Tuesday, May 27, 2025 - In this episode, former Massachusetts Governor Jane Swift joins Jeff and Michael to explore how to rebuild the broken college-to-career pipeline. Now leading Education at Work, a nonprofit that provides work-based learning opportunities for undergraduates, Swift shares how her organization supports first-generation and Pell-eligible students with paid, career-relevant jobs during college. The conversation also dives into the policy vacuum left by congressional inaction, the role of states in driving innovation, and where bipartisan opportunities still exist in connecting higher education to the workforce. This episode is made with support from Ascendium Education Group and the Gates Foundation.
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Publications Mentioned:
0:00 - Intro
02:57 - Fixing the College to Career Pipeline
14:48 - Building Soft Skills
17:47 - The Higher Ed Policy Vacuum
24:28 - Federal Policy Enablers for Work-Based Learning
28:06 - State Governments to the Rescue?
30:46 - The Opportunity for Bipartisanship
Transcript:
Jeff Selingo
So, Michael, there's a lot of talk these days about making college pay off with real world experience. Today, we're joined by someone who's making that happen every day, former Massachusetts governor Jane Swift, who now leads the nonprofit Education at Work.
Michael Horn
And Jeff, we will dive into how her organization bridges higher ed and real jobs, a favorite topic of ours on the show, I'm realizing, and and we'll get to explore her take on what's happening in the world of policy right now by tapping into her unique experience navigating state and national politics. That's all ahead on Future U.
Sponsor
This episode of Future U is sponsored by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, working to eliminate race, ethnicity, and income as predictors of student educational success.
This episode of Future U is sponsored by Ascendium Education Group, a nonprofit organization committed to helping learners from low income backgrounds reach their education and career goals. For more information, visit AscendiumPhilanthropy.org.
Michael Horn
I'm Michael Horn.
Jeff Selingo
And I'm Jeff Selingo.
In today's rapidly evolving economy, the conversation about higher ed is increasingly centered on its direct link to employment outcomes. Many students and families are scrutinizing the return on investment of a college degree, emphasizing the importance of acquiring practical skills that lead to tangible job opportunities.
Michael Horn
And so then discuss this growing emphasis on job guarantees, economic security as really primary motivators for enrollment, or at least the baseline expectations. And the episode, I think, highlighted the need for colleges to not only provide academic knowledge, but also to ensure that students are equipped with the skills and experiences necessary to thrive in the job market.
Jeff Selingo
Yeah. Michael, building on that conversation, today, we're joined by somebody who has been at the forefront of integrating education with real work experience, former Massachusetts governor Jane Swift. As president of Education at Work, Jane leads a nonprofit organization dedicated to providing work-based learning opportunities for higher education students across the country. Her extensive career spans public service, politics, business, and now nonprofit leadership. Jane, welcome to Future U.
Jane Swift
It's great to be here.
Michael Horn
And, Jeff, before you get to ask your first question, I should probably disclose that I got to be Jane's board chair while she was leading LearnLaunch for several years there and during the pandemic, which was both some of the most rewarding work I think I saw you do and, for external reasons, some of the most challenging as well. But just disclose that.
Jane Swift
And I keep seeming to find these really rewarding and really challenging opportunities. So must be something on my forehead.
Jeff Selingo
Well, so speaking of a challenging opportunity, why don't you start off by giving our listeners kind of an overview of education at work? You know, how does it exactly partner with colleges and universities to connect students to meaningful jobs?
