2015
Learning While Earning:
The New Normal
Anthony P. Carnevale | Nicole Smith | Michelle Melton | Eric W. Price
$
$
Center
on Education
and the Workforce
McCourt School of Public Policy
Learning While Earning:
The New Normal
2015
Contents
The rise in the number of working learners is a
natural evolution of our work-based society.
Early work experience forms good habits and
helps students make career connections.
More attention should be paid to the
pathways from education to work.
Four rules are important for understanding the
connections between postsecondary programs and careers.
College enrollment has increased from
2 million to 20 million in 60 years.
Working learners are more concerned about enhancing
résumés and gaining work experience than paying for tuition.
Young working learners (16-29) make very dierent decisions
compared to mature working learners (30-54) when it comes to
majors selected, hours worked, and career choices.
Nearly 60 percent of working learners are women.
Young working learners are disproportionately white, while
mature working learners are disproportionately African-American.
Mature working learners are more likely to
be married with family responsibilities.
Mature working learners are concentrated in open-admission
community colleges and for-prot colleges and universities while
young working learners tend to go to more selective institutions.
Young working learners are more likely to select
humanities and social sciences majors while mature
working learners select healthcare and business.
Mature working learners are more likely to be
working full-time, but over a third of young working
learners work more than 30 hours per week while enrolled.
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10
13
THE RISE OF
WORKING
LEARNERS
WHO ARE
WORKING
LEARNERS?
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PORTRAITS OF
WORKING LEARNERS
INTRODUCTION
SUMMARY
SUMMARY TABLE
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Contents
Mature working learners earn
more than young working learners.
Working learners have less student
debt than students who do not work.
Forty-ve percent of young working learners earn
200 percent of the poverty treshold ($23,540) or less.
After graduating, working learners are upwardly mobile
and more likely to move into managerial positions.
Working learners need stronger ties between the
worlds of work and education. Among all programs for
working learners in postsecondary institutions, learning
and earning is the common currency.
The data system that connects postsecondary elds of study
and degrees with labor market demands is still a work in progress.
Available career counseling in colleges is very limited and is
rarely based on any data about the economic value of college majors.
Tying career outcomes to elds of study
is still an afterthought in postsecondary policy.
The traditional Bachelor’s degree-centric model has
limited utility in a world focused on workforce development.
Working learners need competency-based postsecondary
curricula that drill down below overall degree attainment and
programs of study to the cognitive and non-cognitive competencies
required for them to move along particular occupational pathways.
The relationship between postsecondary elds of study
and careers is only a rough proxy for a deeper and more
dynamic relationship between competencies taught in
particular curricula and competencies required to
advance in particular occupationally based careers.
The overlap between postsecondary education
and career learning is a huge uncharted territory.
Existing policies inside and outside the postsecondary policy
realm could be altered to be of greater assistance to working learners.
APPENDIX:
DATA SOURCES
REFERENCES
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POLICY
IMPLICATIONS
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59
W
e would like to express our gratitude to the individuals and organizations whose generous
support has made this report possible: Lumina Foundation (Jamie Merisotis and Holly
Zanville), the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (Daniel Greenstein and Jennifer Engle), and
the Joyce Foundation (Matthew Muench). We are honored to be partners in their mission of
promoting postsecondary access and completion for all Americans.
Many have contributed their thoughts and feedback throughout the production of this report.
We are grateful for our talented designers, meticulous editorial advisers, and trusted printers
whose tireless efforts were vital to our success.
In addition, the Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce staff was
instrumental to production of this report, from conceptualization to completion. Our thanks
especially go to the following individuals:
• Jeff Strohl for research direction;
• Andrea Porter for strategic guidance;
• Megan Fasules, Artem Gulish, Andrew R. Hanson, and Tamara Jayasundera
for data compilation and analysis, and for fact-checking;
• Ana Castanon, Monet Clark, Victoria Hartt, Hilary Strahota,
and Martin Van Der Werf for communications efforts,
including design, editorial, and public relations; and
• Coral Castro and Joseph Leonard for assistance
with logistics and operations.
We would also like to thank ACT Foundation for its support of this report. We especially
thank Tobin Kyte and Marcy Drummond for providing insight to the report and fostering a
partnership between our organizations. We support ACT Foundation’s mission as it advances
solutions for working learners to integrate working, learning, and living to increase quality of
life and achieve education and career success.
We also wish to thank Dr. Felicito “Chito” Cajayon, the vice chancellor of workforce & economic
development at the Los Angeles Community College District; Milo Anderson; and Scott Ralls,
the president of Northern Virginia Community College; his executive assistant Corinne Hurst;
and Kerin Hilker-Balkissoon, the executive director of college and career pathways at Northern
Virginia Community College. All helped the authors contact mature working learners for this
report.
Finally, we sincerely thank the working learners who gave so generously of their time to help
shape the tone of the project in its formative stages. We have a greater appreciation for the
challenges faced by working learners and the opportunities they have. This report benefited
enormously from our conversations with them.
The views expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of Lumina
Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Joyce Foundation, ACT Foundation or their officers or employees.
Acknowledgements
Portraits of Working Learners
Working while learning is now the accepted pathway to education
and training for both young and mature working learners.
When working with aggregate data, it’s easy to lose sight of the voices and experiences of the people being studied.
As part of the research for this report, the authors interviewed a number of actual working learners — some of whom
were members of the ACT Foundation Working Learner Advisory Council — and utilized their personal experiences
and stories to illuminate the report and to develop policy proposals that would satisfy their needs. The following are
some of the individuals who helped to provide insight into the lives of today’s working learners:
H
eather Jones, a mature working learner, is enrolled part-time at a two-year public technical
college. She works full-time at the corporate oce of a large bank. She is taking classes for self-
enrichment and is not enrolled in a degree-granting program. She earned a Bachelor’s degree from a
four-year private doctorate-granting college 15 years ago.
Hometown: Burbank, Calif.
Heather Jones on working learner needs:
“Orientation days. How great that would be if there was something oered specically for
non-traditional aged students! You know it would be designated a certain name; they would
have specic resources, and specic contacts.”
Hometown: Lake Placid, Fla.
M
organ Lamborn, a young working learner, is enrolled part-time in a
Master of Business Administration program at a four-year public doctorate-
granting university where she works full-time as an admissions ocer.
Morgan Lamborn on working learner time constraints:
“Time is the biggest challenge. There are never enough hours in the day. So working on
my Master’s right now is a lot; it’s being pulled in 62 directions at once, every single day.”
T
hierry Pierre-Charles, a young working learner, is enrolled full-time in a Bachelor’s
degree program at a four-year public doctorate-granting university. His self-designed
major is in biomedical science and policy, with a focus on pre-medical studies and scientic
studies. He works part-time as a transition specialist assisting people with disabilities.
Hometown: Miramar, Fla.
Thierry Pierre-Charles on working learner isolation:
“I knew that I would end up having to work, because my parents weren’t in a position to support me. It kind of
impacts you mentally because you really don’t have too much social interaction — you know you can’t go out and have
fun. But the only reason I even kept doing it is because I didn’t have anything else to fall back on.”
Portraits of Working Learners
L
andon Taylor is a young working learner. He is married and has two children and is enrolled
full-time in a Bachelor’s Degree program at a four-year public non-doctorate-granting university.
His major is public relations and advertising. He works part-time during the day for a technology
consulting rm as a business development coordinator, and part-time in the evening as
a server at a restaurant.
Hometown: Oakland, Calif.
Landon Taylor on the motivations of working learners:
“Society tells you that if you have kids while you’re in school, your life is over — you’ve got to basically give up your
dreams. I believe the exact opposite. I think your children should inspire you to do great things. And that’s what
they’ve done. I can’t wait till when they’re older, to be able to tell them everything that we went through to make
sure that they had a great life.”
M
ilo Anderson, a mature working learner, is enrolled part-time in a certicate program
at a two-year public technical college. His focus is in business administration. He earned a
Bachelor’s degree from a four-year public non-doctorate-granting university 10 years ago.
Hometown: Canoga Park, Calif.
Milo Anderson on the stigmas faced by working learners:
“There is a stigma to going back to college. It’s sort of frowned upon. I think what I’d like to see, as more of a
general change in mindset, is more acceptance of the fact that education is a lifelong process. I’m going back
to school and I can see people’s expression change, like, ‘Oh. So, you’re 31 and still not doing anything with
your life?’ That’s the kind of negative mindset I’d like to see shifted.”
Y
adira Gurrola, a young working learner, is enrolled full-time in a Bachelor’s degree program
at a four-year public college. Her major is social work and she is also pursuing a certication to
become a pharmacy technician. She works part-time at a discount retail superstore as a store manager,
monitoring cash registers and the service desk, and assisting the pharmacy.
Hometown: Scottsblu, Neb.
Yadira Gurrolla on working learner perseverance:
“It feels good to know that I can pay for my phone. I can pay for my gas. I can pay for my clothes. I can pay for
everything that I need. This is, I guess, in my heart. This is me; this is my story. I know what my next step is. As
long as I can get there and keep going on, that’s kind of my ambition.”
1 Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data,
2012-2013.
F
or decades, the popular conception of a
college student in this country has been
the full-time residential nancially dependent
student who enrolls in a four-year college
immediately after graduating from high school.
But that student has not been the norm at U.S.
postsecondary institutions for more than 30
years. Such students exist but they are greatly
outnumbered by working learners: students
who balance learning in college with earning
a paycheck.
In the United States today, nearly 14 million
people – 8 percent of the total labor force
and a consistent 70 percent to 80 percent of
college students – are both active in the labor
market and formally enrolled in some form of
postsecondary education or training.
1
These
programs include degree-granting programs,
such as Associate’s and Bachelor’s degree
programs, non-degree granting programs, and
certication and vocational training programs.
In the 21st century economy, skills have become
the most important currency in job markets.
Today, workers need the right postsecondary
preparation to gain a foothold and prosper
in the labor market, employers need highly
skilled postsecondary talent in order to remain
competitive, and communities need both a
highly skilled workforce and a competitive
business sector in order to build attractive
places to live, work, and study.
In this report, we examine the students who
are combining work with ongoing learning.
