Lumina sets new goal: 75% of workers with higher education

The new strategic direction the Lumina Foundation announced this month commits it to working with state governments, school boards, colleges and universities to increase to 75% the proportion of adults in the American labour force who by 2040 have either post-secondary credentials or college degrees.

The goal builds on Lumina’s earlier goal, set in 2008, to increase the percentage of Americans in the labour force with post-secondary education from 28% to 60% by 2025.

“We can’t make the 2040 goal happen on our own, just as we couldn’t make the 2025 goal happen without the major role played by the states, by different education and training providers, including colleges and universities,” Lumina’s president, Jamie Merisotis, told an online media briefing on 3 March.

Based in Indianapolis, Indiana, Lumina is a non-governmental organisation that works to increase opportunities for access and success in tertiary education for all Americans.

“We see ourselves as a catalyst, a contributor to helping to shape the ecosystem that helps make change possible. And as part of our efforts, as one organisation working on this to help our country reach the 2040 goal, we’re going to focus on four areas: ensuring credentials of value; expanding access to education; helping more students graduate; and redesigning education for the future,” said Meristotis.

Earnings premium

The reason behind the 75% goal, Courtney Brown, PhD, Lumina’s vice-president of impact and planning, told University World News, is that by 2031 72% of all jobs will need some form of post-high school education, with most needing a college degree.

Accordingly, in addition to including information at the national and state levels, regarding the associate bachelor (AB) degrees (from junior colleges), bachelor, masters and doctorates, the Credentials of Value website she unveiled at the briefing includes post-secondary certificates and certifications (which are often taught at two-year junior colleges) that were not included in A Stronger Nation, Lumina’s previous online tracking tool.

In her opening remarks to the online briefing, Brown explained that the metric for educational success is that the degree or credential holder earns at least 15% over someone whose highest credential is a high school diploma.

As to why Lumina settled on the 15% figure, Brown said: “I considered having different levels: 15% for certificates, 20% for associates, etc. I did all the data to see how it fit together. It just became too confusing. We were told to keep things simple, and so everybody is at 15%.

The 15% earnings premium is a national average. “We have a national goal. So, for now, we are comparing to a national average,” Brown said.

Less confidence in higher education

One of the greatest impediments to achieving the goal of increasing post-secondary education to 75%, both Merisotis and Brown explained, is that large numbers of Americans have lost faith in the post-secondary education system.

Last July, Lumina published the results of a Gallup survey showing that one-third of all Americans (and 50% of Republican voters) had lost confidence in the higher education system.

Forty-one percent believed college professors had a political agenda, with 25% saying professors brainwashed students and 17% saying campuses were too liberal. Thirty-seven percent of those with little or no confidence said that colleges did not teach the right things, with 30% saying that students were not “properly educated” or taught “relevant skills”.

Notwithstanding these sentiments, 94% of Americans want to get some form of higher education, said Brown.

“When you ask people if they hope to get more education after high school, overwhelmingly, everyone wants it. People who have never touched higher education, people who had stopped out [that is, are no longer enrolled], people who are currently enrolled – want to get a credential. They want to get a bachelor degree. They all aspire to that, and they value it.”

But, she continued, Americans have profound doubts that the nation’s higher education system can deliver relevant education at an acceptable cost and that there is a reasonable return on investment (both in terms of time and money). “It’s not that they don't want it, they just don't trust the system,” said Brown.

Lumina has set itself four tasks to help address this crisis. The first is the Credentials of Value website, which presents both to professionals in the education field and, even more importantly, the general public, the data about what percentage of the working population has a credential or which degree – and therefore earns at least 15% more than a high school graduate on average.

The website allows users to drill down to the state level by gender, age as well as by racial or ethnic group.

Additionally, Lumina will gather data and develop plans to present to government stakeholders that should lower college and university costs.

Among the models that can be considered, Brown said, are whether a bachelor degree can be completed in three (instead of four) years, the expansion of dual enrolment programmes (under which students earn college credits while in high school), making the first two years of college tuition-free (with the final two being paid for by the student, and the stacking of credentials.

If any of these plans find purchase, Lumina will help run pilot projects.

Further, Lumina will make efforts to help students complete their training and college and university education more efficiently, and will work to expand entry points for training, and college and university education.

How apprenticeships fit in

Lumina’s credo, Brown explained, is not that the only path to a good well-paid job and fulfilling life is through a university gate.