Jane Swift
So at Education at Work, we are trying to fix the broken college to career pipeline for many students for many years. Like, you think about the GI Bill, which now I'm really dating myself, which I do not remember the GI Bill. But I actually went to elementary school in a neighborhood, Greylock Elementary School was right in the middle of an entire development of houses that were entirely built by the GI Bill. And that entire neighborhood was known for that. It was one of the nice middle class neighborhoods in North Adams, Massachusetts. But for many, many decades, the American experience was if you came to this country as an immigrant, which my mom's parents did, you worked your tail off like my mom's parents did in a factory for forty five and forty seven years. You scrimped and saved, and if your kids went to college, they would have a better life than you did. So my mom went to what was then called North Adams Normal School, which was a producer of teachers. My dad went to a two year technical college, and took over the family plumbing business. And then all three of their or all four, I don't know which one of my siblings I just left off. But all four of their three and me, the special one. But all four of their children got a four year degree, and we have done phenomenally well. Right? I tell folks that when I moved into Trinity College, I'll never forget that there is a young woman who moved into the dorm room across the hall from me, and I am certain that the ensemble of furniture, she not only moved in this beautiful, like, bedroom set with, matching comforter and pillows that I would have never, Laura Ashley, imagined. They actually moved out the furniture out of the whole dorm room and moved in matching furniture. To this day, I don't think my parents have ever had as nice of a bedroom set as and I'm not gonna say her name, just in case you guys have very... But her name, if I would say it, was indicative of it. Right? The kind of preppy girls and boys I went to Trinity College with. But, you know, that enabled me to have a very different life, a wonderful life, and work on things I'm passionate about, but just a very different lifestyle than my parents had, and certainly than my grandparents. But today, we see students going off to college, and these are a lot of the students that I work with. So we partner with Arizona State University. We partner with the University of Texas El Paso, which is one of the largest Hispanic serving institutions in the country, University of Utah, and also a lot of the schools around them. So Maricopa Community College, a lot of the two year institutions in their general vicinity, 50% of our students are first generation college students. About 50% are on Pell Grants. I was on a Pell Grant. And about 80% of our students are students of color. Our students are doing the same thing I did. Right? Okay. I'm gonna go off to college. I'm gonna get a degree. Except what's happening is when they leave college, they are not getting a first job that merits the investment of time and money that they and the adults who support them expected. And it's because this whole pipeline is broken. With the velocity of change, all kinds of things happening in our economy that smart people like you and Michael can diagnose, and probably have in one of the many books that I have signed and haven't completely read in my bookshelf. But, you know, the employers are not investing as much in early career talent. We don't have as many internships. Handshake just did their annual report. Fewer internships available at the very time we've now proven their efficacy and that more students want them. And so it is the students who you'd argue most need those internships, so the least number of networks, the least connections who aren't getting them, and then the students we work with have to work. Right? So getting an internship isn't or a paid job for them isn't a job or isn't an employment strategy for when they graduate. It is an existence strategy during college. And so many of them are their expected family contribution for folks who know the FAFSA. You get an expected family contribution every year. That's their responsibility as a student. And what we know from research is a very long answer to a very short question. I may just filibuster the whole thing. But what we know from research is
Michael Horn
We call it a Cory Booker now.
Jane Swift
Oh, good. In general, students who work more than twenty hours a week while they're in college full time have very bad academic outcomes. What we do is try to flip that script, and so I always talk about I always talk about my children, but I talk about trying to give students who have to work, who are the most at risk, I told you the profile of our students, The same advantages as if you were a D1 athlete. So one of my daughters worked in college athletics. If you're doing college athletics, the institution mediates all potential conflicts for you. So there are times that they call it the division of the day at Williams. I don't know what they call it at Harvard, probably something much more lofty than that. But there are times of the day when you can have classes. There are times of the day when you can have practice. If you're going to a game on a Friday afternoon, the professor has to excuse you from classes, has to give you an opportunity to make it up. If you are, I would argue, the most at risk student in a college population, Pell Grant, student of color, student who has to work, nobody is mediating the conflicts between work and school, but we do that. So how do we work with institutions? So we get companies to give us full time jobs that they're having trouble filling, usually that don't require a college degree, mid skill jobs.
Jeff Selingo
So can you give an example of the jobs?