We nd that:
• Going to college and working while
doing so is better than going straight
to work after high school. Many people
argue that it’s better to go to work than to go
to college, particularly from the perspective
of lost potential wages while in school.
Our ndings show clearly that students
who complete college degrees while working
are more likely over time to transition to
managerial positions with higher wages than
people who go straight into full-time work
after high school.
• Working while attending college hurts
disadvantaged students the most.
This is because working learners of lower
socioeconomic status are more likely to work
full-time and attend under-resourced open-
admission community colleges. There is a
widespread consensus that working too much
while enrolled in a postsecondary program
hurts one’s chances of completing it. It is not
clear, however, whether low completion rates
among working learners employed full-time is
due to working more, having access to fewer
Summary
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 11
2 Working in high school is bad for student outcomes but outcomes are much more complicated for college students. For those
who complete a degree, working while in college can yield many long-run advantages, especially if students work in a field directly
related to their course of study.
3 Bailey et al,. Redesigning America’s Community Colleges. 2015. Working in field is especially relevant for fields of study that have direct
ties to occupations such as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and healthcare, or Associate’s degrees
in applied sciences. Carnevale et al., Certificates, 2012, show that working in field adds 37 percent to wages of workers with a
postsecondary vocational certificate.
4 See Table 1.
educational and support services, the relevance
of the program to their career, or other barriers
associated with socioeconomic status.
2
• Working and learning simultaneously
has benets, especially when students
work in jobs related to what they study.
Work experience also becomes an asset that
working learners carry with them as they enter
the full-time job market, accelerating their
launch into full-time careers.
3
• Most students are working. Students
are workers and workers are students.
From 1989 to 2008, between 70 percent and
80 percent of undergraduates were employed.
By 2012, that share declined to 62 percent due
to the job losses associated with the 2007-
2009 recession.
4
Students work whether they
are in high school or college; whether they
are rich, poor, or somewhere in between;
whether they are young and inexperienced
or mature and experienced.
• One-third of working learners are 30
or older. Mature working learners (ages
30-54) primarily comprise workers who
have a postsecondary credential but are
upgrading their credentials to keep up with
the requirements of their jobs, to earn a
promotion, or to retrain for a new career.
• More people are working full-time
while in college. About 40 percent of
undergraduates and 76 percent of graduate
students work at least 30 hours a week.
About 25 percent of all working learners
are simultaneously employed full-time and
enrolled in college full-time. Adding to their
stress, about 19 percent of all working learners
have children.
• You can’t work your way through
college anymore. A generation ago,
students commonly saved for tuition by
working summer jobs. But the cost of college
now makes that impossible. A student working
full-time at the federal minimum wage would
earn $15,080 annually before taxes. That isn’t
enough to pay tuition at most colleges, much
less room and board and other expenses.
• Students are working and taking out
more loans to pay for college.
The nation has yet to gure out how to pay
for this new stage in the transition from youth
dependency to adult independence and family
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
12
formation. Public funding of postsecondary education at both the state and federal
levels is declining. This trend has resulted in the rapid increase in the amount of
outstanding student loan debt, from $240 billion in 2003 to $1.2 trillion today.
5
Policy implications
• Working learners need stronger ties between the world of work
and the world of education. In spite of the centrality of career goals as the
motivation to get a college degree, students are left largely on their own to connect
their postsecondary education choices to an increasingly complex set of career
options.
6
• To improve the connections between work and learning, federal
and state policymakers should fund postsecondary education, in
part, based on performance measured by labor market outcomes.
Historically, the public has funded postsecondary education and training
programs based on enrollment. In this system, regionally-accredited institutions
receive public funding in proportion to the size of their student body. However,
many states have recently embraced performance-based funding models, under
which institutions are awarded for achieving outcomes measured by outcome
standards set by policymakers.
• Policymakers should also invest in competency-based education
programs that teach skills with labor market value. Mature working
learners in particular have developed competencies through work that are not
recognized by postsecondary education and training institutions because they
were not learned in a classroom environment. Competency-based education
programs recognize and award credit for prior learning, which allows working
learners to learn eciently and potentially to accelerate their progress through
education and training programs.
5 Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the Federal Reserve
Bank of New York, 2003-2014.
6 Bailey et al., Redesigning America’s Community Colleges, 2015.
Summary Table
* A small share of working learners (3%) is over 55 years old and is generally excluded in the analysis of this report.
** The federal poverty line varies by household size. In 2015, an income of $23,540 represents 200 percent of the federal poverty line for a single individual.
Wages above $42,000
per year
Between $7,500 and
$42,000 per year
Less than $7,500 per year
9% 42%
58% 46%
33% 12%
Wages after
completing
Bachelor’s degree
Young working learner,
16-29 years old
Mature working learners,
30-54 years old*
Wages above $42,000
per year
Between $7,500 and
$42,000 per year
Less than $7,500 per year
10% 8%
67% 53%
23% 39%
Wages while
enrolled
Share 67% 33%
Share with children 20% 61%
Sex 56% women 59% women
40% 76%Share working full time
Bachelor’s degree Certificate/Associate’s degreeCommon degree program
Four-year colleges
Community colleges and
for-profit colleges
Institutional sector
Disproportionately white
Disproportionately African-
American
Race/ethnicity
Common occupations
26% food and personal
services occupations
6% in managerial occupations
12% food and personal
services occupations
17% in managerial occupations
Common majors
Social sciences, humanities,
business, and other
applied fields
Healthcare, business, and
other applied fields
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Review, 2012 and
National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health waves 3 and 4, 2001-2009.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
14
The rise in the number of working learners is a natural evolution
of our work-based society.
Work always has been, and continues to be,
a central component of American culture.
Americans work more hours than anyone else
in the developed world. Work provides income
that is the primary means to access the goods
and services necessary for a middle-class
standard of living, but it is more than that.
The jobs that individuals perform are a
central part of their identity.
Work used to be the primary means of nancing
a college education. In the 1950s, college
students represented a small share of the
population and many college students nanced
their tuition by working summer jobs. Since
then, going to college has become much more
widespread – and much more expensive. The
number of college students has increased from
2.4 million in 1949 to 20 million in 2014.
7
The lockstep march from school to work no longer
applies for a growing share of Americans. Many
young adults are taking longer to launch their
careers: the shift from a high school-centered
economy to a postsecondary-centered economy
has added a new phase to the lifecycle. In the
industrial economy high school was enough.
Nowadays one goes nowhere after high school
unless he or she gets at least some college.
8
On
average, because of the new postsecondary human
capital requirements for formal learning and work
experience, the age at which young workers reach
the median wage has increased from 26 to 30.
9
In
other words, the period of transition from youth
dependency to adult independence has grown
from seven to 11 years.
That kind of career bootstrapping is more
visible than ever on campuses. Not only do
colleges include growing numbers of students
who need work (working learners), but more
and more experienced workers who also need
college (learning workers). The transition
into a career is no longer linear. The system
of education for youth leading to informal
learning on-the-job has been replaced by
an expectation of lifelong learning and the
continuous upgrading of skills required to adapt
to new workplace technologies and evolving
occupational structures.
At the same time, the summer job market
has collapsed. In the 1970s, more than half
of youth in their late teens were employed in
7 Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics’
Digest of Education Statistics tables, 2013.
8 At best, 20 percent of high school educated men have access to middle-class careers with what is left of the old industrial
career track. See Carnevale et al., Career Clusters, 2011.
9 Carnevale et al., Failure to Launch, 2013.
Introduction
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 15
summer jobs; today, only 30 percent are.
10
So
the old picture of students working and saving
all summer so they can study full-time during
the school year is now quite rare.
A persistent question for parents and educators
has been whether work harms educational
performance or expectations for further
education. The general answer has been
that working more than 15 to 20 hours per week
can harm academic performance and educational
aspirations, especially among
high school students.
11
But these ndings often
rely on heavily descriptive data. More nuanced
analyses suggest a more complicated picture.
Early work experience forms good
habits and helps students make career
connections.
The eect of work on students depends on the
student and the work. Work helps pay living costs
in high school and some share of educational
costs after high school. In general, work — even
menial work — promotes skills such as time
management, communications, and conict
resolution, as well as many other soft skills
necessary for success in the workforce. Work can
also be a meaningful alternative entry into the
adult world, providing an escape into relevance
10 Desilver, “The fading of the teen summer job,” 2015.
11 Dundes and Marx, Balancing Work and Academics in College, 2006
Internships. Half of graduating
college seniors report having
worked as interns.
T
he Economic Policy Institute estimates there are
about 2 million interns in the U.S. labor force (1.3
percent of the 155 million workers in the labor force).
Internships are tailored mostly to four-year college
students while they are enrolled or shortly after
they graduate and enter the full-time labor market.
Colleges and universities typically award academic
credit for internships and frequently match students
to internships and provide oversight of the intern-
employer relationship. Roughly half of college seniors
nationally said they completed an internship while
enrolled, suggesting that roughly one million college
students are employed as interns.
Internships provide on-the-job training and relevant
work experience that prepare future workers for
occupations in a particular industry or career field.
Interns also acclimate themselves to a professional
setting; acquire letters of recommendation for
future entry-level jobs and graduate-level programs
of study; and form professional networks they can
potentially leverage into high-paying jobs later in their
careers. Internships also serve as an opportunity to
test whether particular career fields are of interest
to the interns at minimal cost to themselves or their
employers.
Evidence shows that internships pay off in the long
run. The starting annual salary for college graduates
who completed a paid internship was $52,000,
compared to $36,000 for those who completed an
unpaid internship and $37,000 for those who did
not complete an internship. Furthermore, the share
of college graduates who received a job offer was 63
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
16
from the abstract grinding rigors of schooling.
Work can also be a personal and occupational
exploration connecting individual interests,
values, and personality with academic elds of
study leading to particular careers.
12
But the eects of work dier by student
characteristics both in high school and even more
so in college. Low-income students, especially low-
income African Americans and Hispanics, tend to
experience the more negative eects of working
on their educational achievement and educational
attainment. This appears to be the result of
a lack of counseling, social capital, and other
supports that are typically associated with a higher
socioeconomic status or more selective colleges.
