Rachel Lipson | Team Profile
- Project on Workforce Team
- Jun 8
- 5 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
Rachel Lipson is a co-founder and Scholar in Residence at the Project on Workforce, and a Research Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. Her current research focuses on a new generation of technical jobs—many fueled by AI and other emerging technologies—that do not require a four-year degree. She is studying the labor market experience of U.S. “frontier regions” at the forefront of producing critical technologies such as data centers, chips, quantum computing, nuclear energy, aerospace, biomanufacturing, and batteries.
From 2023 to 2025, Rachel served in the Biden-Harris Administration as a Senior Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Program Office, where she helped launch the workforce strategy for the $50 billion federal investment to revitalize domestic semiconductor manufacturing.
Rachel is the co-editor of America’s Hidden Economic Engines (Harvard Education Press 2023), a well-regarded volume that has helped catalyze community college reform efforts nationwide. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Hill, and her research has been featured by C-SPAN, NPR, Bloomberg, The Economist, and MIT Technology Review. She previously co-led the Workforce Futures Initiative in partnership with the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute and served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine task force on the STEM workforce. She has also held economic policy roles across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including at the World Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Obama for America, Year Up, and Mexico’s Ministry of Communications.
Rachel graduated magna cum laude in Government from Harvard College and holds an MBA and MPP from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. She is a recipient of the Frederick Fischer Prize for outstanding research on social policy, the Harvard Certificate of Distinction and Excellence in Teaching, a Harvard Business School Leadership Fellowship, and the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work. In 2024–25, she is also serving as a Futures Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity as part of a year-long cohort of leaders developing a vision for human capital development that supports longer lives and multiple career transitions. Rachel started her career in public service as the student representative to the Clarkstown Central School District Board of Education.
CONTENTS
Selected Research & Projects
In America’s Hidden Economic Engines, editors Robert B. Schwartz and Rachel Lipson spotlight community colleges as institutions uniquely equipped to foster more equitable economic growth across America’s regions. As Schwartz and Lipson show, these colleges are the best-placed institutions to reverse the decades-long rise in US economic inequality by race, class, and geography.
Navigating Public Job Training | Research Report
This report describes and analyzes the more than 75,000 “Eligible Training Provider” (ETP) programs in the United States. ETP programs are job training programs deemed eligible for funding under America’s primary federal workforce development law, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). Among other functions, WIOA funds vouchers for unemployed or underemployed workers to enroll in job training services. The vouchers are typically used to support enrollment in short-term, non-four-year-degree programs that connect to "in-demand employment” opportunities in a regional economy. Under the law, each state and territory must maintain a list of pre-approved programs that eligible individuals may select from. The programs on these lists (commonly known as “eligible training provider lists” – ETPLs) comprise our primary unit of analysis.
The College-to-Jobs Playbook | Research Report
This playbook provides a framework to help college better deliver on the American Dream by creating a coherent, comprehensive taxonomy of the landscape of college-to-jobs programs and policies through a review of the existing academic research according to a set of common criteria. With a focus on public two-year and four-year colleges, Minority Serving Institutions, and Historically Black Colleges and Universities, it identifies 13 “interventions” within the college ecosystem that could be used to ease the transition into good jobs in the workforce.
Building the new high road: Immigrants and workforce development | Research Report
The report “Building the New High Road” analyzes 131 applications to the WES Mariam Assefa Fund’s grant competition to shed light on how workforce programs, policies, and practices support immigrant inclusion in the U.S. economy; it finds that most initiatives focus on recent arrivals rather than longer-term residents, widely serve economic immigrants and refugees but seldom address migrant workers or immigration detainees, and increasingly prioritize job quality—wages, career progression, and supportive workplaces—yet critically underinvest in credential recognition, with only 5% of applicants addressing skills transfer from other countries. While over 80% of organizations engage with employers, only about a quarter hold direct hiring agreements, and nearly all are led by individuals with lived immigrant or refugee experience, underscoring the field’s growing emphasis on inclusive, employer-informed strategies to elevate immigrants’ economic potential.
Selected Media
In recent years, confidence in higher education has plummeted. This decline has prompted a vigorous debate on the role of all types of post-secondary education. In their recent book America’s Hidden Economic Engines: How Community Colleges Can Drive Shared Prosperity, Robert B. Schwartz and Rachel Lipson make the case for the value of community colleges. Surveying five case studies across the US–in Ohio, Virginia, Arizona, Texas, and Mississippi–they argue that community colleges serve as “engines” of social mobility for individuals and communities. Their research shows that community colleges have proven remarkably effective at mitigating economic inequality and promoting social engagement and economic development.
Over the past two years, the Workforce Futures Initiative—a bipartisan collaboration among the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Project on Workforce—has evaluated the U.S. federal-state workforce education and training system. Their findings indicate that while programs like the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) modestly improve outcomes for disadvantaged workers, the overall impact remains limited due to insufficient funding and systemic constraints. The group advocates for increased public investment in proven, scalable programs, particularly sectoral employment initiatives that align training with high-demand industries such as healthcare, IT, and advanced manufacturing. Additionally, they emphasize the necessity of supportive services like counseling and childcare, as well as enhanced data infrastructure to better track program performance and adapt to evolving labor market needs.
President Biden announced that after negotiations with moderate Democrats, his Build Back Better Act would no longer include 12 weeks of paid family and medical leave and free community college. While this was disappointing, all hope is not lost for workers; the new plan still includes $40 billion to make higher education and training more affordable, including expanded Pell Grants and critical investments in skills-based training, support services, and America's workforce development infrastructure.
Workers who lost jobs amid the pandemic see the tides of economic change quite clearly. Will we be able to deliver better vessels to ride out the waves? Director of the Project on Workforce, Rachel Lipson, writes for the Boston Globe on the US job training system: how we got here and how we move forward.