Jane Swift
Call center jobs. Right? So actually, right now, we're actually helping people prepare their taxes or remember their forgotten password for TurboTax or other types of product support. And so students will call us. They will get one of our students on the phone, but we'll take a full time job, and we will make it a part time job with flexibility around a student's schedule. And what institutions often do is help us by providing space on campus, because we are trying to help our students. Again, think of the D1 sports. We want them, so we're not providing a special cafeteria and those little scooters that all the d one athletes get. But what we are trying to do is have a place for them to work in proximity to campus, so that they can manage both a work schedule and a school schedule. So the other thing we're doing is we're asking colleges and universities to work with us with their career services or other offices. So Intuit was a new client for us. We work with the business school, with the accounting professors to say, who are the students within your classes who would most benefit or are the most prepared to succeed with this new client that we have. So they help us with recruiting, Or they give us donated space so that we can be in closer proximity to the work, and to the schooling that students are doing.
Michael Horn
So you so you just gave us also a sense of the types of jobs that these students get to do. How do they get paid? Is it from the employers? And then do you track, are the students getting jobs with those employers after they graduate?
Jane Swift
So we do not promise the students that they're gonna get a job with the employer after they graduate, but many of our employers, besides having immediate needs that are jobs they need to fill, also recognize that they're cultivating a long term workforce of the future. And so Fidelity actually works with our students, and over 250 of our students have actually been hired as full time students at Fidelity. Intuit is not promising our students that they're gonna have jobs full time, but they, many of our students have a pathway to get certified as a tax specialist. Intuit hires hundreds, probably thousands of tax specialists every year, and tax specialists make anywhere from seventy to a hundred thousand dollars a year. And if you know the demographics or the finances of Pell Grant students, so Pell Grant families make on average $40,000 a year. So if you think about 50% of our population is Pell Grant, and we are getting them certified to do tax specialist work for Intuit in college part time, and that's a role that they could go on to do part time or full time that could make you upwards of a hundred thousand dollars a year when you leave. That is life changing type work. So we pay the students based on what Intuit pays us. We provide training. In the case of the tax specialist role, Intuit actually has a free academy online that anybody could take. I actually took a couple of the courses just to brush up a little bit on my math skills, but we actually supplement. Right? So we lead, it's an asynchronous training course, but we actually break it up, lead our students through, help them to think how to pace themselves. And I think that's the reason why we have a very high pass rate. So this is actually a good news math story that we need in the United States. We're at almost 90% pass rate for our students on the academy test. And we actually had, this is from a couple weeks ago. Two of our students have moved from a Tax Specialist I to a Tax Specialist II, which is 30 returns in a row that you have helped to create with zero errors. And so now they're starting at the very basic level, but still. So we produce really skilled workers. Like, one of the biggest myths that I hope this and a lot of the press that I do will bust, people have such a misimpression of college students today. They think about I I, you know, exaggerate a little bit, but they think about all these kids at elite institutions like the one I the H one I've talked about a few times. Yeah. They were ways I'm saying. Marching around in their Lululemon pants and their Canada Goose jackets, right, protesting everything under the sun. That's not our students. Right? They don't have that luxury of either the clothing or the time. Our students are ambitious, hardworking students, and we often get measured on the same thing that other business process outsource providers, or internal employees doing the same work are getting measured on, and our students kick their butt. I'm not swearing for lent, so I kicked their butt
Michael Horn
That was well done. That was
Jane Swift
Well, yeah. Thank you.
Michael Horn
My kids would let it go.