13
The eects of work and learning also depend on
the nature of the work. A job is more powerful as
an educational tool when it provides exploratory
learning that supplements or complements
a student’s eld of study. This is crucial in
graduate education, where elds of study are
most tightly tied to careers. It is more complex
at the baccalaureate level, where educational and
career exploration is still fresh, especially among
younger students with less work experience. A job
is most likely to be complementary to academic
skills for the 80 percent of baccalaureate majors
pursuing career-related majors such as science,
technology, engineering, and mathematics
(STEM), business, education, and healthcare.
14
12 Hobson, Is Work Good for Your Health and Well-Being?, 2007
13 Carnevale et al., Separate and Unequal, 2013
14 Carnevale et al., The Economic Value of College Majors, 2015
percent for those who completed a paid internship,
compared to 37 percent for those who completed an
unpaid internship and 35 percent for those who did
not complete an internship.
†
The benefits are not so clear, however, when the
internships are unpaid. Many students engaged
in disciplines such as politics, policy, arts,
entertainment, and journalism often participate in
unpaid internships as a necessary rite of passage
for entry-level workers. However, there are strong
allegations that these internships are prone to
nepotism and that, because young adults from low-
income family backgrounds cannot afford to take
unpaid positions, their access to careers in these
industries is limited. The Economic Policy Institute
has proposed subsidizing unpaid internships for
students from low-income families through the
Federal Work-Study grant program to address these
concerns. The recent public scrutiny of unpaid
internships has sufficed, in some cases, to encourage
employers to either pay their interns, as the Nation
Institute and Atlantic Media did, or to end their
internship programs altogether, as in the case of
the mass-media company Condé Nast. Under the
assumption that internships are mutually beneficial
to employers, postsecondary institutions, and interns
themselves, these new trends represent a cause for
concern. However, recent evidence questioning the
value of unpaid internships suggests their decline
may not carry a significant negative impact.
† Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis
of data from the National Association of Colleges and Employers, 2013.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 17
Tying learning content to work experience is
more problematic at the Associate’s degree
level. More than half of Associate’s degrees are
Associate of Arts (AA) degrees with no obvious
relevance to specic occupations or industries. But
Associate of Science (AS) or Associate of Applied
Science (AAS) degrees, which have a direct tie
to occupation or industry, comprise a large
share of Associate’s degrees. The same is true of
the 12 million certicates produced every year.
Moreover, substantial shares of programs have
direct connections to industry-based certications
and licenses that provide a “workaday” focus for
college programs and course clusters.
Young and mature working learners’
experiences vary:
• Young working learners are more likely to be
enrolled in baccalaureate programs at colleges
than mature working learners, who are more
likely to be in certicate programs or employer-
sponsored training.
• Young and mature working learners enroll in
dierent majors and elds of study. Young
working learners are disproportionately
enrolled in the humanities and social
sciences, while mature working learners are
disproportionately enrolled in career-oriented
majors, such as healthcare and business.
• Mature working learners have more work
experience, possess a clearer concept of their
future career goals, and are more likely to
enroll in career-oriented majors.
Internships, externships, and work-study
programs that connect students to real job
experiences as well as professional contacts are
the new norm for college-goers. In the hope of
gaining a competitive edge and enhancing their
résumés, many working learners seek temporary
work positions while enrolled. Working learners
who complete college degrees while working are
more likely to transition to managerial positions
over time than workers who have not completed
college degrees while working.
This suggests that the marketplace rewards
those with higher credentials and increasingly
requires additional skills before employees
can be promoted. In addition to moving to
managerial positions, working learners also have
increased mobility as a whole and are more likely
to transition to dierent occupations after they
complete their education compared to workers
who do not complete degrees while working.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
18
More attention should be paid to the pathways from education to work.
The growing connection between work and
learning needs to be a serious subject for policy
discussion and a key performance metric in
assessing postsecondary outcomes. Ultimately,
of course, in a modern republic such as our own,
the higher education mission is to empower
individuals to live fully in their time. But it’s hard
for people to live fully in their time if they are
living under a bridge. It’s hard to be a lifelong
learner if one is not also a lifelong earner.
Yet, while the connection between postsecondary
education and the economy has moved to the
center of the national policy dialogue, and
as data systems that connect postsecondary
programs with careers become more integrated,
our current ability to articulate and build
curricula and counseling systems that honor
these relationships is woefully inadequate.
Transparency between postsecondary programs
and labor markets has become more important
because of the growing diversity among
postsecondary programs of study, credentials,
and modes of delivery that are aligned with an
increasingly complex set of career pathways.
• The number of career elds identied by the
U.S. Census Bureau increased from 270 to 840
between 1950 and 2010;
15
• The number of colleges and universities
grew from 1,850 to 4,720 between 1950
and 2014;
16
and
• The number of programs of study oered
by postsecondary education and training
institutions grew from 410 to 2,260 between
1985 and 2010.
17
In this new environment, programs and
curricula matter more and institutions matter
less. In economic terms, the relationship between
the college a worker attended and the career
that person chooses has become weaker and
the impact of eld of study on career prospects
has become stronger. The economic value of
postsecondary education and training has less to
do with institutional brands and more to do with
the growing dierences in cost and value among
15 Wyatt and Hecker, Occupational Changes During the 20th Century, 2006; BLS, 2015.
16 National Center for Education Statistics, Digest of Education Statistics, table 317.10.
17 National Center for Education Statistics, “Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System,” n.d.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 19
an expanding array of programs in particular
elds of study. Degrees and other postsecondary
credentials have multiplied and diversied: from
traditional degrees measured in years of seat
time; to micro-credentials that take a few months;
to boot camps, badges, stackable certicates,
noncredit programs, and MOOCs (massive open
online courses) that take a few weeks; to test-
based industry certications and licenses based
on proven competencies completely removed
from traditional classroom training.
The fragmentation in programs and providers
reects a parallel fragmentation in the
education and training needs of the modern
postsecondary student body.
Four rules are important for understanding the connections between
postsecondary programs and careers.
The new relationship between postsecondary
programs and the economy comes with new rules
that require much more detailed information on
the connection between individual postsecondary
programs and career pathways:
• Rule 1. On average, more education yields
more pay. Over a career, high school graduates
earn $1.3 million; Bachelor’s degree holders
earn $2.3 million; PhD holders earn $3.3
million; and professional degree holders earn
$3.7 million.
18
• Rule 2. What a person makes depends on what
that person takes. A major in early childhood
education pays $3.3 million less over a career
than a major in petroleum engineering.
• Rule 3. Sometimes less education is
worth more. A one-year information-
technology certicate holder earns up to
$72,000 per year compared with $54,000
per year for the average Bachelor’s degree
holder. Thirty percent of Associate’s degree
holders make more than the average
four-year degree holder.
• Rule 4. Programs are often the same in
name only. Programs and college majors
have dierent values at dierent institutions
depending on the alignment between particular
curricula and regional labor market demand, as
well as on dierences in program quality.
18 Carnevale et al., The Economic Value of College Majors, 2015.
College enrollment has increased
from 2 million students to 20 million
students over 60 years.
The growth in the postsecondary student body
is partly a function of the growing demand for
educated workers and the reality that jobs and
the opportunity to earn middle-class wages are
increasingly tied to postsecondary credentials.
The number of students enrolled in postsecondary
institutions increased from 2.4 million in 1949 to
20 million in 2010, from 60 percent to 68 percent
of high school graduates.
19
Much of the growth
since 1973 can be attributed to rising demand
for college graduates in the labor market and
the dierence in wages that could be earned by
college graduates over high school graduates.
As the U.S. economy has restructured over the
past few decades, the need for skilled workers
has accelerated. A comparatively widespread and
diverse cross section of American youth and older
students has recognized and responded to the
market demand for higher skills by enrolling in
postsecondary institutions.
Much of the postsecondary enrollment
growth witnessed over the past decade is
attributable to the rise in enrollment of
older students.
As economic change accelerated in the 1980s and
1990s, colleges began to attract an increasing
19 Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the National Center for Education Statistics’ Digest of Education Statistics,
Tables 302.10 and 303.10, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/.
The Rise of Working Learners
Access to a support system that both removes
traditional barriers and provides a nancial
safety net appears to be one of the most
signicant factors aecting educational and
workforce outcomes for working learners.
Indeed, an ideal holistic support system for
working learners, provided in partnership
by a postsecondary institution and a private
company to increase postsecondary retention
and attainment rates, could include the
following components:
• Convenient learning options, such as
distance learning or online courses;
• Provision of child care;
• Aordable transportation options;
• Employment partnership agreements;
• Access to healthcare insurance;
• Paid sick, maternity, and paternity leave;
• Financial literacy and wealth-building
information and retirement/investment options;
and, most importantly,
• Tuition assistance.
Employee Tuition Assistance Programs
make up an important financial safety net
that supports working learners.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 21
share of older students as well as the traditional
18- to 24-year-old cohort. In fact, students over
the age of 25 accounted for more than 40 percent
of the enrollment growth between 2000 and
2011.
20
Today, most undergraduate students –
consistently between 70 percent and 80 percent
of undergraduates enrolled in U.S. postsecondary
institutions for most of the past 25 years — are
employed (Table 1). Regardless of student
characteristics such as family income, nancial
dependency, enrollment status, type of institution,
age, race, marital status, or other demographic
characteristics, the contemporary “average”
college student works.
Moreover, the attachment of students to the labor
market is anything but marginal. Data from the
early 1990s to the present consistently show that
students work an average of around 30 hours per
week. At least a quarter of all students – and about
a fth of all students who enroll on a full-time
basis – are also employed full-time while enrolled.
Working while enrolled in college is not a
new phenomenon and does not appear to be a
temporary response to cyclical economic factors.
Rates of student employment rose steadily
during the 1970s and 1980s and have held steady
20 National Center for Education Statistics. Digest of Education Statistics, 2013, (2015), Chapter 3.
We identify tuition assistance as being the
most important support component because,
in the absence of nancial support from an
external source, such as need-based grants,
parental support, or student loans, the majority
of workers simply could not aord the cost
of tuition and fees for postsecondary
enrollment each semester.
Over the past 20 years, businesses have
begun to rethink their position on tuition
assistance programs (TAPs) for employees.
