These reports are a product of the Harvard Project on Workforce’s Summer Fellowship Program. In Summer 2021, the Project on Workforce hosted 16 Summer Fellows from Harvard's policy, business, and education graduate schools. Our fellows worked in cross-sector teams and collaborated alongside leading organizations in the field. These reports highlight their key learnings and findings.
Contents
Credentials in Secondary CTE Programs (with infographics)
The views expressed in these reports are the sole responsibility of the Summer Fellows and are not meant to represent the views of the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, or any of the summer fellowship collaborators.
Aligning College and Career: Expanding Citywide Pathways for Boston Youth
How can we improve access to equitable opportunities to college and career for Boston’s youth? We conduct a feasibility study for a universal, citywide college- and career-readiness strategy in the City of Boston. Recommendations include staffing models, data infrastructure, and funding sources.
By: Alexis Farmer (MPP '21), Ethan Lyle (MPP '22), and Melanie Shimano (Ed.M '21)
Credential Quality in Career and Technical Education
Perkins V (Strengthening Career and Technical Education for the 21st Century Act) introduced a new program quality indicator for recognized postsecondary credentials. We assess the new indicator and provide recommendations for the Department of Education on how to leverage this metric to strengthen value and quality in the CTE and industry credential landscape.
By: Ashley Hong (MPP '23), Ashley Etemadi (Ed.M '21), and Ari Hilliard (Ed.M '21)
Identifying Worker Displacement Risk
As technology and automation increase economic disruption, supporting workers prior to permanent job displacement is becoming a larger priority for the workforce development ecosystem. We propose a new displacement risk framework and data product that can be used by federal, state, and local workforce development organizations to analyze jobs and areas of high risk by occupation and location.
By: Cathy Chukwulebe (MBA '21) and Rodrigo Medeiros (Ed.M '21)
The Future of Office Work
COVID-19 is inducing a large work from home experiment, and hybrid work may be the future of office-based work for many Massachusetts and Rhode Island workers. We propose metrics for states to monitor the extent of the remote and hybrid shift, as well as targeted policies, such as scaling reskilling programs, placemaking investments, and office conversions that can help states convert the remote/hybrid threat into an opportunity for equity.
By: Martina Bedatsova (MPP '22), Jonathan Ji (Ed.M '21, MTS '22), Andrea Neyra Nazarrett (MPP '21), and M. Savio Nicholas (MPA '22)
Online Skills Platforms
Nearly 1 in 3 American workers lack foundational digital skills. We identify opportunities and drawbacks of different scaling strategies for online resource and learning platforms and offer recommendations for connecting with users, testing assumptions, and monetizing to achieve a stronger fit in the market.
By: Pierce Henderson (Ed.M '21), and Nakul Nagaraj (MPP '21)
Credentials in Secondary CTE Programs
States are using different methodologies and strategies to measure postsecondary credentials in CTE. This report provides three case studies from states that elected to report on Perkins V’s 5S1 program quality indicator. We look at the different CTE programs and industry credential offerings of Delaware, Texas, and Louisiana.
By: Ashley Hong (MPP '23), Ashley Etemadi (Ed.M '21), and Ari Hilliard (Ed.M '21)
These reports are a product of the Harvard Project on Workforce’s Summer Fellowship Program, a short-term research and policy opportunity for Harvard graduate students and recent alumni from the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. Summer fellows are placed in interdisciplinary, cross-school project teams over the course of the summer and complete projects focused on pressing policy or operational challenges at the intersection of education, labor markets, and workforce development. The Fellowship Program also provides students with opportunities for professional development and engagement with staff and faculty at the Malcolm Wiener Center for Social Policy, the Managing the Future of Work Project at Harvard Business School, and the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The views expressed in this report are the sole responsibility of the Summer Fellows and are not meant to represent the views of the Harvard Kennedy School, Harvard University, or any other organization or government entity mentioned in the reports.