Jane Swift
Yeah. We outperform internal and external competitors over and over. Even though our students are working part time, they tend to stay with us for about eighteen months. And we find that they can get skilled up in the technical skills really quickly, where, and this is consistent with what you read about young professionals, they need help with the soft skills or durable skills, which makes sense. Right? They haven't been in these professional settings. And how do you know the things you don't know? So we have a great video. You know, you're not supposed to have favorites, but this young guy, Edward, right, the first day I welcomed, was in our first class Intuit, and so they were on Zoom, and I did a Zoom welcome. They were in person in Tempe, I was on Zoom. And, you know, raises his hand right away, I love a kid who asked the first question, asked me when I was coming to visit. And I was like, oh, I'm actually gonna be there in two weeks. Well, I'm gonna wear an orange shirt because he's wearing an orange shirt that day, you know which one I am. I'm like, you know what? I have a feeling, Edward, I'm gonna know who you are. So we now have a whole thing, but Edward talks about and it will not surprise you if you go to our YouTube page, and please do, and like our page and watch our videos. But Edward talks about how he was good at talking, but he didn't know how to communicate professionally. And that was something he's really learned in this job. We just did our “Voice of the Student” survey. Our students learned to do problem solving. Now listen. You do problem solving in an academic setting, but it's a different kind of problem solving. One of the biggest things for any of us who've ever hired a young professional or an intern, the thing that stands out from certain students and certain young professionals is the students who know how to keep working at something and to solving a problem until the right point at which they come back and ask for more help. And how to sort of get as far as you can, right, and no one is that time to say, okay, now I need to come back to you and ask you, like, I've gotten to here, when do I like, kinds of, you know, developed skills about how often should I ask for help, how often should I keep trying to solve this on my own. Problem solving, communication, professionalism is something our students called out. Right? So we have, most of our work that our students work with clients, they're on camera. You know, how do you dress? In today's society, when you're not sitting in a classroom, you're not even on a Zoom classroom, you're actually interacting with a client. Those are the kinds of things until somebody tells you, you don't know.
Jeff Selingo
So let's shift gears a bit, Jane, because you served as governor of Massachusetts, a Republican governor.
Jane Swift
Allegedly
Jeff Selingo
A traditionally Democratic state. You've also had national influence, including serving on the governing board overseeing NAEP, known as the nation's report card.
Michael Horn
Well, so let's broaden the policy aperture then. Flurry of executive actions, obviously, in education recently, but not a lot of legislative progress, I think it's fair to say. Elementary and Secondary Education Act last renewed in 2015, so that's a decade ago at this point. Higher Education Act hasn't been renewed since 2008. There seemed to be momentum for a brief moment toward ideas like the College Cost Reduction Act or redirecting higher ed funding towards short term Pell or whatever it's been rebranded as of late. I I'm just curious, like, why hasn't this moved forward in your view as you're looking at it? What's holding it back, from actual policy making as opposed to the regulatory sort of pendulum we've been on?
Jane Swift
So set aside whether you agree with everything that's happened in the first however many days it seems like a million of the Trump administration, no one should let congress and members of either party in Congress over the last ten, fifteen, twenty years off the hook. Mhmm. Because the real issue is what you just said, and this is not just in education. Congress has not done their job, and reauthorized legislation, passed budgets in a routine manner for so long that the executive branch has been empowered to act extracurricular, because there's no one else performing their tasks. And frankly, if there's waste, fraud, and abuse, somebody should, some folks should look in the mirror who've been getting paid. Like, the legislative branch of the federal government is supposed to be passing budgets and reauthorizing legislation. And the fact that they haven't done it in so long, and just abrogated that responsibility to presidents of both parties is partly how we are in the place that we are.
Jane Swift
So I and the issue is, and we have children, right, and daughters, twin daughters.
Michael Horn
Mhmm. We share that.
Jane Swift
We do share that. No one can fight like siblings, especially sibling girls, and then they all love each other later. But
Michael Horn
That always makes me feel better when I hear you say that.
