“Everyone wants to hire somebody with three years’ experience, and nobody wants to give them three years’ experience,” says Peter Capelli, management professor at The Wharton School. Many first-time job seekers confront this mismatch between work requirements and their ability to apply what they know to those demands. Analysts call this problem the job seeker’s experience gap.

K-12 schools, two- and four-year colleges, and workforce training programs can help young people overcome the experience gap through earn-and-learn apprenticeship programs. In addition to long-standing registered apprenticeships, new models are emerging, including youth apprenticeships, pre-apprenticeships, and apprenticeship degrees. National Apprenticeship Day is an opportunity to investigate this growing movement.

Read more in Real Clear Education.

The Trump administration’s K-12 education policy prescriptions typically focus on ways to provide financial support for private schools, including federal vouchers and tax-credit scholarships. These programs require congressional action through new K-12 legislation or modifications to the U.S. tax code.

However, the administration has an additional opportunity to provide families with more K-12 education choices that has received far less attention. This involves existing federal programs, administrative guidance and regulatory shifts that would not require new legislation. Doing this would create more choices for families, give educators more options to work in different learning environments and unlock more educational opportunities for K-12 students nationwide.

This approach is consistent with the January 29 executive order that focused on helping parents escape the “geographically based school assignments” that constrain “choosing and directing the upbringing and education of their children.” The order requires the secretary of education to issue guidance on how states can use federal formula and discretionary grant programs to do this, consistent with the administration’s desire to return education authority to the states.

Read more in The 74.

“Artificial intelligence snaps up good entry-level positions [so] entry-level jobs start to look like today’s mid-levels, which demand years of experience,” writes Ryan Craig, Managing Director at Achieve Partners. The result for college graduates who are career beginners is an experience gap, where requirements for good entry-level jobs are higher than in the past.

In cybersecurity, for example, Tier 1 entry-level jobs that involve detection and response are now automated. This creates new entry-level analyst jobs requiring at least four years of experience, placing a higher premium on demonstrated experience or knowing what to do with the skills individuals have.

Another example comes from OpenAI researchers, who showed how ChatGPT could perform thousands of tasks that cover more than 1,000 occupations defined by the U.S. Department of Labor. The effect is to “sever the career ladder of industries like finance and law,” writes Molly Kinder of the Brooking Institution. The problem will worsen as industry-specific language models develop, with employers adding years of job experience to entry-level job descriptions.

Read more in Forbes.

The month of March marks the five-year anniversary of the event that forever changed U.S. K-12 public education: the COVID-19 pandemic. The immediate effect of the President’s COVID-19 emergency declaration was that public schools closed their doors and went into lockdown mode. This lockdown produced long-term consequences for K-12 education.

One of these consequences is how dissatisfied Americans are today with public education. From 2019 to 2025, Gallup’s annual public satisfaction survey shows that the percentage of adults who report feeling dissatisfied with K-12 public education increased from 62% to 73%, with those who felt satisfied at the lowest level since 2001.

Another consequence is the learning loss disaster COVID-19 produced for our nation’s young people, especially the most vulnerable. (There also are other negative pandemic-related social and emotional consequences that befall young people.) To be fair, some of the pandemic’s distressing effects result from school closures, while others predate the pandemic but were made worse by it.

Read more in Forbes.

In the era of Donald Trump, many liberals understandably look back with fondness at the time when Republican moderates recognized that racial diversity strengthens institutions.

Such nostalgia can include favorable feelings for three Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices who, over the course of nearly four decades, provided the crucial swing votes to sustain racial affirmative action in higher education. Nixon appointee Lewis F. Powell Jr. did so in the 1978 Bakke decision. Reagan appointee Sandra Day O’Connor did so in the 2003 Grutter ruling. And another Reagan appointee, Anthony Kennedy, did so in the 2016 Fisher case.

But what if that view is wrong? Looking back today, after the Supreme Court’s 2023 Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard decision, which struck down racial preferences, a very different picture emerges. Many (though not all) colleges have managed to preserve previous levels of racial diversity by adopting new programs to admit more low-income and working-class students of all races.

In light of this emerging evidence, the efforts of moderate Republican-appointed justices to fortify racial preferences takes on a different light. After all, the old admissions regime tended to benefit well-off Black and Hispanic students, and it provided political cover for a larger system of preferences for the mostly white children of alumni, donors, and faculty that is now coming under attack. What if the Republican moderates weren’t so much champions of racial justice as economic elitists who fulfilled the worst stereotypes of Republicans from that era?

Read more in Slate.

I’ve spent my career as a center-left thinker and writer, working with people like former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio to help promote school integration and Keith Ellison and the late John Lewis to strengthen organized labor. So why did I agree to join a conservative group, Students for Fair Admissions, in its lawsuits against Harvard and the University of North Carolina in cases that enabled the Supreme Court to bring an end to racial preferences in 2023?

As I outline in my new book, Class Matters: The Fight to Get Beyond Race Preferences, Reduce Inequality, and Build Real Diversity at America’s Colleges, I testified as an expert witness that racial and economic diversity benefits students, but there is a much better way to accomplish these goals than through racial preferences.

Universities, I testified, should consider ending preferences for the wealthy and instead give an admissions break to economically disadvantaged students of all races, a substantial share of whom would, in fact, end up being Black and Hispanic.

I’d long argued that this approach could work, but I became even more convinced once I had a chance to peek inside the files at Harvard and UNC and see how the admissions process worked.

Read more in the New York Post.

A New Book Describes The Experience First College

“For every employer I interviewed for this book, from the largest tech companies to smaller and medium size businesses in cities or rural American, the most important resume signal today for candidates to get hired is not where they went to college, or even whether they went to college, but their experience relevant to the role they’ll be asked to perform. And experts anticipate that this will become even more of a trend if artificial intelligence begins to eliminate more entry-level jobs,” writes Kathleen deLaski, author of the new book Who Needs College Anymore? Imagining a Future Where Degrees Don’t Matter.

The typical college degree does not provide graduates with the experience they need for the work role they will be asked to perform, creating an experience gap for graduates. DeLaski’s solution to this problem is an experience first model of college. This approach prepares students for jobs by integrating elements of what colleges traditionally offer with significant work experiences, especially for the career that interests the student.

Read more in Forbes.