means.”
Virginia Secretary of Education Aimee Guidera highlighted her state’s efforts to bridge that gap by making real-time labor market data both accessible and actionable. The State Council of Higher Education for Virginia now hosts an online data portal for students and counselors to view detailed job outlooks, salary information and corresponding education pathways. Virginia schools are also incorporating the data into mandatory eighth-grade academic and career plans that, until recently, were treated largely as box-checking exercises.
“One of the things that we have tried to transform in Virginia in the last several years is using labor market information to make every single decision in our education and workforce systems,” Guidera said. “What it’s doing is blowing up the one-size-fits-all system, but it’s also changing the culture that everybody needs to go to college, which has failed.”
Indiana's Secretary of Education Katie Jenner said her state followed a similar logic when redesigning its high school diploma. As part of the new structure, students earn a “readiness seal” by demonstrating aptitude. One seal guarantees acceptance into any of the state’s seven public colleges and universities. Others give students a leg up with some of the state’s top employers or with military service qualifications.
PREPARING FOR THE UNKNOWN
While panelists all seemed to view technical skills and job alignment as critical, they also agreed on the idea of teaching students how to think, not just what to know.
“The idea is less about teaching them specific sets of knowledge or chunks of knowledge, because I think we’re good at that in our country,” Sinema said. “What we’re not doing a good enough job at is teaching students how to think in situations for which there is not a chunk of knowledge to provide an answer.”
Sinema said teaching critical thinking is not just important in the abstract; it could help prepare students for jobs that don’t exist yet in changing technology fields. This idea was a concern for Markell, especially with artificial intelligence changing the career landscape so quickly.
“I think these technologies are extraordinary and are going to solve some of our biggest problems, and at the same time, they obviously represent all kinds of threats in some bad ways,” he said. “Literally, what are we preparing our students for? What kind of work?”
While panelists agreed using labor data to inform education is important, they also warned that the data could be irrelevant in five years. Teaching durable skills like critical thinking can help students prepare for navigating those changes, they said, and workforce preparedness should not be a one-and-done project but an ongoing practice.
“When even folks who are in the private sector don't know what their industry is going to look like in five years, to expect that people whose job is to teach college students very specific tasks and skills should know what the private sector is going to look like in a different industry in five years is unfair,” Swift said. “But we can embed students. We can give them the critical thinking skills.”
FACING RESISTANCE, LETTING GO OF OLD STORIES
Implementing systemic change, panelists agreed, means confronting resistance and letting go of narratives that don’t serve students.
Jenner said that in Indiana's diploma redesign process, initial pushback, especially from Purdue University, helped highlight common ground between proponents and opponents and ultimately strengthened the final plan. When they announced the final version, Purdue was the first to sign up, she said.
Guidera described similar tensions in Virginia, particularly around the state’s overhaul of its accreditation and accountability systems. The prior model, she said, masked real problems by labeling virtually all schools as accredited even amid significant learning loss.
“The message we were giving is, ‘Everything’s groovy here, nothing to worry about,’ when the truth was very different,” she said.
Virginia's new system categorizes schools in clear, parent-friendly terms — off track, on track and distinguished — and places value on industry credentials, associate’s degrees and military preparation.
Panelists said programs that best serve students don’t represent a return to the status quo but an innovative approach to improving outcomes for students, and conversations in politics need to do the same to be effective.
“The stories of, ‘It’s not the money, it’s the value of the education,’ or the story of, ‘the unions are great’ or ‘the unions are horrible’ — all the stories that we all know and have known for all of these years, I would suggest that perhaps those aren't as important right now,” Sinema said. “Because the unknown is so much bigger, so much greater than anything we’ve ever experienced.”
