Aligning Postsecondary and Workforce Development Systems: Evidence from State WIOA Plans
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The U.S. has rapidly shifting educational and labor needs, as we wrestle with connecting students to accessible educational pathways and high-need industries and life-sustaining wages.
This project seeks to understand the current landscape of education and workforce development strategies, as outlined in states' Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) plans, and their ability to bridge the sectors in service of students and states. Utilizing LLM approaches, we'll identify high impact practices before leveraging various regression techniques to explore relationships between these education and workforce connections (e.g., stackable credentials; apprenticeships) and select measures of state-level higher education and workforce performance (e.g., Job Quality Index). This work, in collaboration with Dr. Elaine Leigh at RAND Corporation, will offer insights into how policymakers and other community stakeholders are currently leveraging their education and workforce ecosystems, and provide recommendations for strengthening that alignment in the future.
