issue: Education
Manno for Forbes: Dual Enrollment Blends High School And College—Next Step Is Jobs
Allowing high school students to earn both college and high school credit at the same time has gone from boutique to baseline. These dual enrollment programs blend the last years of high school with the first year of college, often in classes taught on high school campuses. They increasingly link coursework to career pathways that lead to good jobs. They are also an underrated form of K–12 public school choice.
Done well, dual enrollment gives students a first taste of college-level expectations, lowers the cost of a credential, and accelerates the path to a good first job. Done poorly, it devolves into random acts of dual credit, with scattered classes that don’t apply to a pathway, credits that don’t transfer, and equity gaps that widen instead of close.
The Union Podcast Episode 17
Manno for The Stanford Social Innovation Review: A New AI Career Ladder
The growing use of generative AI in the workplace raises a paradox for entry-level workers. The very tasks that once trained new workers—such as summarizing meetings, cleaning data, and drafting memos—are increasingly automated. This means that entry-level jobs today require experience that entry-level roles no longer supply.
AI has cannibalized the routine, low-risk work tasks that used to teach newcomers how to operate in complex organizations. Without those task rungs, the climb up the opportunity ladder into better employment options becomes steeper—and for many, impossible. This is not a temporary glitch. AI is reorganizing work, reshaping what knowledge and skills matter, and redefining how people are expected to acquire them.
The consequences ripple from individual career starts to the broader American promise of economic and social mobility, which includes both financial wealth and social wealth that comes from the networks and relationships we build. Yet the same technology that complicates the first job can help us reinvent how experience is earned, validated, and scaled. If we use AI to widen—not narrow—access to education, training, and proof of knowledge and skill, we can build a stronger career ladder to the middle class and beyond. A key part of doing this is a redesign of education, training, and hiring infrastructure.
In the words of Burning Glass Institute President Matt Sigelman, “AI doesn’t automate away jobs. It automates tasks. Whether that opens time to take on more valuable tasks, whether new efficiencies unlock latent demand that actually grows opportunity, or whether employers decide to take the savings depends on a range of factors and plays out over time… First, we need an accessible infrastructure.”
Read more in the Stanford Social Innovation Review.
The Union Podcast Episode 16
Kahleberg in the Associated Press: Black enrollment is waning at many elite colleges after affirmative action ban, AP analysis finds
On average, the decreases don’t appear to be as steep as some college leaders predicted, said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher at the Progressive Policy Institute. And he believes colleges can still do more to promote racial diversity, such as giving greater preference to students from lower-income families and eliminating legacy preferences that tend to benefit wealthy, white students.
“I wouldn’t want people to draw from the data a conclusion that the situation is hopeless,” he said.
Read more in the Associated Press.
Kahlenberg in The Wall Street Journal: A Backlash Is Growing Against Another Elite College Practice: ‘Legacy’ Admissions
“There is a huge hypocrisy in failing to examine legacy preferences, which have nothing to do with merit and everything to do with accident of birth,” said Kahlenberg, a longtime advocate for eliminating both racial and legacy admissions preferences who testified as an expert witness against affirmative action in the Supreme Court case.
Blum, Kahlenberg and Arcidiacono, the Duke economist who also testified against Harvard in the affirmative-action case, jointly sent their recent letter to the federal government.
Read more in The Wall Street Journal.
Kahlenberg in the Wall Street Journal: How Brilliant Toddlers Became the Center of Attention in New York’s Mayoral Race
“The reaction to Mamdani’s proposal on kindergartners represents a larger fear,” said Richard Kahlenberg, a researcher who advised de Blasio on gifted education policy. “The socialist ethos applied to education is alarming to people who believe in merit.”
Read more in the Wall Street Journal.
Kahlenberg in the Washington Post: Black, Latino and international student enrollments drop at Harvard
Richard Kahlenberg, who testified as an expert witness for the plaintiffs who challenged Harvard’s race-conscious admissions policies, said he was disappointed by the decline in Black and Hispanic undergrads.
Kahlenberg said he believes Harvard could do more to maintain Harvard’s racial diversity through legal means, such as ending preference for relatives of Harvard grads and giving more advantages to low-income applicants.
“They are not doing as much as they could,” said Kahlenberg, a researcher for the Progressive Policy Institute think tank, which he described as center-left.
Read more in the Washington Post.
Kahlenberg in The Washington Post: University of Virginia reaches deal to pause Trump administration probes
Richard D. Kahlenberg, director of the American Identity Project at the Progressive Policy Institute, called the U-Va. deal “pretty outrageous” and said the federal memorandum “provides a gross misreading” of the landmark 2023 Supreme Court case on affirmative action. He said the guidance says “‘criteria like socioeconomic status, first-generation status, or geographic diversity must not be used’ if a university’s goal is to further racial integration on campus.” But he said the high court’s decision “outlawed the means of using racial preferences, not the ends of achieving the benefits of a racially diverse student body.”
Read more in the Washington Post.
Kahlenberg for Liberal Patriot: Clinging to Racial Preferences
Democratic politicians grappled with the issue of racial preferences for decades without much success at reconciling competing beliefs. On the one hand, the American public has long been against the practice. In 2020, even as liberal California voters supported Joe Biden over Donald Trump by an overwhelming 29 points, an effort to reinstate racial preferences was soundly defeated by 14 points. On the other hand, Democratic interest groups in Washington, D.C., have been diehard supporters of racial preference policies, driving positions on these issues that many politicians feared to challenge.
So, for years, Democratic politicians spoke one way, then acted another. In 1995, President Bill Clinton launched a trial balloon, saying he wanted to shift the basis of affirmative action from race to economic need, but he backed down after interest groups rebelled. More than a decade later, presidential candidate Barack Obama said he thought his own daughters did not deserve racial preferences in college admissions and that working-class students of all races did. When I told a top Obama staffer after the election that I would like to help the new administration develop a class-based affirmative action program, however, I was told there was no way Obama could go against powerful Democratic interest groups. The courts would have to force him to make the shift.
Read more in the Liberal Patriot.
Union Podcast Episode 15
Union Podcast Episode 14
Kahlenberg in Washington Monthly: Who deserves opportunity in Trump’s America?
In his latest piece for the Monthly, legal scholar Rick Kahlenberg wrote about the College Board’s shameful termination of “Landscape,” a college recruiting tool designed to identify promising students from low-income communities, regardless of their race. Rick called it “the worst kind of capitulation” to Trump.
What’s significant about Rick’s stance is that he’s among the nation’s most prominent opponents of race-based affirmative action in college admissions. In fact, he testified against the practice in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard—the landmark Supreme Court case that made racial preferences in college admissions illegal.
Rick argues that race-neutral admissions policies are not only acceptable but should even be encouraged. The result would be more diversity, but on terms that Americans believe fair. Trump, on the other hand, is waging war on diversity itself.
Read more in The Washington Monthly.
Union Podcast Episode 13
Manno for Forbes: College Students Reshape Higher Education By Voting With Their Feet
College students are increasingly voting with their feet when choosing a degree program that will produce a return on their financial investment. They are moving away from institutions that offer poor economic returns and toward those with a more promising payoff.
In Learning with Their Feet, Preston Cooper, Senior Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, offers compelling evidence that students are not just responding to rising costs or demographic shifts. They are actively rejecting or choosing colleges based on quality, value, and outcomes.
Using over a decade of data, he documents a striking divergence in enrollment trends across the postsecondary landscape. Since its peak in 2010, undergraduate enrollment in the United States has declined overall. But that decline is far from uniform.