The predominance of the nearly 4,000 colleges and universities which enrol more than 19 million students in the United States, obscures the fact that while America does not have as well-developed an apprenticeship system as, for example, Germany, the country has always had certificates and certifications.

According to ApprenticeshipUSA, there are presently 678,000 apprentices in the United States.

“Apprenticeships are the … stepchild that nobody wants to mention. But to be in the trades, you've always had to have some sort of licence or certificate. We don't have the built-out apprenticeship model that other countries do, but an apprenticeship is built with lots of certificates and certification,” said Brown.

Further, she explained that, unlike many other countries, apprenticeships have always been separated from education, because, in American parlance, ‘education’ means the K-12 system and college.

“The other stuff has been in the ‘workforce’, in a separate data system, in a separate department,” said Brown.

In addition to those who pursue short-term credentials after high school to enter the well-paid trades, for example, Brown pointed to another reason for re-thinking the value of short-term credentials and certificates: the increasing number of individuals with bachelor and masters who now pursue short-term certificates (mainly through colleges and universities) in order to remain up-to-date in their fields or retrain for another career.

“We’re really thinking about: How do you pull these things together? Because they work really well together. And most of the huge increase we've seen in the short term – credential, certificate and certification – is [because] more and more people are getting them on top of a college degree. There’s incredible value in getting them after you have a degree to kind of continue to skill and upskill,” she said.

Shared learning outcomes

Much of Lumina’s work can be described as ‘back end’, the setting up of the intellectual machinery that will allow educational systems or colleges and universities to move forward in a rapidly changing education ecosystem.

Among the lessons Lumina has taken from education systems outside the United States is one from the EU-funded Tuning-Calohee and Calohex project: the development of shared learning outcomes and expectations of students who graduate from similar programmes in different countries.

According to Brown: “They wanted to make sure that if I have a history degree from a French university, it translates into a history degree in Germany, for example.

“So, they ‘tuned’ their degrees to answer such questions as, ‘What does it mean to have a history degree?’ ‘What are the things I should know and be able to do if I have a bachelor in history?’.”

The United States does not have the equivalent of a national ministry. Colleges and universities are chartered by state governments that are, by convention and, in some cases, law, forbidden from intruding into curriculum matters. Accordingly, ‘tuning’ required getting buy-in from several stakeholders, not least of whom, Brown told University World News, were professors.

“Because, as you know, nothing can happen without professors’ support.

“What we did was take the model and present it to many different national organisations. We got hundreds of universities to begin to ‘tune’ their history programmes,” she said. The American Historical Association took on ‘tuning’ and began to consider what it meant to have an associate degree in history, a bachelor, masters or PhD.

“The aim was to make it mean the same thing at Syracuse University in central New York as it would at Indiana University, in Bloomington, Indiana. We built something called the degree qualifications profile and then shared it. We profiled a great deal of the research and helped interested parties pilot it,” said Brown.

A ‘moral imperative’

Words and phrases like ‘pilot’, ‘educational outcomes’, ‘data-driven’, and ‘census data’ are familiar to professionals in education and politicians. They can also seem cold and soulless.

In Lumina’s hands, Brown explained, the numbers in these concepts serve a “moral imperative,” as they are used to find ways to increase educational opportunity.

“I'm a data person, so I'm going to lead with data all the time,” said Brown. “When I look at the data, I can see clearly that some people are not getting opportunities.

“Everyone deserves an opportunity. Every person, no matter where you live, how much money your parents make, the colour of your skin, where you were born, everyone should have an opportunity to have the education they need and they want, and be able to have a good job and a good life with purpose.

“On the economic side, we need more people with more education and more skills to fuel our economies. To do that, we need to make sure that we're including everybody.

“We can’t do that with one race, one gender, one region. We need everybody participating in our education system so that they can better participate in our workforce,” she noted.

Lumina’s data allows it “to understand who is not being served or who is not being served well,” Brown told University World News.

“We look at region, we look at rural-urban, we look at race, ethnicity, we look at age, we look at gender. When someone isn't being served well, we need to examine that and see what's missing, and how we improve it for those individuals so that they have access to what they need, and so their regions have the education they need for their economies,” he added.

Lumina’s focus is on the United States. However, Brown said: “It’s really important we look across the world, and, you know, in every country, there are different groups that are being underserved or not served at all.

We’re trying to learn from other countries about how they think about those populations, and how they bring them into their education systems. Because they also need those individuals to fuel their economies.”