Ensuring education and training is both accessible and tied to jobs isn’t just an economic issue — but also one of racial equality.
covid-19, education and work
People of color are being hit disproportionately by the COVID-19 pandemic when it comes to their jobs and their education plans. About a quarter of Latinx and Black Americans have been laid off — and while they are more likely than white Americans to see education as a path to new employment, they are also far more likely to have seen their education plans disrupted.
That’s according to the most recent data from the Strada Education Network’s Public Viewpoint survey, which found that almost a third (32%) of Latinx adults — anyone aged 18 to 65, from recent high school graduates to people well into their work lives — have cancelled or delayed their education plans, and about a quarter (24%) of Black adults have done so, compared to 16% of white adults. At the same time Black and Latinx Americans are both more likely to say they intend to enroll in education and training programs in the next six months.
This makes it clear that ensuring training is both accessible and tied to jobs isn’t just an economic issue — but also one of racial equality.
While the pandemic created some unique challenges, in many ways, it simply exacerbated existing equity gaps and underlined systemic failures. Even before the pandemic, people of color were disproportionately in low quality jobs — those that don’t pay a living wage, provide benefits or sick leave or offer stable schedules.
At the same time, the education and training these workers are told they need to level up is frequently elusive. Black and Latinx students are far less likely to graduate from college than their white peers. Newer models, designed to address the failings of the traditional system, also come up short — with Black students, for example, making up only 6% of those enrolled in technology and skills bootcamps last year. Quality training alone isn’t a guarantee of a job, either, with proxies like degrees, social networks and often biased hiring systems playing an outsized role in who gets hired.
If there is a positive here, it comes in recognition of the problem: Urgent work on inclusivity began before the pandemic and that work is accelerating. The country is far from a solution, but we have some promising ideas. And it’s important to examine what our areas of focus should be to address this fundamental inequality.
We know, for example, that time is of the essence. In fact, as Complete College America told us a decade ago: Time is the enemy of completion — the longer a program takes to complete, the more opportunity for life to intervene and derail a student. In an economic downturn, time is also the enemy of stability.
The first component of any work-related program should be to assess what people already know, and to give them credit for their knowledge and skill whenever possible. If workers need additional education and training for in-demand jobs, they need programs that allow them to obtain them quickly and then re-enter the workforce. Learners know this — a majority of adults in the Public Viewpoint poll who said they planned to pursue education in the next six months said they were looking to take a few work-related courses or enroll in other non-degree options.
We can lean on some experience here, with a lot of learnings in the past few years around what makes for a short-term education and training program. First and foremost, these programs must be aligned with in-demand jobs. All the better if they provide opportunities for people to earn while they learn. Kenzie Academy, for example, partners with Kelly Services to allow students to work part-time with a flexible schedule while learning to be a software engineer.
Training that is connected to longer-term employment is better still — creating an imperative for employers to invest in upskilling and reskilling their own employees. These education benefits are most beneficial when they come as direct training, through internal skills academies, for example, or through direct tuition assistance. Programs that ask employees to front tuition costs and wait for reimbursement exclude a larger number of workers, particularly minorities. Even before the current crisis, three quarters of American workers were living paycheck to paycheck. They simply can’t front the cost of training.
Programs must also support the whole person. We need to recognize that skills alone aren’t enough to help people land and stay in jobs. That means providing wrap-around supports or connecting learners to outside services for their financial, mental and physical health. Professional skills development, mentoring and support of this networking are especially critical. A growing body of research makes it clear that occupational identity — what people like to do, believe they are skilled at, and where they feel they belong — and social capital — who they know — are just as essential as skills for unlocking opportunities.
“For decades the education sector has narrowly defined the capabilities necessary for people to succeed, privileging academics as the great equalizer,” said Michaela Leslie-Rule, Senior Strategist at Wonder: Strategies for Good. “The experience of millions of Black and Latinx Americans tells a different story — one in which one’s sense of identity and belonging are as important as academic achievement in determining what careers and futures people may pursue.”
Experiences and exploration in childhood and adolescence have a particularly powerful impact on career identity, but people continue to shift and reconsider their career identities as they gain work and life experience. And, while existing research doesn’t specifically look at the role of crisis in identity formation, people may be particularly likely to re-evaluate in times of turmoil.
Flexibility is also crucial here. Education and training needs to enable people to learn when and where they can. Online education — besides being a necessity amid Covid-19 closures — provides crucial flexibility for learners to fit their education around the rest of their commitments, including family and work.
There are, of course, issues with access — as we’re seeing many students without reliable internet access attempt to complete courses on their cell phones. We might consider ways, even beyond the current crisis, for education providers to offer new or tap into existing mobile hotspots. When possible, we also should be designing short-term learning modules as mobile first, an approach used by providers like Cell-Ed, which is designed to teach “essential skills on the go.” This not only eliminates the need for broadband access, but would allow learners to study during breaks at work or otherwise on-the-go when we begin to return to more normal levels of mobility.
Finally, we can’t ignore that many students are parents. A quarter of all undergraduates have children, and Black and Latinx students are especially likely to have young children at home. Prior to the current crisis, nearly half of all Black women undergraduates were parents, many of them single parents. Learners with children face many of the same challenges that all working adults do — but they face the additional pressure of childcare and are especially likely to suffer from “shredded time,” in which periods of study are frequently interrupted by the demands of work and family.
As we think about ways to help parents retrain and get back to work, we cannot ignore the fact that school systems and childcare have been completely upended. Even if they are out of work, parents won’t likely have long stretches of uninterrupted time to devote to education and training. They’ll need programs that allow them to make progress in shorter bursts, and to stop and start their education without being penalized.
“Student parents need convenience, flexible, low-cost solutions to help them achieve their postsecondary and career goals,” said Vinice Davis, Venture Partner at Imaginable Futures. “Supporting the success of student parents is crucial, not only for the parent, but also for the child.”
There’s no simple solution to these challenges. Indeed, equity gaps in education and work have persisted for as long as our modern systems have existed. But by exploring and focusing on the fundamentals we can build a path to progress and focus on the right ways to address systemic inequality. Even seemingly intractable problems can be tackled — and COVID-19 demonstrates the full cost of inaction. We can’t afford it.