Jane Swift
Yes. But whenever you see a sibling fight, like, somebody has to be the one to stop. Mhmm. Right? Like, somebody at some point just has to, like, be the bigger person. And the problem in Washington right now is that both parties are more focused on winning elections than on serving the public. And a lot of individuals, as far as I can tell, are more concerned with retaining power than remembering why they wanted power in the first place. And there are things worse than losing an election, and walking away from power, as somebody who walked away from a powerful position. And if you have to basically give up everything you stand for in order to maintain power, I would put forward, you should seriously think about what it is you're doing with your life. And it is absolutely true that as a political strategy, letting the party in power have wins, meaning doing things that are good for the American public that both parties can largely agree on, and solving problems like an immigration bill that was 90% of what most rational Americans believed was a good bill, and then people who supported 90% of what was in there voted against it because the guy who was sitting in the White House wasn't from their party, that's the behavior like little girls fighting. Right? That at some point, somebody And at this point, I'd given up on it being leadership of either party. But some individuals have to stand up and be like, why are we here, and what matters? And maybe this moment in time, right Yeah. Is what it takes. Like, I thought the last Trump administration or the Biden administration where it was so clear that the person we elected as president was not in charge. That one of those two things would have motivated some member of congress to say, gee, perhaps we should do our job. Right? Like, we're a co-equal branch of government. And it hasn't happened yet, and my fear, frankly, is that we're just gonna keep swinging back and forth where one administration comes in and tries to right whatever wrongs they perceive of having been done to their party, and it's like this grievance filled. It's like we're in a Seinfeld episode that never ends. Right? And meanwhile, we have these huge issues like the one I'm trying to solve where we have no path to economic and social mobility for hardworking people in a country that has been completely built on the basis that where you're born does not determine your destiny of where you're going to end up. And so…
Michael Horn
Let me let me let me jump in on that one, because in terms of specific policy shifts you would like the legislative branch to step up on, how would you prioritize helping those students better integrate work experience into their education? Right? Like, what policies would you put in place to alter funding flows and so forth?
Jane Swift
So I think there are a bunch of things we could do. So ten years ago, nobody no very few high school students ten or twenty years ago were taking college classes in high school. Now it's ubiquitous, really. Right? Like, it's not like the glamorous, sexy thing to do because so many folks had done it. When it first started, was like, woah. That's like a novel idea. How would we even do that? Think ten years from now. I would love for folks to be like, I can't believe there was a time when every college student wasn't getting the work experience integrated. So there's a bunch of different ways to do it. First, I think we have to free up some federal funding and dedicate it more toward integrated work experiences. And I think if you let students control it, then you're gonna get it much quicker and much better. So I would turn work study into a voucher. So it's not enough to pay a student who has to work twenty hours a week, but if the students I work with, they're not even using their work study voucher because it's not worth enough money to pay for what they need. But if I could aggregate those $2,000 or $2,500 vouchers, I could use all that money to match it, eight to one, really, with private sector money, and then that's money I could use toward tuition assistance, toward upskilling, all the things that, you know, are very tight to do right now. But also, if there's as we know from seeing title four, when there's a federal funding flow, all of a sudden, a lot more private sector business models and nonprofit business models get into a particular business. So there's just not enough folks doing what I do, providing these services as intermediaries for work based learning. So getting the federal funding flow, I think, would make a huge difference. I also think some states should start looking at if they get a lot more of their workforce training dollars, they should make those much more flexible. And because we know we have a huge number of college students and young adults who are underemployed, in addition to the traditional stuff we do, we should allow those to be eligible for students who are in college. Right? So there's no reason 50%. Georgetown has this stat. I hope that's not competitive with Harvard. Georgetown has this stat that 50% of young adults make less than $35,000 a year. No wonder. $35,000 a year, even in low cost states, that is not a sustainable wage. And so and I'd rather have them making more money because they're getting more skills, they're getting more work experience than we keep, like, contorting the minimum wage. Like, let's give them an opportunity to get the experience. So we I think finding ways to take forms of funding that we have now toward workforce development, and being much more focused on an entire swath of the workforce that is the most ill served right now, which are young adults, whether they choose a college path or go straight into careers, we need to redirect a lot of those dollars into programs that we know are effective.
