Newly elected Prime Minister Keir Starmer did not hold back at the launch of Skills England -- a new government agency -- in July 2024. The Labour Party's 2024 election manifesto had stated that Skills England would 'bring together business, training providers and unions with national and local government to ensure we have the highly trained…

Universities are critical to the success of a growth-driving industrial strategy, and to the sector plans, which must capitalise on the higher education sector's contributions: (1) developing a high-skilled workforce for the nation; (2) collaborating with businesses, further education colleges and Mayoral Strategic Authorities to bring coherence…

The report "State Approaches to Short-Term Postsecondary Credentials: Challenges, Opportunities, and Policy Gaps" explores how state policymakers engage with short-term postsecondary credentials, highlighting key policy levers such as state authorization, consumer protections, financial aid, and quality standards. It examines the…

In late 2020, Congress passed the FAFSA Simplification Act, restoring access to federal Pell Grants for confined and incarcerated students for the first time since 1994. Following the reversal of this nearly 30-year ban, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) established a new application process for institutions of higher education seeking to…

The purpose of this report is to provide readers with a comparative analysis of the Massachusetts workforce "system" structures and performance reporting processes compared to other states. Though the federal workforce development system is often examined in its entirety and individual state systems are at times examined independently,…

In this article the role of Human Resource Management (HRM) in the UK Higher Education (HE) sector is interrogated, with a focus on the Gig Academy. A literature review of the casualisation of academics in the sector is undertaken and critiqued through the consultative unitarist values and behaviours of the Chartered Institute of Personnel and…

Job opportunities in the United States are growing, but there are not enough interested or qualified workers to fill them. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is also transforming the future of work, bringing both innovation and uncertainty and emphasizing the growing need to equip students with adaptable, future-ready skills. This report advocates for…

Humanities majors are used to answering the question, "So, what are you going to do with that degree?" The common misconception is that students in humanities programs don't learn any useful skills for the real world. In "Major Trade-Offs," sociologist Corey Moss-Pech argues that not only do humanities majors learn real-world…

Policy cycles are initiated via a variety of context-bound causal drivers. In situations where systemic reform is desired, agenda-setting is vital to this process. This paper examines 'The National Discussion on Scottish Education', which was a sequence of stakeholder engagements promoted as a listening exercise to enable policy agenda-setting for…