Between 2021 and 2024, one-third of the skills required for the average job changed.
Photo illustration by Inside Higher Ed | pixdeluxe/E+/Getty Images
Although the Trump administration and its allies have spent the past year waging partisan campus culture wars, a bipartisan group says battles over DEI and so-called woke ideology are distracting policymakers from the urgent need to modernize the workforce in an age of rapid technological advancement.
On Wednesday, the Bipartisan Policy Center published the report “A Nation at Risk to a Nation at Work: The Case for a National Talent Strategy,” which offers a blueprint for how the federal government can work with education leaders, employers, local governments and other sectors to develop a robust domestic talent pipeline prepared to meet current workforce needs.
The strategy is the work of the Commission on the American Workforce, which BPC established in February 2025 in response to outdated laws governing higher education and scattered approaches to preparing students for a job market that’s undergoing major transformation amid the rising influence of artificial intelligence.
Improving workforce development is also priority for the Trump administration, which recently announced a $145 million funding expansion for apprenticeship programs and championed the passage of Workforce Pell—allowing low-income students to use federal grants for short-term credential programs—this past summer.
“The most central issues before us are whether Americans are going to be prepared to take advantage of the ever-changing economy in light of AI and demographic changes. We’re really trying to light a fire around the urgency of these issues,” Margaret Spellings, president and CEO of BPC and education secretary under former president George W. Bush, told Inside Higher Ed.
“It’s fertile territory for a bipartisan approach,” she added. “On the culture war stuff, we all know what team people are playing for. But on the implications of AI, I think we’re all a little bit scared and a little bit optimistic.”
Consisting of 24 members from across government, education, philanthropy and industry, including the co-chairs, former Republican governor Bill Haslam of Tennessee and former Democratic governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts, the commission spent the past year identifying shortcomings in the nation’s talent pipeline and considering how public and private sectors can work together to strengthen it.
The report identified falling math and literacy scores, rising underemployment rates for college graduates, and the 43 million Americans who have left college without earning a credential as some of the biggest kinks in the talent pipeline. It also noted that one-third of the skills required for the average job changed between 2021 and 2024, and that as of late 2025, 57 percent of current U.S. work hours could be automated with technologies that already exist.
“As the gap grows between what people learn and what the labor market and society demand, and as too many leaders have become distracted by partisan priorities that fail to broadly serve the American people, the nation lacks a coherent strategy that links individuals to opportunity and the nation to a secure future,” the report reads. “The result is a landscape where learners, workers, and employers must navigate fragmentation at precisely the moment when clarity and agility matter most.”
The Blueprint
The commission’s plan includes the following three imperatives:
- Creating a national talent council that would operate in coordination with governors, state workforce boards and industry leaders, and utilizing a talent data system to ensure states invest in proven, high-impact strategies;
- Focusing education on knowledge and skill validation and expanding the supply of workforce-aligned programs;
- Upgrading benefits and support for employers and employees, including stronger federal investments in childcare, paid family and medical leave, retirement security, and other tax incentives.
While wrangling the necessary level of cooperation between local, state and federal governments, in addition to higher education and industry, may seem like a tall order in an era of heightened political polarization, the commission argues that it’s worth a try.
“Skeptics will say that this Commission’s vision for wholesale reform is not possible, that the political headwinds are too strong and America’s civic divide is too wide. We say it is possible,” the report reads. “Achieving our vision will take time, but the first step is to outline the challenges and a set of solutions and then work on the broad-based leadership and trust- and will-building it will take to deliver.”
