WASHINGTON — At a time when calls to align higher education with workforce needs are ubiquitous, Tuajuanda Jordan — president at St. Mary’s College of Maryland — bucked the trend Wednesday and questioned the merits of “training for the immediately apparent and educating for an uncertain future.”
“We keep talking about ‘education must be aligned with workforce needs,’ but who is setting the vision as to what the workforce needs are going to be in the future?” Jordan asked.
Jordan said if students are guided down certain educational paths in order to meet workforce demands, policymakers and educational leaders must make sure the system is sustainable and that workers can get retrained without having to incur a lot of additional costs.
“You can’t just train for an immediate job and we know in the next few years it’s going to go away and the people are left with a skill that’s unusable,” Jordan said. “The system should be if we guide you down this path and jobs go away where you can’t function anymore, we will retrain you for something else.”
Jordan made her remarks Wednesday at the National Press Club during the release of “Investing in the Future: Sharing Responsibility for Higher Education Attainment,” the capstone report of the National Commission on Financing 21st Century Higher Education. The commission — which has produced 10 white papers on a range of higher education issues — was created by the University of Virginia Miller Center.
The final report draws from all those papers and makes a series of recommendations that Brian Fitzgerald, CEO of the Business-Higher Education Forum, described a “full menu of strategies that we all have to advance.”
Fitzgerald pressed for better information to match graduates with jobs.
