Rachel Lipson - Bridging Business, Education, and Policy to Build a Better Workforce

What does it take to connect the very disconnected worlds of academia, government, and industry, all of which are involved in workforce development in different ways? Why does the US keep defaulting to the same type of education and training programs? And what would it look like to do something different? My guest today is Rachel Lipson, a researcher and policy entrepreneur affiliated with Harvard, Brookings, and the Aspen Institute. Her work sits at the intersection of

education, business, and economic policy. Here's our talk.

Welcome to The Economics of Work. I'm excited to welcome Rachel Lipson. Rachel, you have so many affiliations. I can't even really count them. There's like Harvard, Brookings, Aspen Institute, doing so many cool things, all seemingly related to workforce development, social mobility. Welcome.

Thanks for having me. And yeah, I'm a little bit embarrassed, but I've been calling this the portfolio phase of my career because I got a lot of different hats I'm wearing, but it's fine. I like it.

I feel like we'll probably see a lot more portfolio careers or maybe we will. But being in all these different parts of the economy, I mean, I feel like you're well equipped to weigh in on like how they all relate to each other. So how would you describe the relationship as you see it between academia, nonprofits, federal government, local government, like how do they fit in and how should they fit in?

Good question. Sometimes I refer to myself as economist adjacent, so I'm often in the translation function across these different spheres. Traditionally, I tend to think about the Venn diagram of being business, education, policy, and then academia sometimes touches all of those and the most exciting stuff and the kind of the space that I like to be in is in like the convergence of those three circles.

Interesting. I mean, where do you see business fitting? I mean, I was thinking about these all being kind of education, government maybe sub circles in that Venn diagram. But I mean, I think of business as kind of existing outside of workforce development as I see it. But I mean, maybe that's not how it is or maybe not how it should be.

Look, in terms of the average state of the field in workforce development, like probably that's more true, but certainly more than I would argue it should be. And for instance-

Yeah.

One of the most interesting conversations these days that I have where I learn the most is when I'm talking to like real companies that are hiring people

who

they're the ones who understand the best what skills they're going to need, like what models are going to work for them. And I would argue that right now that's especially true if the speed of technological change is picking up. If anything, like the ones who are positioned to be in touch with the ways in which it's moving are the folks who are like have to adopt by virtue of having a profit motivation, essentially. And like the education system, I think more than ever, I am afraid that if they're divorced from that demand, single is not going to be able to keep up.

Yeah, I think that sounds right. I mean, you've been involved in like the CHIPS Act industrial policy. So like, if we