An item from a neo-liberal…  This one is an item from a business professor with little direct experience in education, but who believes free market economic principles are the answer to education’s (and pretty much all other society’s social) problems.

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JUL 12

Ranking Colleges Based on Different Career Pathways

		MICHAEL B. HORN

Which colleges best set up its graduates for careers in finance? Or data science? Or law? It turns out that different schools really help students pursue careers in different fields. And other schools, not so much. Our guest, Matt Sigelman, from the Burning Glass Institute, helps breakdown the latest research that they published with the Wall Street Journal on the topic and helps you know what it all means—plus other insights on the connections between education and careers.

For those who have been in the worlds of education and workforce, you probably know Matt and the great analytical work he has led to help build the field of labor market analytics. This conversation is the first in a semi-regular set that Matt and I plan on having each year to help share insights from the latest in research that the Burning Glass Institute does and help share why it matters.

As always, subscribers can listen to the conversation above, watch it below, or read the transcript.

 

Horn:                Welcome to the show where we are dedicated to building a world in which all individuals can build their passions, fulfill their potential, and live a life of purpose. And to help us think through that today, our guest is Matt Sigelman. He’s the president of the Burning Glass Institute, a nonprofit that mines for data-driven insights around the future of work and pathways into the job market, and then works with educators and employers and policy makers to help build those better pathways to advance opportunity for more people. That’s my language. I’ll let Matt give a crack at it in a moment in his. But before the Burning Glass Institute, he was the CEO of Emsi Burning Glass for nearly two decades, which is now known a Lightcast, where he’s still the chair of that board. And he really helped pioneer this notion of data-driven labor market insights. So Matt, welcome to The Future of Education. It’s great to see you. We’ve been threatening to do this for a while. I’m glad we’re finally getting to do it.

Sigelman:         Well, very much likewise, Michael. Thanks so much for having me.

Morning Warmup

Horn:                Yeah, you bet. So four parts to the show. We’re going to start with our morning warmup, go into a work time of specials and closing time. And in our morning warmup, sort of our lightning round, if you will, I want folks to get to know you and your work better because you and I anticipate doing this on a more regular basis. So first, just give us a little bit more about the fundamental work that the Burning Glass Institute does and your raison d’etre. Why do you exist?

Sigelman:         So the Burning Glass Institute is a fully independent nonprofit that advances data driven research and experimentation at the intersection of the future of work and the future of learning. As you mentioned a few minutes again, I spent most of my career building what’s today Lightcast, terribly proud of its breakthrough innovation of bringing really robust and granular and timely data to understanding the supply and demand of skills in the market today. The Burning Glass Institute builds on novel data sources like Lightcast and a number of others to be able to answer the question of: How do we take these kinds of data sets and drive fundamental transformation? We know that the world of work that we live in is one that still is rife with inefficiencies, with inequities, and the question is: How do we bridge those gaps?

So we’ve been doing a ton of work recently, for example, looking at worker mobility this past fall together with the support of the Schultz Family Foundation and in partnership with Joe Fuller at Harvard Business School, we released what we called our American Opportunity Index, which is our first foray into saying, “Hey, look. How we do evaluate worker outcomes in a truly quantitative way?” And specifically, what the was doing was measuring the Fortune 250 based upon the level of opportunity that they create for workers. At a broader level though, what we were doing was creating a methodology for evaluating mobility. And it’s something that we’ve more recently been applying to understanding the trajectories of learners after the complete programs of study.

As you know, there’s a lot of work that’s out there. They’re trying to figure out: How do we make sure everyone complete a degree? But how do we make sure that degree actually bears out over time? And so some of those same metrics that we used in the opportunity index to study worker mobility are proving to be terribly relevant in measuring learner mobility as well.

Horn:                Yeah. I mean, it’s just fascinating the amount of work that you’re doing in these areas. And focusing on the real question, which is the ultimate value, not just: Did we print a card that says, “You graduated,” which is the easy part, I like to think? You did a bunch of reports recently that I think ranked schools in an incredibly novel way, at least as far as I can tell. You basically looked at the careers themselves and asked, “Which undergrad institutions were the best at not just placing students in those careers, but helping them earn high salaries in those careers?” I think the areas were data science, consulting, law, finance. I’d love to know more about the research and the methodology behind that.

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