While TAPs may be benecial for working
learners, they also benet employers. Workers
who make full use of tuition assistance may
demonstrate productivity above the market
level (i.e. companies that oer TAPs hire more
productive workers to begin with and reduce
costs through decreased employee turnover).
Even if the skills and knowledge gained
through completion of a degree program
ultimately lead to working learner turnover
to the benet of dierent companies, current
employers and rms continue to nd TAPs
to be worth the investment.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
22
since then (Table 1), irrespective of economic
cycles.
21
The U.S. Census Bureau found that
72 percent of students worked in 2011, and
one-fth of all students worked full-time year-
round. The number of weeks employed while
enrolled varies to some degree. For example,
the share of full-time students who work all
or most weeks is 87 percent, compared with
97 percent of exclusively part-time students.
Eighty-nine percent of dependent students work
all or most weeks, compared with 93 percent of
independent students.
22
The share of students working was relatively
consistent in the 1990s and 2000s at between
70 percent and 80 percent. The share working
full-time was also fairly consistent, at between
30 percent and 40 percent. Both have declined
somewhat due to the Great Recession that began
in 2007. The decline since 1996 in the proportion
of working learners who are employed full-time
may mean that the benets of working while
going to college may have topped out as rising
college costs make working a less eective
nancing strategy compared to loans.
21 The proposition that rising demand is entirely responsible for rising student employment is complicated by demographic supply side
factors. For example, the largest gain in employment among students occurred during the 1970s as the baby boomers rushed into the
workforce and onto college campuses at the same time, creating a relative surplus of young workers and a large number of college
students who needed to work, especially prior to the advent of large increases in federal student loans. (Stern and Nakata, Paid
Employment Among U.S. College Students, 1991).
22 Horn and Betktold, Profiles of Undergraduates in U.S. Postsecondary Education Institutions, 1998.
Table 1. In the 1990s and 2000s, the share of Americans working while enrolled in
postsecondary institutions was consistent until it declined following the recession.
2003 - 2004
2007 - 2008
2011 - 2012
1995 - 1996
1992 - 1993
1989 - 1990
29
29
29
30
31
21,072
24,573
18,081
12,328
11,667
10,139
33
32
26
36
34
4030
74
75
62*
79
72
77
Average hours
worked
Share
working (%)
Share working
full-time (%)
Average student debt
(2014$)
Year
Sources: All data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Review, various years; National Center for Education Statistics, 1994;
Cuccaro-Alamin and Choy, Postsecondary Financing Strategies, 1998; Horn and Berktold, Profiles of Undergraduates in U.S. Postsecondary
Education Institutions, 1998; Horn and Nevill, Profiles of Undergraduates in U.S. Postsecondary Education Institutions, 2006; U.S.
Department of Education, 2010; U.S. Department of Education, 2014.
* The decline in the percent of working learners in 2011-2012 is most likely due to severe job losses during the Great Recession.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 23
Working learners are more concerned about enhancing résumés
and gaining work experience than paying for tuition.
Students enter the labor market for a variety of
reasons.
23
Those reasons include to:
• Provide nancial support or pay for
education expenses;
• Gain or maintain useful skills and experience;
• Build or maintain a professional network; or
• Complement and reinforce classroom learning.
College students also work because it’s part of the
culture in which they were raised, because their
parents choose not to nance their education
wholly, or due to other preferences related to
debt, nancial independence, or lifestyle.
24
Regardless of their reasons, to some extent,
all working learners share the common
experience of simultaneously navigating
enrollment in postsecondary education
and formal engagement in the labor market.
23 Rising tuition and other educational costs relative to family income and the rise in unmet financial need explain the proliferation
of working learners. Students are motivated to work in order to pay tuition costs when they receive federal aid in the form of
work-study or when the student and his/her family are unable or unwilling to pay the difference between college costs and
unmet financial need. For example, during the 1960s and 1970s, student employment rates grew consistently while family
income and public subsidies for college were growing faster than college costs (Stern and Nakata, Paid Employment Among U.S.
College Students, 1991). The “rising cost of college” thesis also does not account for the fact that employment among part-time
students has held steady since at least the 1970s while postsecondary education costs have experienced extraordinary growth.
Moreover, the simple explanation that students work to pay for college doesn’t account for the complexity of student financing
strategies, and the differences among student strategies regarding how they combine borrowing, working, and enrollment. For
example, students at two-year institutions are more likely to work without borrowing to pay for their education, and students
who enroll full-time are more likely to borrow (Cuccaro-Alamin and Choy, Postsecondary Financing Strategies, 1998). However,
working is a strategy that students pursue regardless of whether they receive financial aid without having to borrow, or receive
aid and still choose to borrow; while intensity of work is less for those who receive aid and do not borrow and the least for those
who receive aid and do borrow, wherein, nearly one in five students (19%) who receive aid and borrow still work full-time
(Horn and Berktold, Profile of Undergraduates in U.S. Postsecondary Education Institutions, 1998).
24 This perspective is somewhat supported by the fact that over 70 percent of dependent students from families with incomes
over $90,000 per year work, and about a third of these students worked more than 20 hours per week (King, Working Their Way
Through College, 2006). Perna et al. argue that older undergraduates grow as a share of total enrollment; they posit that these older,
financially independent students are more likely to work because they are already working adults with financial responsibilities. This
would include the subset of students for whom the question is not “Why work?” but “Why enroll in school?”
In order to better understand and compare the diverse experiences of
working learners, we have separated them into two groups based on age.
Young working learners are those aged 16-29; we refer to working learners
aged 30-54 as mature working learners.
25
The decision to divide working
learners into two age groups is for the purpose of clarity; making age 30 the
dividing line is somewhat arbitrary. We use age 30 because at that point,
most adults (including working learners) will be more established in the labor
market and in adulthood.
26
We also studied the income levels of working learners. We categorize those
whose annual earnings place them at 200 percent of the poverty line
27
and below as “low-income working learners.” The choices that this group
makes – including selection of undergraduate majors and selection of future
occupations, along with associated labor market outcomes – are important in
assessing the extent to which education has been an important tool for
lifting these and similarly disadvantaged groups out of poverty.
Young working learners (16-29) make very different decisions
compared to mature working learners (30-54) when it comes
to majors selected, hours worked, and career choices
Fourteen million Americans work while enrolled in a higher education
institution.
28
Two-thirds of working learners are between the ages of
16 and 29 (Figure 1).
25 Where the data support it, we include data on working learners between the ages of 16-18; for some data sets,
this is not possible due to data limitations. In these cases, young working learners are those aged 18-29.
26 This analysis of working learners uses five different data sources (more details in Appendix 1). The differing data sources allowed
more detailed analysis of the characteristics of working learners. However, it is important to note that the populations covered
are different in each of these databases.
27 The federal poverty threshold changes each year and is determined by family size. Two hundred percent of the poverty level
multiplies the federal poverty level by two ($23,540 for a single individual is 200% of the 2015 poverty level).
28 Includes both postsecondary institutions and graduate schools.
Who Are Working Learners?
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 25
Figure 1. The majority of working learners are between the
ages of 16 and 29.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of
U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
16-29
30-54
33%
67%
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
analysis of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
Figure 2. More than half of working learners are in sales and food/personal services occupations.
Sales and office support
Food and personal services
Blue collar
Education
0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35
Managerial and professional office
Healthcare professional and technical
Healthcare support
Community services and arts
STEM
Sixty percent of working learners work in one of two career elds: sales and
oce support occupations (34%) and food and personal services occupations
(26%) (Figure 2). Many of these jobs are either temporary or part-time.
Many working learners leave these jobs after graduating, while others
move into higher paying jobs.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
26
The distribution of jobs held by working
learners varies by age (Figure 3). While more
than a quarter of working learners between
the ages of 16 and 29 are employed in food and
personal service occupations – such as tending
bar, supersizing meals, and sweeping hair
clippings – the percentage of working learners
in those occupations drops to just 12 percent
for mature working learners. Working learners
transition from food and personal service
jobs into managerial positions as they gain
experience and credentials.
The majority (51%) of mature working learners
are employed in one of three career elds:
managerial occupations, education occupations,
and sales and oce support occupations.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis
of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
Figure 3. Young working learners are more likely to be in sales and office and food
and personal services occupations. Mature working learners are more concentrated in
management.
Sales and office support
Managerial and professional office
Blue collar
Education
Food and personal services
Healthcare professional and technical
Healthcare support
Community services and arts
STEM
Young working
learners (16-29)
34%
20%
17%
14%
12%
6%
8%
26%
Mature working
learners (30-54)
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 27
Working learners are more likely to hold jobs that are not related to their long-term career goals
– perhaps waiting tables or doing administrative work in an oce – but are more likely than other
workers to have long-term career goals (Figure 4).
Nearly 60 percent of working learners are women.
More women than men are enrolled in postsecondary institutions overall, and this is also true for
working learners. Indeed, women are more likely than men by a ratio of about 60:40 to be working
learners among the young and mature (Figure 5).
Figure 4. Working learners are more likely to be working in
transitional jobs not related to their long-term career goals.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data
from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health wave 4, 2008-2009.
Part of long-term career goals
Preparation for long-term career goals
Not related to long-term career goals
Do not have long-term career goals
Working only Working learners
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
28
Young working learners are disproportionately white, while mature working
learners are disproportionately African-American.
By race and ethnicity, the distribution of young
working learners reects that of the national
population. However, as workers age, the share
of working learners that is non-white rises –
attributable almost entirely to a larger share of
African-American working learners.
Within racial and ethnic categories, whites
comprise the majority of young and mature
working learners (62% and 57%, respectively,
compared with 64% for the general population),
but the share of African-American working
learners nearly doubles among mature
working learners (African-Americans are
12% of young working learners and about
23% of mature working learners).
29
Hispanic
young working learners are about 16 percent
of the working learner population, equal to
their share in the general population; this
drops to approximately 13 percent among
mature working learners. A similar pattern
holds for Asians.
Figure 5. Women are more likely to be working learners.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis
of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
Men
Women
Young working learners Mature working learners
41%59%
44%56%
29 As illustrated in Figure 6, African Americans represent 12 percent of the total population.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 29
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of
data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Review, 2012 and U.S. Census, 2010.
