![](\"https:\/\/fortune.com\/img-assets\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/GettyImages-464267036-e1773326865184.jpg?w=2048\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
On Wednesday, some of the most prominent names in American education and workforce policy gathered in Washington to deliver a blunt message: the United States is failing its workers, its students, and its economy \u2014 and the window to fix it is closing fast.<\/p>\n
The Bipartisan Policy Center, a group of bipartisan national and state policymakers, business leaders, and education experts, released a sweeping report produced by a 24-member commission that spent more than a year examining the country\u2019s broken education and workforce pipeline. The report, entitled \u201cA Nation at Risk to a Nation at Work: The Case for a National Talent Strategy,\u201d told a sombering story of a nation headed towards severe economic instability as an unready workforce becomes all the more unprepared in the midst of rising AI technologies in the workplace.<\/p>\n
The Numbers Are Alarming<\/p>\n
By late 2025, estimates showed that 57% of current U.S. work hours could be automated with technology that already exists\u2014nearly double McKinsey\u2019s projection from just two years prior. Half of college graduates from the last decade were underemployed a year after graduation, and nearly three-quarters stayed that way for a decade. Some 37.6 million American adults under 65 have some college credits and no credential to show for it.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cThe World\u2019s Changed\u201d<\/p>\n
Former Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who co-chaired the effort and were joined on Wednesday by former U.S. Secretary of Education and BPC President Margaret Spellings and former Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo. The two governors spoke to Fortune about the need to update our laws for the current dire situation.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The key laws governing how Americans pay for college and access job training\u2014the Higher Education Act and the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act\u2014were last updated in 2008 and 2014, respectively, predating the rise of generative AI, the gig economy, and widespread remote work.\u200b<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not just about AI,\u201d Haslam told Fortune. \u201cThis is about making certain that we have a workforce training system that was designed 100 years ago for a very different economy than we have now. It\u2019s about having a system that lets people know, hey, the world\u2019s changed \u2014 here\u2019s the skill sets that you are probably going to need going forward, and here\u2019s how to get them.\u201d\u200b<\/p>\n
According to the Bipartisan Policy Center, the trend reveals that \u201cthe U.S. workforce system is not fully aligned with the demands of an AI-driven economy,\u201d with a growing skills mismatch leaving many employers unable to find qualified workers even as unemployment fluctuates. Education systems, the report notes, \u201cremain largely built around traditional college-only pathways, while the modern labor market increasingly requires a wider range of options such as apprenticeships, technical credentials, short-term training programs, and opportunities for lifelong learning.\u201d What makes the current moment different from past technological disruptions, the BPC argues, is its pace: \u201cPrevious tech waves automated routine tasks, while this disruption is different\u2014changing in real time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Who Gets Left Behind<\/p>\n
Patrick, who served two terms as Massachusetts\u2019 governor before leading Bain Capital Double Impact and later joining the Harvard Kennedy School faculty, was clear that the report\u2019s ambitions stretch well beyond the AI debate. \u201cWe\u2019re at a period of rapid change in the workforce, in our economy that comes from a lot of different places, but it affects all of us\u2014workers, learners, employers.\u201d<\/p>\n
Central to the commission\u2019s diagnosis is the question of who gets left behind. Patrick invoked the research of Stanford economist Raj Chetty to illustrate the stakes. \u201cRaj Chetty\u2019s work on \u2018lost Einsteins\u2019 shows us that genius, creativity, and innovation exist equally across zip codes and income levels,\u201d Patrick said. \u201cYet too many talented young people from low-income and working-class communities never get the chance to develop their gifts because they lack access to great schools, mentorship, and career pathways,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019re leaving untapped talent on the sidelines. If we\u2019re serious about strengthening America\u2019s competitiveness and expanding opportunity for everyone, we have to be equally serious about ensuring that every child can discover and develop their talents. That\u2019s not charity \u2014 that\u2019s smart policy and moral imperative.\u201d<\/p>\n
A Model From Tennessee<\/p>\n
Haslam brought his own track record to the table. As governor of Tennessee, he launched Tennessee Promise, making community college and technical school free for all high school graduates\u2014a program the report holds up as a model for what aligned state-level policy can achieve. \u201cWhen Tennessee made community college and technical school free for all high school graduates, we weren\u2019t just opening doors\u2014we were transforming the entire state\u2019s economic trajectory,\u201d Haslam said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cEmployers had a deeper talent pipeline. Communities saw young people stay and build careers at home instead of leaving for opportunity elsewhere,\u201d he continued. \u201cCombined with our investments in K-12 and our commitment to employer partnerships, free community college became a linchpin of a statewide talent ecosystem. That\u2019s what happens when you align education policy with workforce and economic development.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Fix: A National Talent Strategy<\/p>\n
The report\u2019s central structural fix is the creation of a Talent Advisory Council within the Executive Office of the President\u2014modeled on the National Security Council \u2014 that would coordinate education and workforce policy across more than a dozen federal agencies that currently spend over $230 billion annually across 150+ programs with no cohesive strategy. \u201cWhat we have experienced is a system that is very fragmented, that is hard to access\u2014that you kind of have to know about in your little corner of the economy to take advantage of,\u201d Patrick said. \u201cWe need a strategy, and that strategy needs to be national in scope. Because the challenge is national in scope.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThis feels like\u2014different parts of the country, different political parties\u2014but this feels like an issue that has some increasing national urgency, and it needs some leadership to address it,\u201d said Haslam.<\/p>\n
The report arrives at a fraught political moment, with the current administration cutting federal education spending and Congress showing little appetite for sweeping reform. But Patrick rejected the idea that funding battles would doom the effort. \u201cWashington will act on this if the people are mobilized,\u201d he said. \u201cFunding always matters. I don\u2019t want to downplay that. But this is not solely an issue about funding. This is about how you allocate the resources and assets to properly train the next generation workforce. If we get stuck in a funding conversation, that does evolve into the old battle. This is about how do we think differently.\u201d\u200b<\/p>\n
That cross-partisan determination is the summit\u2019s animating spirit. \u201cThere are a lot of things that are just immediately polarized in today\u2019s world,\u201d Patrick said. \u201cThis is one of those that everybody, I think, understands: the future is going to look a lot different. And I don\u2019t know if we\u2019re ready for it.\u201d\u200b<\/p>\n
#dont #ready #Govs #party #appalled #centuryold #fed #workforce #strategy<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Wednesday, some of the most prominent names in American education and workforce policy gathered…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[245],"tags":[2533,2529,2534,1462,1508,2531,2532,2530,127,1982],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1233"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1233\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1233"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1233"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stock999.top\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1233"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}