Jeff Selingo
So, Jane, you mentioned the states. Are they gonna save us? Right? Is the political environment around higher education at the state level as polarized as it seems national?
Jane Swift
No. I think the states are gonna save us, and also, it's states and coalitions of states. So one of the things that I've suggested into the abyss that we have right now is some of the destruction of entire departments at the federal level. So we've seen this before. So when you had the rise of all of these online education companies, but really no way to measure what their financial strength was, and NC-SARA, this is getting really geeky and technical, but the Southern Regional Education Board in North Carolina came up with a measurement of financial strength that wasn't perfect, but it became the way that we measured financial strength for online institutions. There's no reason the New England the New England Regional Education Board
Michael Horn
NECHE. Yeah.
Jane Swift
Yeah. And the Southern Regional Education Board, WICHE, the Midwest Higher Education Council, those are not constructed to only be higher ed governing boards. They're actually regional governors councils that meet around all of those. A lot of those could take on workforce. They could take on lower ed. And then you could have because part of the challenge that I think a lot of people are trying to struggle with right now is how do you have local action, state level action, but regional and national coordination? Because you can't have 50 different standards of things. But you could have state leadership where you establish a standard in a region, and then all the other regions decide to adopt the state. But doesn't it have to come from the governors? I agree. Yeah. And that did. Right? That did come from coalition of governors. Look at Western Governors University as another example
Jeff Selingo
Perfect.
Jane Swift
Where you can start something with a coalition of governors. Well, some people are skeptical, and they'll have to wait and see. I do think there will be areas where the federal government will return more dollars with less restrictions to states, and we'll see some real innovation. And I'll be pushing really hard to make sure that some of that is around this area of underemployment of young adults who can really get the full benefit of degrees and training and work experience to we need this generation of students to maximize their potential and drive our economy forward. There's just not enough of them.
Jeff Selingo
So do you see higher ed and workforce development as potential bipartisan issues, or is that window closing? Like, where is their bipartisan agreement for you?
Jane Swift
Workforce within higher education?
Jeff Selingo
Or workforce and higher education. Or do you just see it has to be workforce within higher education? Now higher education is no longer a bipartisan issue. Is that that what you think is happening?
Jane Swift
Both parties have focused on the wrong thing within higher education. And, yeah, I joke about, right, the elites like the Harvards and the Columbias. But truthfully, the Republicans are making the same mistake in the opposite way the Democrats made.
Michael Horn
By targeting excessively.
Jane Swift
We have to stop focusing on the elites. Right? Fixing Harvard is not gonna solve what ails us as a country, nor is not fixing Harvard. Right?
Jeff Selingo
Fixing actually any of the Ivy League.
Jane Swift
They are gonna do what they're gonna do. The problem is most students are never gonna go to Harvard. They we need the place where most students go to serve them better, to get them the skills, both soft skills, job readiness, basic citizenship skills, and get them prepared to go into the workforce, and Harvard's not doing that work. Now there's a lot of other important things that Harvard does that is a different debate for another time around research and medical facilities that are big issues for our international competitiveness. The elite institution issues are not gonna be partisan for a long time. And frankly, that's an area I if you saw what President Obama talked about a couple, like, last week. I think his approach and his recommendation to those elites, I would actually agree with. I I think there are real issues with freedom of speech, open dialogue at the elite institutions, but I wouldn't spend a lot of my energy working on them because frankly, they have the wherewithal to fix them, and they should, or they're gonna continue to be in this turmoil with the politics batting back and forth. But what I wish as a country, and the governors are much more pragmatic would focus on, are the workforce economic growth issues that will actually save us as a country, and allow us to move forward. And I think those workforce issues that embed in many of our non-elite higher education institutions are a bipartisan issue.
Michael Horn
I think that's a great place to leave it. Jane, thank you so much for joining us in Future U. Leading the nonprofit Education at Work, former Massachusetts governor, appreciate the wisdom. And for all of our listeners, we'll be back next time on Future U.