Figure 6. The majority of working learners are white, but mature
working learners are disproportionately African-American.
Young working learner
Mature working learner
U.S. Census data average
50%
25%
75%
White Black or African-
American
Hispanic
or Latino
Asian American Indian
or Alaska Native
Native Hawaiian/
other Pacific
Islander
Other/more
than one race
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
30
50%
25%
Mature working learners are more likely to be married with family responsibilities.
Stark dierences in family status characterize
young working learners and mature working
learners – mature working learners are much
more likely to be married and have children
than their young working learner counterparts
(Figure 7). Perhaps unsurprisingly, most young
working learners (60%) are single and do not
have dependents, compared with less than a
quarter of mature working learners. Young
working learners are also less likely to be
single parents; about 20 percent of young
working learners have at least one dependent,
but only 4 percent are unmarried; a larger
share of mature working learners have
dependents (about 60%), but about 17
percent are unmarried.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
analysis of data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, 2012.
Figure 7. Mature working learners are more likely to be married than young working learners
Young working
learner
Mature working
learner
Unmarried, no
dependent children
Unmarried with dependent
children
Married, no
dependent children
Married with
dependent children
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 31
Young working learners and mature working
learners are generally found in dierent types of
postsecondary institutions, and each group tends
to enroll in dierent types of degree-granting
programs. This is likely because mature working
learners have greater constraints on their time
(as they are more likely to be married and have
dependents, as well as to work longer hours).
As a result, mature working learners are more
prevalent in shorter-duration programs (i.e.,
those that are two years or less) such as those
that provide certicates and Associate’s degrees.
Likewise, mature working learners are more
likely than young working learners to be enrolled
in a postsecondary program that does not
provide a credential or degree upon completion.
These types of programs are often professional
in nature and oer a certicate of completion
based on attendance and not necessarily
completion of a formal examination. Young
working learners, by contrast, are most likely
to enroll in Bachelor’s degree programs oered
by selective, doctorate-granting institutions.
Fifty-six percent of young working learners are
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Review, 2012.
Figure 8. Young working learners are more likely to be enrolled in Bachelor’s degree programs.
Young working
learner
Mature working
learner
50%
Certificate Associate’s degree Bachelor’s degree Not in a degree program
or others
25%
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
32
in baccalaureate programs, compared with 37
percent of mature working learners, whereas 58
percent of mature working learners are enrolled
in AA or certicate programs, compared with
42 percent of young working learners (Figure
8). Among those enrolled in Associate’s degree
programs, young working learners are also
slightly more likely to be on an academic/
transfer, or general education track, whereas
mature working learners are more likely to be
in a technical or occupational Associate’s degree
program (33% of mature working learners are
in an occupational track, compared with 26%
of young working learners).
Mature working learners are concentrated in open-admission
community colleges and for-profit colleges and universities while
young working learners tend to go to more selective institutions.
The type of institution working learners attend
also varies by age. Almost half (46%) of young
working learners attend two-year public colleges,
and another 40 percent are enrolled in public
and private, not-for-prot, four-year institutions.
About 10 percent attend for-prot institutions.
By contrast, mature working learners attend
two-year public institutions (63%) and for-prot
institutions (20%) in greater numbers (Figure 9).
Even among working learners pursuing the
same degree, the institution type varies. For
example, among those enrolled in Bachelor’s
degree programs, mature working learners
are nine times more likely to be at for-prot
institutions compared with their young working
learner counterparts (18% of Bachelor’s degree-
seeking mature working learners are enrolled
in for-prot institutions, compared with only
2% of young working learners). By contrast,
roughly half (49%) of young working learners
are in public, four-year doctorate-granting
institutions, compared with just over a quarter
(28%) of mature-working learners.
30
Young working learners tend to go to more
selective institutions. For example, while equal
numbers (17%) of both young working learners
and mature working learners enroll in public,
four-year non-doctorate-granting institutions,
17 percent of young working learners enroll
in private, not-for-prot four-year doctorate-
granting institutions, compared to only 13
percent of mature working learners who enroll
in such institutions. Not only are young working
learners more likely to attend public two-year
and four-year institutions than mature working
learners, but such institutions are most likely
to be categorized as being either very selective
or moderately selective. In fact, more than
half of all young working learners attend
such institutions. Conversely, nine out of 10
mature working learners attend the least
selective institutions.
30 U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics, Baccalaureate & Beyond Longitudinal Study, 2008-12.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 33
Young working learners are more likely to select humanities and social sciences
majors while mature working learners select healthcare and business.
Young working learners are also more likely
than mature working learners to be liberal
arts majors, in programs such as visual and
performing arts, humanities, personal and
consumer services, education, communications,
English, history, and psychology (Figure 10).
Nearly half (49%) of mature working learners are
in either healthcare or business-related majors.
Mature working learners are also more likely
than their young working learner counterparts to
select majors for which the knowledge and skills
gained upon completion of the program of study
may be applied directly to a future career such as
military technology and protective service, public
administration, and law/legal studies programs.
Majors selected by young working learners are
less likely to be related to their occupations.
31
At the Associate’s degree level, young working
learners are more likely to be enrolled in general
education or transfer programs than their
mature working learner counterparts (74% vs.
68%), who are more likely to be enrolled in
technical programs (33% vs. 26%).
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey, 2003-2009.
Figure 9. Mature working learners are concentrated in two-year and for-profit institutions.
Young working
learner
Mature working
learner
Public or private
not-for-profit
4-year
50%
75%
25%
Public 2-year Public
less-than-2-year
Private not-for-
profit 2-year
For-profit
(2-year or 4-year)
31 An exception to this general finding applies to young working learners employed in the following technical or specialized fields:
artists and designers, sports occupations, and social service occupations.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
34
Share of working learners
Computer and
information sciences
Engineering and
engineering technology
Biological and phys science,
sci tech, math, agriculture
General studies
and other
Healthcare fields
Education
Other Applied
Business
Social Sciences
Humanities
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
analysis of data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, 2012.
Figure 10. Business is the most popular major for both young and mature
working learners enrolled in Bachelor’s degree programs.
20%
Young working
learner
Mature working learner
Workforce outcomes dier for young and mature working learners due to:
• Dierent levels of labor market experience;
• Diering social and familial responsibilities, including dependency status by age; and
• Their self-identication as either “primarily students” or “primarily employees who
enroll in postsecondary programs.”
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 35
Mature working learners are more likely to be working full-time, but over a third
of young working learners work more than 30 hours per week while enrolled.
The mature working learner population divides
roughly evenly into those who are enrolled
full-time in a postsecondary program and those
who are enrolled part-time. Two-thirds of
young working learners attend postsecondary
institutions full-time.
Logically, with their heavier school
responsibilities, young working learners are
more likely to be employed part-time. Sixty-
three percent of young working learners work
fewer than 30 hours per week, and half of
those work fewer than 20 hours per week. The
number of hours worked varies signicantly
based on the level of education pursued, which
is likely also a function of both age
and dependency status (e.g., transitioning
from dependent to independent). Eighty-ve
percent of young working learners who
are classied as “dependents” are
employed part-time.
Mature working learners are most likely to work
at least 40 hours per week while enrolled. A
quarter of mature working learners work part-
time while enrolled. These patterns hold true
regardless of whether student loans are a factor.
Fifty-seven percent of young working learners
work 35 hours or fewer each week while
enrolled in school.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of
data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey, 2003-2009.
Figure 11. Mature working learners tend to work longer hours while enrolled.
Young working
learner
Mature working
learner
1 - 19 20-29 30-39 40 or more
50%
75%
25%
Hours worked per week
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
36
Figure 12. Mature working learners work longer hours, regardless of
whether they are enrolled in undergraduate or graduate degree programs.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
Over 30 hours/week
21-30 hours/week
11-20 hours/week
0-10 hours/week
College
undergraduate
program
Young working learner Mature working learner
College graduate
professional
program
College
undergraduate
program
College graduate
professional
program
While they are enrolled, mature working learners work more hours than young working learners.
After they graduate, however, young and mature working learners work similar hours (Figure 12).
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 37
Working learners with a Bachelor’s degree tend
to work in similar occupations, regardless of
age or experience. Both young working learners
and mature working learners who have attained
Bachelor’s degrees are employed most frequently
in managerial and professional occupations
(22% for both groups); sales and oce support
occupations; education, training, and library
occupations; and STEM occupations. As
previously noted, mature working learners are
more likely to become employed in occupations
that are similar to their eld of study.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, 2012.
Figure 13. After completion of a Bachelor’s degree, young and mature working learners work similar hours.
Young working
learner
Mature working
learner
1-19 20-29 30-39 40-49 50 or more
50%
25%
Hours worked per week
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
38
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
Figure 14. Working learners who have earned a Bachelor’s degree work in similar occupations.
Managerial and
professional office
Blue collar
Food and personal
services
Sales and office support
Healthcare professional
and technical
Education, training,
and library
Healthcare support
Social sciences
Community
services and arts
STEM
Young working learners Mature working learners
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 39
Mature working learners earn more than young working learners while enrolled.
While enrolled in a postsecondary program,
nancially independent young working learners
earn less than mature working learners. Nearly
70 percent of independent young working
learners earn less than $20,000 annually
(compared with only roughly 30% of mature
working learners). This disparity is likely a
reection of both the total number of hours
worked per week, the value of accumulated and
reinforced workforce experience, and the greater
likelihood of mature working learners working in
a professional eld.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the National Postsecondary Student Aid Review, 2012.
Figure 15. While enrolled, mature working learners earn more than young working learners.
Young working
learner
Mature working
learner
Less than $7,499 $7,500-$19,999 $20,000-$41,999 $42,000 or more
50%
25%
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
40
More than half of young working learners (52%) earn less than $43,000 annually, with 42 percent
earning between $20,000 and $42,999. Comparatively, only 38 percent of mature working learners
earn less than $43,000, with 30 percent earning between $20,000 and $42,999. At the higher end
of the income spectrum, about 40 percent of mature working learners earn more than $60,000 per
year, compared with 23 percent of young working learners (Figure 16).
Mature working learners are the most likely to earn comparatively higher salaries. More than 75
percent of young working learners earn less than $60,000 annually, whereas only 60 percent of
mature working learners, holding the same postsecondary degree, earn less than $60,000 annually.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, 2012.
