"Thirteen hundred miles from where Jones wrangles 18-wheelers at EMCC, members of the freshly minted Project on Workforce are collaborating in Cambridge to figure out America’s upward-mobility problem."
Nancy Walecki chronicles the research and growth of The Project on Workforce through the voices of 'STARs'—workers Skilled Through Alternative Routes—in the latest edition of Harvard Magazine.
"The seeds for the project were planted about a decade ago during conversations between professor of management practice (and former CEO of Monitor Consulting, now Monitor Deloitte) Joseph Fuller, and his mentor, professor emeritus of practice in educational policy and administration (and former high-school principal) Robert Schwartz. They saw unemployment and wage stagnation as byproducts of a supply-and-demand imbalance: the American education system wasn’t supplying students equipped with the skills employers were demanding...
Hoping to shape those kinds of pathways, in 2019, the pair enlisted Rachel Lipson ’12, M.B.A.-M.P.P. ’18, as director and looped in faculty co-directors HKS’s David Deming, Isabelle and Scott Black professor of political economy, and HGSE’s Peter Blair, assistant professor of education, who first learned about economics selling produce at the Nassau Straw Market (in the Bahamas), to lead the new Project on Workforce."
Read the full article on harvardmagazine.com