Figure 16. After completing a Bachelor’s degree, mature working learners are more likely to earn high incomes.
Young working
learner
Mature working
learner
$1-$20,899 $20,900-$42,999 $43,000-$59,999 $60,000+
40%
20%
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 41
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health
wave 4, 2001-2009.
Figure 17. Working learners are more likely to have attended college
or gotten a degree than full-time students or full-time workers.
Some college or an
Associate’s degree
Bachelor’s degree
Graduate degree
High school or less
Working learner Student only Working only
Share of 24-34-year-olds
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
42
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of
data from the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Survey, 2003-2009.
32 We define “low income” as 200 percent of the federal poverty line or less.
Figure 18. Mature working learners are more likely to be low income,
32
partly due to larger family size.
Mature working learners are more likely to be low-income,
dened here as at or below 200 percent
of the poverty line (Figure 18). Family size is the primary explanation for this outcome. Mature
working learners are more likely than their younger counterparts to have dependents. So even
if they earn more money, mature working learners may still be poorer because of the number
of dependents that they have.
Young working
learner
Mature working
learner
At or below poverty 101-150% 151-200% 201% or above
50%
25%
Percentage of the federal poverty level
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 43
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data
from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health wave 3, 2001-2009.
Figure 19. Working learners and students who do not
work are equally likely to have student loan debt.
Working only
Student only
Working learners
22%
43%
42%
Marital status is the strongest indicator for
whether a working learner is in or out of poverty.
Young working learners who are married with
dependents are nancially much better o than
young working learners who are unmarried and
have no dependents.
Unmarried young working learners and mature
working learners who have dependents are
comparatively much worse o: 66 percent of
independent young working learners and 39
percent of mature working learners who have
dependents and earn incomes less than
$40,000 are in poverty.
Working learners have less student debt than students who do not work.
Twenty-two percent of students who do not
work while in college have more than $50,000
in student debt.
33
Fourteen percent of working
learners and 13 percent of workers who are
not enrolled in college have a comparable
amount of debt.
33 To calculate this figure, we took the universe of respondents to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health
dataset and subdivided them at one static point in time between those who were working learners (working and enrolled), students
only (enrolled and not working) and working only (working and not enrolled). Since the “working only” subsample also had
accumulated student loans, they were clearly enrolled earlier. Whether or not they were once working learners or students only is
not defined in the data.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
44
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis of data from
the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health wave 4, 2001-2009.
Figure 20. Thirty-four percent of working learners have $25,000 or more in student loan
debt. But the size of debt is comparable among different types of students and workers.
Less than $1,000
$5,000 to $9,999
$1,000 to $4,999
$25,000 to $49,999
$50,000 to $99,999
$10,000 to $24,999
Over $250,000
$100,000 to $249,999
Working Learners Student only Working only
1% 1% 1%
4%
9%
20%
15%
19%
9%
3%
9%
12%
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 45
Forty-five percent of young working learners earn 200% of the
poverty level ($23,540) or less.
Nearly half (45%) of all young working learners
earn incomes that place them at or below 200
percent of the federal poverty line (Figure 21).
34
We call the individuals in this category low-income
young working learners. Compared with other
working learners who are not poor, low-income
young working learners are more likely to be single
(92% vs. 84%) or non-citizens (7% vs. 5%).
Compared with their higher-earning peers,
low-income young working learners are
roughly equally likely to be enrolled in public
institutions (77% vs. 80%). While enrolled,
low-income young working learners are less
likely than their peers to major in education
administration, medical and health sciences
and services, and ne arts, and more likely
to major in biology and life sciences, physical
sciences, and psychology.
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis
of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
Figure 21. Just under half of young working learners are low income.
34 The federal poverty line is defined in relation to the number of individuals in a household. For a single individual, 200 percent of the
poverty line is $23,540; for a two-person household, it is $31,860; for a three-person household, it is $40,180; for a four-person
household it is $48,500.
200% of poverty line
and above
Below 200%
of poverty line
45%
55%
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
46
Low-income young working learners are more
likely to be found in food and personal services
occupations, and less likely to be in technical
healthcare occupations (3% vs. 6%) and in
blue-collar occupations (10% vs. 14%) when
compared to other working learners. They
are also more likely to be working in the
education services industry and the leisure
and hospitality industry, and less likely to
be working in government, in healthcare
services, 0r in wholesale and retail trade.
35
Source: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis
of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
Figure 22. Working learners enroll in similar types of institutions regardless of income.
35 All values in parentheses are comparing low-income working learners, defined as below 200 percent of poverty, to other working
learners who are above 200 percent of poverty.
Public
Private
Below 200% of poverty line 200% of poverty line and above
80%
20%
77%
23%
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 47
Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce analysis
of U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey data, 2012-2013.
Figure 23. Low-income young working learners are more likely to work in food and personal service occupations.
Blue collar
STEM
Sales and office support
Military
Healthcare support
Healthcare professional
and technical
Managerial and
professional office
Education
Food and personal
services
Community services
and arts
Below 200% of poverty line 200% of poverty line and above
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
48
After graduating, working learners are upwardly mobile
and more likely to move into managerial positions.
In nearly every occupational group (the
exception being healthcare support
occupations), working learners are less likely
to stay in the occupations they were initially in,
compared with those who were only working.
Moreover, for most occupations, a higher share
of working learners ended up moving into
managerial and professional occupations than
their working-only or student-only counterparts
(the exceptions being STEM, blue collar, and
those already working in managerial and
professional occupations).
Among working learners who were working
in education occupations at the start of the
survey, about four in 10 (39%) were still
working in education by the end of the survey.
When compared to other workers who were
not enrolled, 68 percent remained in education
occupations. Working learners were much more
likely than their non-enrolled counterparts
to move out of education into managerial
and professional occupations and STEM
occupations, which suggests that education is
in fact an important factor in upward mobility.
Blue-collar occupations appear to be very
stable for working learners as they graduate.
Fifty-two percent of working learners who
were employed in blue-collar occupations
remained there ve years later. Those
working learners who move out of blue-
collar occupations, however, are most likely
to move into sales and oce occupations.
W
orking while learning has become the
new pathway to achieving the American
dream. The 21st century young working learners
face barriers that their grandparents did not
encounter. Due to the rising cost of college, for
example, working learners must nance their
college education largely through student loans. It
is no longer possible for 21st century students to
work their way through college. Student loans pay
for tuition, books, equipment, and sometimes the
lifestyle needs of college students.
The transition from college to career is now longer
than ever, and it is no longer sharply dened.
The system that once required one to learn and
then earn has been replaced by an expectation of
lifelong learning and the continuous upgrading
of skills required to adapt to new workplace
technologies and an evolving occupational
structure. These changes have meant three things
to the American worker: training, upskilling, and
remaining current.
Because working and learning are now
entrenched in the nation’s work culture and ethic,
working learners are likely to need additional
policy assistance, although the type of assistance
is likely to vary based on the characteristics of
the working learner. We believe that many of
the systems already in place could be better
coordinated to help the nation’s 14 million
working learners succeed.
Policy Implications
Competency-based education (CBE) is based
on mastery of competencies rather than on
“seat time.” Traditional credit-hour-based
postsecondary education is grounded in seat-
time – the amount of time students spend in
class or doing class assignments. By contrast,
competency-based education focuses on whether
a student masters the relevant material and skills.
The competency-based approach is often used in
career-focused education and training programs.
The curriculum is designed in collaboration with
employers to address local labor market needs and
the competencies are job-related. These programs
prepare students for careers traditionally
dominated by men.
For working learners, the competency-based
approach makes it more harmonious to combine
education and employment. Each competency is
job-related, and a working learner can apply it
on the job as soon as it is mastered. Employers
are often aware of the skills working learners are
obtaining and can entrust them with additional
responsibilities as they progress through the
training. Working learners can get credit for skills
they learned on the job by demonstrating mastery
Competency-based education and
noncredit education represent new
models for attaining credentials that
could benefit both young and mature
working learners.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
50
Working learners need stronger
ties between the worlds of work and
education. Among all programs for
working learners in postsecondary
institutions, learning and earning is
the common currency.
Getting a job is a primary motivation for
many students going to college, but they
are left largely on their own to connect
their postsecondary education choices to an
increasingly complex set of career options.
Information that connects programs to careers
is generally unavailable in college catalogues
or on campuses. Career plans never come up in
the process of awarding college grants or loans.
Education and employment policy remain
isolated in discrete silos of policy and practice.
A new approach is needed to better connect
postsecondary education and training, and to
address the inecient and inequitable use of
education and workforce information. Such an
approach would enable students to understand
better how their postsecondary education and
training options are likely to t into the job
market. It may also motivate institutions to be
more accountable for shaping programs to t
their students’ needs and matching students
to the requirements of the emerging global
economy. The good news is that the data and
technology needed to create such a system
already exist, and the costs of integrating them
into a unied whole are low.
36
36 The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 allotted $250 million to be used for statewide data systems that include
postsecondary and workforce information, of which up to $5 million may be used for state data coordination and for awards to
public or private organizations or agencies to improve data coordination. Up to 2012, 17 states had established these data systems
and 21 additional states were in the process of creating such data systems.
of those competencies through prior learning
assessments, which allows working learners
to complete their educational programs faster.
Furthermore, unlike traditional courses
in which students may learn some material
well and other material not at all and still get
a passing grade, students in competency-based
courses have to demonstrate mastery of all
competencies in the curriculum.
This aspect of competency-based education assures
employers that learners have mastered all the
relevant skills and knowledge from the training and
can apply those on the job. Moreover, the short-
term, workforce-focused nature of competency-
based education helps ensure that students actually
complete it, promoting higher completion rates
among CBE students than within the traditional
coursework structure
Noncredit education oers a variety of exible,
short-term, workforce-training opportunities.
This postsecondary pathway is most likely
to appeal to learning workers who spend the
majority of their professional time on the job,
and who engage in education and training as
a way to improve work-related skills and to
advance in their career eld. Noncredit students
are more likely to be mature learning workers.
Also, technically focused noncredit programs
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 51
The data system that connects
postsecondary fields of study and
degrees with labor market demands is
still a work in progress.
Data connecting college programs to careers
are increasingly available via statewide
longitudinal data systems that connect
student transcript data to earnings and
career pathways. A few states — including
Florida, Texas, and Washington — began
connecting postsecondary education
transcript data and Unemployment
Insurance (UI) wage records starting in the
1980s. Since 2006, the federal government
has spurred further connections between
K-12 education, postsecondary education,
and wage record data systems by providing
more than $600 million in grant funding to
47 states and the District of Columbia.
37
As
a result, about a dozen states currently link
postsecondary education records with wage
records through an established longitudinal
data system. A larger number of states have
the capacity to share data directly between
postsecondary education agencies and
workforce agencies.
38
Some states have not only connected
education and workforce data systems, but
have also begun to produce information
geared toward policymakers, educators,
and students. According to the most recent
Workforce Data Quality Campaign survey,
37 Government Accountability Office, Education and Workforce Data: Challenges in Matching Student and Worker Information, GAO-15-27,
November 2014.
38 State Higher Education Executive Officers Association, Strong Foundations: The State of State Postsecondary Data Systems, 2012.
are more likely to appeal to men, while
women tend to be more concentrated in general
education and basic skills noncredit programs.
Whites and African Americans tend to be more
concentrated in noncredit training than in the
general population, whereas Hispanics tend to be
underrepresented among noncredit students.
†
Noncredit education helps learning workers
to stay current with changing techniques and
technologies in their eld. It also prepares
students for industry-based certication and
occupational licensing exams. The noncredit
education and industry-based certications
and occupational licenses make a harmonious
combination. Noncredit education oers a
logical way to prepare students for licensing
and certication exams, and industry-based
certication and occupational licenses provide
industry-recognized credentials for students who
complete noncredit education. Workers who
already have a license or a certication rely on
noncredit training to meet continuing education
requirements, often associated with maintaining
or renewing industry-based certications and
occupational licenses.
† Forthcoming Georgetown University Center on Education
and the Workforce report on noncredit education.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
52
13 states have developed scorecards that
report results from particular programs and
institutions, so that students and workers
can compare programs. Twenty more states
are making progress toward this goal.
39
For
example, Arkansas in 2014 issued its most
recent Education to Employment Report that
shows earnings outcomes by education level,
credential, and type of program.
At the same time, there is a growing bipartisan
consensus in Washington that greater
transparency is needed regarding data on
the outcomes achieved by higher education
institutions and programs. The U.S. Department
of Education is set to release new data –
beyond what is available through the College
Scorecard – that will help students, families, and
counselors make informed decisions about going
to college. In May 2015, a bipartisan group of
lawmakers introduced legislation that requires
the collection of earnings metrics for programs
and institutions. Student data submitted by
higher education institutions would be connected
with earnings data held by the Social Security
Administration.
40
39 Workforce Data Quality Campaign, State Progress on Workforce
Data, October 2014.
40 The Student Know Before You Go Act was introduced in the
House of Representatives (H.R. 2518) by Rep. Duncan D.
Hunter, R-Calif., with Reps. Mia Love, R-Utah, John C. Carney, Jr.,
D-Del., Trey Gowdy, R-S.C., Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Susan A. Davis,
D-Calif., Jared Polis, D-Colo., and Doug LaMalfa, R-Calif. It was
introduced in the Senate (S. 1195) by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore.,
with Sens. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Mark R. Warner, D-Va.
A number of employers, beginning in early 2014,
have been stepping forward with innovative new
plans to assist their workers with obtaining college
degrees and other postsecondary credentials.
Google, Apple, BP, Smuckers, Deloitte, and
Raytheon provide anywhere from $5,000 per
year to 100 percent full reimbursement for college
courses. Fiat Chrysler announced in May 2015
that it would provide full tuition assistance for
dealership workers through Strayer University.
The only prerequisite is that, in many cases,
such courses must be pre-approved, related to
personal development within the company, or
contingent upon continued service requirements.
Many other companies also provide some form of
tuition-assistance funding, though these are often
less generous. For example, McDonald’s, through
its Archways to Opportunities program, provides
partial tuition coverage at community colleges of
up to $700 a year for workers and up to $1,050 for
managers.
The money can be used to attend classes online or
in-person and, depending on variations in tuition
and fees, can cover one to two classes each year.
Wal-Mart provides employees and their family
members an annual 15 percent tuition “savings and
book grant” for the online degree program of its
educational partner, American Public University.
However, employees must work full-time for one
year in order to be eligible for the discount.
Employers are creating new plans
to assist their workers in obtaining
postsecondary credentials.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 53
Available career counseling in colleges is very limited and is rarely
based on any data about the economic value of college majors.
Currently, postsecondary students often do not
consider their careers until they complete their
programs of study. By then it can be too late.
American society invests enormous amounts of
money and energy in the preparation, testing,
and admissions process that marks the transition
from high school to a postsecondary experience
—
a period that spans only a few years in a person’s
life. At the same time, it invests very little in
preparing that person for the great economic
sorting that marks the transition from college to
work
— a process that will determine, in most
cases, what that person will do after breakfast for
the next 45 years.
American society needs to pay attention to
careers at the beginning of the postsecondary
process, not at the end. While it is true that
people who choose majors or careers too soon
tend to leave that eld at a higher rate than those
who choose later, the consequences for people
who choose too late are more severe. Students
who wait to the very end to make career decisions
often experience the academic equivalent of
buyer’s remorse. The exposure or exploration
model that allows a person to nd his or her true
talent and passion while in college is great – if
the person can aord it. For everyone else, better
decisions depend on better access to information
that links training and education to careers.
This is especially true for adult working learners
who return to college and do not have time for
exploration. For this group of working learners,
decisions have to be timely and precise.
Personal counseling, career counseling,
comprehensive nancial counseling, and basic
information on how to navigate careers require
access to social capital that many young working
learners never get.
41
The best way to relay this
information to working learners is through a
counseling system at college. Many schools
oer these types of “Career Ready,” “Career
Exploration,” or “Success after College” courses
already, but they are often optional and, at best,
arbitrary. We propose that this counseling system
should be information-based, available at the
beginning of a person’s education pathway, and
mandatory for all students.
The governance, accreditation, and nancing
of postsecondary education are essentially
disconnected from outcomes after college,
especially from learning and earning in
particular elds of study. This awkward reality
leaves employers and policymakers as much in
the dark as students, and creates a runaway cost
spiral driven by institutional prestige rather
than learning-and-earning outcomes.
41 Grubb, Like, What Do I Do Now?, 2006.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
54
Tying career outcomes to fields of study is still an afterthought
in postsecondary policy.
The gold standard for higher education among
postsecondary reformers has shifted from
access to cost and completion, but the current
emphasis on completion raises the question:
Completion for what purpose?
The current focus on college completion is a
reactive reform goal in response to runaway
costs and high levels of college dropouts.
Completion is a goal that presumes no outcomes
beyond seat time and credit accumulation. It
ignores the relationship between learning and
earning in particular elds of study as well
as the social and economic value of general
education outside academe.
Completion — as well as associated metrics like
time to completion and cost per completion — is
an inadequate outcome standard. While college
completion and related outcome standards
can improve internal eciencies in higher
education, these kinds of internal metrics don’t
necessarily improve the broader economic
utility of postsecondary investments.
The traditional Bachelor’s degree-centric model has limited
utility in a world focused on workforce development.
The growing diversity in postsecondary
oerings mirrors a growing diversity among
student needs. The popular conception of
college as four years of full-time residential
study applies, as this report shows, to a smaller
and smaller proportion of college students.
Yet that “preferred” model is the basis for
most planning at colleges. It places its primary
emphasis on a process of self-discovery and
on an expanding global awareness through a
sampling of traditional academic disciplines.
The traditional model addresses career
concerns through the use of majors, but
courses in major elds of study only make
up 30 percent to 40 percent of the 120 or so credit
hours required for the Bachelor’s degree. The
courses in a student’s major have become the
rough compromise between career-related
learning and general education.
However, market realities have interceded.
Colleges and universities, even traditional
liberal-arts colleges, have created more
career-specic majors — two-year degrees
and certicates as well as baccalaureate and
graduate programs — that promise to provide
students with skills that are more closely
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 55
aligned with the needs of the workforce. These
career-related elds of study now dominate the
postsecondary system. Since 1970, the proportion
of baccalaureate degrees awarded in the
humanities, education, and social sciences has
fallen from 61 percent to 38 percent.
42
Roughly
80 percent of Bachelor’s degree majors are
aligned with occupations. In two-year colleges,
the traditional Associate of Arts (AA) degrees that
emphasize general education are still dominant.
But the Associate of Science (AS) and Associate of
Applied Science (AAS) degrees are approaching
43 percent of two-year awards.
43
The vast majority of students are now non-
traditional learners who may have the inclination
but lack the time and money to pursue the rich
mix of general and specic coursework oered
by the preferred model.
Perhaps the most telling problem with the
traditional residential four-year model is that not
everybody who might want it can aord it. For
example, if everybody who went to college got
a four-year degree, the cost to society would be
enormous, particularly since the average cost of
training would increase substantially
for nontraditional populations.
42 National Center for Education Statistics, “Digest of Education Statistics, 2013” Table 318.20.
43 Analysis of Current Population Survey differentiation between general and occupational AAs, 2014, ages 25-35.
Perhaps the best-known postsecondary
incentive plan was created by Starbucks.
The company announced in 2014 that its
College Achievement Plan (CAP) would allow
employees to pursue a Bachelor’s degree in
partnership with Arizona State University
through ASU’s online distance learning
program EdPlus, at no cost to the student.
Out of 4,000 applicants, roughly 1,800 Starbucks
CAP students were enrolled in the inaugural
cohort during the second half of the ASU Online
Fall 2014 semester. Originally, the program was
only oered to eligible juniors and seniors who
had earned at least 56 college credits and who had
been employed for 45 days. However, Starbucks
announced in May 2015 that the program
would expand to include all eligible Starbucks
employees. Starbucks has a goal of 25,000
employees with Bachelor’s degrees by 2025.
This $250 million eort will also seek to enroll
and employ 10,000 “Opportunity Youth” who
are identied as “16-to-24-year-olds who face
systematic barriers to meaningful jobs
and education.”
The Starbucks/Arizona State
University Model: A Novel
Partnership
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
56
Working learners need competency-based postsecondary curricula that
drill down below overall degree attainment and programs of study to the
cognitive and non-cognitive competencies required for them to move
along particular occupational pathways.
Employers traditionally use educational
attainment as an indicator of potential for
learning on the job since they have no evidence
of proven competence. Educational attainment
provides entry qualications for lifetime learning
on the job. Outside colleges and universities,
employers are the largest providers of formal
education and training. Employers account for
$177 billion of the $650 billion spent annually
on formal postsecondary education and training.
Employers also spend $413 billion each year on
informal on-the-job training. Altogether, the
sizes of employer-based formal and informal
training systems and formal postsecondary
education are roughly equivalent.
The use of education to signal an employee’s
potential performance has increasingly become
a crucial determinant of lifetime opportunity
because education allocates access to human
capital development in labor markets. Those
with the best education credentials have jobs
with the best access to the most powerful and
exible technology that complements human
potential rather than technology that substitutes
for human potential— for example, the portable
PC versus the keyboard cash register with the
pictures of fries and hamburgers at McDonald’s.
Academic preparation and learning on the job
are sequential and cumulative, snowballing into
increasing advantages over a lifetime of working
and learning on the job. These advantages also
accumulate across generations reinforcing race,
ethnic, and class divisions in earnings.
Over time, the general relationship between
postsecondary attainment and earnings has
become stronger, but it is most pronounced in
career-oriented majors. Where a college degree
used to be enough to enter and succeed in many
occupations, the alignment between particular
elds of study and career pathways has become
more important.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 57
The relationship between postsecondary fields of study and careers are only a
rough proxy for a deeper and more dynamic relationship between competencies
taught in particular curricula and competencies required to advance in particular
occupationally based careers.
Career competencies taught in postsecondary
curricula ultimately derive from the competencies
required to perform the ever-changing bundles
of tasks, activities, and technologies in
occupationally based career pathways.
Those competencies are knowledge, skills, and
abilities.
• Knowledge competencies are content
domains familiar to educators as elds of study
from math and the sciences to the humanities,
and include more applied disciplines like
accounting. Learning in knowledge domains
is the most obvious overlap between schooling
and work. It is where elds of study in schools
overlap with occupational pathways most
clearly and early on in careers.
• Skills are competencies that promote further
learning, problem solving, and innovation.
Skills are best learned in the context of
knowledge domains. For example, problem
solving and critical thinking skills are
qualitatively dierent for historians, engineers,
and teachers. In addition skills are acquired
both in school and through formal learning,
informal learning, and experience on the job.
• Abilities such as creativity, mathematical
reasoning, and oral and written expression
are competencies dened as partly
innate and partly developed through
schooling and experience.
There are both academic and non-academic
dimensions to cognitive knowledge, skills, and
abilities. There are qualitative dierences in
the use value of these cognitive competencies
between academic and more applied
environments, for example. They can be
learned dierently – the traditional dierence
between book learning and applied learning or,
more formally, the dierence between pedagogy
in academic settings and andragogy in more
applied settings and in adult education.
44
In
addition to the cognitive competencies, there
are more personal competencies that determine
a successful match between individuals and
occupational pathways. These commonly include:
• Work style. This is a personal characteristic
that can aect how well someone does a
job. Some of these characteristics are
creativity, leadership, analytical thinking,
attention to detail, integrity, social orientation,
stress tolerance, teamwork, independence,
and adaptability.
44 Knowles, Holton, and Swanson, The Adult Learner, 2005.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
58
• Work values. Important outcomes
for individuals include recognition,
achievement, working conditions, security,
advancement, authority, social status,
responsibility, and compensation.
• Work interests. These are individual
preferences for the work environment.
Interests are classied as realistic,
artistic, investigative, social,
enterprising, and conventional.
• Personality. This is the combination of
characteristics or qualities that form an
individual’s distinctive character. While some
aspects of personality are innate, they have a
substantial inuence over behavior both
in school and in the workforce.
The summative competency in careers is tacit
knowledge, the integration of cognitive and
personal competencies with experience that
allows peak performances. It is the knack that
allows some doctors to make the fastest and
most eective diagnoses, the sales worker to
close, the analyst to see the trend in mountains
of data, and the politician to appeal to an
audience of one or one million. Tacit knowledge
is not easily shared or communicated to other
individuals. It consists of beliefs, ideals, and
value systems that are deeply ingrained into our
subconscious.
45
The overlap between postsecondary education and career learning
is a huge uncharted territory.
About $772 billion is spent annually on
postsecondary education and training. About
65 percent of this total is spent outside of the
formal postsecondary education system. If
society is going to respect the career dimension
to postsecondary learning, it will need to open
multiple new avenues between traditional
postsecondary programs and new ideas in
postsecondary policy, including:
• New forms of accreditation for alternative
programs with labor market value and
alternative delivery (i.e., technology-based
online programs);
• Substitution of learning outcomes for credit
hour-based funding and completion;
• Added support for competency-based programs
that align occupational and general work-based
competencies with postsecondary curricula;
• Performance-based funding for programs tied
to employment, earnings, and occupationally
based career pathways;
• Subsidies for counseling tied to career pathways;
• More work study in jobs closely related to
student’s chosen major, including internships
and apprenticeships;
45 Polyani, The Tacit Dimension, 1966.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal 59
• Stronger tax breaks for employer-provided
tuition assistance including eligibility for
certicates, industry-based certications,
occupational licenses, and other kinds of
learning with labor market value;
• Stronger incentives and stronger standards
for institutional recognition for work
experience as accredited learning
toward postsecondary awards; and
• Expansion of support for noncredit learning
leading to employment, industry-based
certications, and occupational licenses.
Existing policies inside and outside the postsecondary policy realm could
be altered to be of greater assistance to working learners.
In many cases, existing programs could be
extended or modied. For example, Trade
Adjustment Assistance and the Workforce
Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA)
are policy tools that help working learners
who are retraining or transitioning into new
careers. Extending or adjusting the existing
tax credits could also be eective; for example,
providing tax breaks to companies that employ
advancing working learners or raising the limit
on the amount that individuals can claim for
educational credits on their tax returns (the
current maximum is $5,250).
More exibility in applying aid – such as the
Pell Grant – is likely to help working learners
who are enrolled part-time and those who are
enrolled in non-degree programs. In other
instances, new policies and programs may
be necessary. For example, childcare support
is likely to assist working learners who have
children. Other examples include establishing an
emergency loan fund for students’ unanticipated
major expenditures (which may be successful
in improving retention and degree attainment)
and leveraging loan forgiveness or support
(which is likely to help working learners who
take out loans as part of an educational
nancing strategy).
Working learners who are low-income, who
come from a family without a postsecondary
credential, or who are not adequately prepared
for postsecondary education are likely to be
the most dicult group to assist. They are least
likely to be helped simply by changing policies.
These working learners are more likely to be
culturally disconnected from college, and have
lower persistence and completion rates than
others. Unlike transitioning and advancing
working learners, they do not necessarily have
the goal or incentive of a guaranteed job in front
of them. More information and experimentation
is needed to ascertain what kind of support
would enable them to succeed in school and be
more successful in the labor market.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
60
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Appendix 1. Data Sources
In preparing this report, the Georgetown University Center on Education and
the Workforce analyzed ve dierent databases to get a full picture of the
characteristics of working learners. The multiple sources were necessary to
understand dierent aspects and traits of working learners. Also, by studying
multiple databases, the authors were able to confirm that the findings were
consistent. However, because each database is dierent, they studied dierent
populations. The following is a brief description of each of the databases and
the populations that are covered by each.
The American Community Survey
The American Community Survey (ACS) is an ongoing nationally
representative survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau that provides
information on a yearly basis about the United States and its people. The ACS
obtains data about jobs and occupations, educational attainment, veterans,
and whether people own or rent their home, among other topics. In particular,
ACS contains information on family interrelationship, demographics, health
insurance, education, work, income, occupational standing, migration,
disability, and veteran status.
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health
The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health is a nationally
representative longitudinal sample of adolescents who were in grades 7-12 in
the United States during the 1994-95 school year. The respondents have been
followed into young adulthood with four in-home interviews conducted in
1995, 1996, 2001-2002, and 2007-2008. The most recent interviews in 2007-
2008 occurred when the respondents were between the ages of 24 and 34.
This survey looks at social, economic, psychological, and physical well-being
with contextual data on their families, neighborhoods, communities, schools,
friendships, peer groups, and romantic relationships.
Learning While Earning: The New Normal
68
National Postsecondary Student Aid Study (NPSAS:12)
The National Postsecondary Student Aid Study is a large, nationally-
representative sample of postsecondary institutions and students that contains
student-level records on demographics and family background, work experience,
expectations, receipt of nancial aid, and postsecondary enrollment. NPSAS
data come from multiple sources, including institutional records, government
databases, and student interviews. NPSAS examines the characteristics of
students in postsecondary education, with special focus on how they nance
their educations. The NPSAS:12 sample represents approximately 26 million
undergraduate and 4 million graduate students enrolled in postsecondary
education at any time between July 1, 2011 and June 30, 2012.
The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study
The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study (B&B) examines students’
education and work experiences after they complete a Bachelor’s degree, with a
special emphasis on the experiences of new elementary and secondary teachers.
Following several cohorts of students over time, B&B looks at Bachelor’s degree
recipients’ workforce participation, income and debt repayment, and entry into
and persistence through graduate school programs, among other indicators.
B&B draws its initial cohorts from the National Postsecondary Student
Aid Study (NPSAS).
Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study
The Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study (BPS) currently
surveys cohorts of rst-time, beginning college students at three points in time:
at the end of their rst year, and then three and six years after rst starting in
postsecondary education. The study collects data on student persistence in and
completion of postsecondary education programs, transition to employment,
demographic characteristics, and changes over time in their goals, marital
status, income, and debt, among other indicators. Like the Baccalaureate and
Beyond study, the BPS draws its initial cohorts from the National Postsecondary
Student Aid Study.
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