Eloy Oakley, President and CEO of College Futures Foundation: Post-Secondary Education Is Key to Equity And Prosperity

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Hello, I’m Van Ton-Quinlivan, CEO of Futuro Health. Welcoming you to WorkforceRx, an ongoing conversation with leaders and innovators offering insights into creating a future-ready workforce.

Today we’re going to focus on an interesting new study showing that if California lifted post-secondary attainment to 70% across every demographic group, the payoff would be $4.4 trillion in net economic gains over the next fifty years. But getting there means credentialing nearly two million more adults than current trends will deliver.

My guest today is Eloy Oakley, president and CEO of College Futures Foundation, the organization behind the study, which was produced in partnership with Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Before College Futures, Eloy served six years as Chancellor of the California Community Colleges, and was my boss while I was in the system. He also served as senior advisor to US Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, under the Biden administration. And he’s the host of his very own podcast, The Rant. Thanks very much for joining us today, Eloy.

Eloy Oakley
It’s great to be with you, Van.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well Eloy, your study is entitled The Golden Ticket Indicating that higher education is a singularly powerful factor in economic advancement. Help us understand why.

Eloy Oakley
Yes, so the report is in partnership with the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. They are experts at studying the workforce throughout the country, coming from an economist perspective. So we asked them to take a look at California, specifically the 70% attainment goal that Governor Gavin Newsom had issued for the state of California. And we wanted to ask the question, what would happen if the state achieved 70% attainment across all demographic groups, all working learners in California, regardless of zip code, regardless of background.

What we found was, based on their analysis, is that if we raised attainment, which right now sits around 56% across the state for working-age Californians, to 70% across all demographic groups, it would create an additional $4.4 trillion in economic lift. That would mean $214,000 for every working-age Californian, and it would move California from being the fourth largest economy on the planet to the third largest.

So it is a significant lift for the state of California, and it’s something that is it is attainable. Although you did say you know we need to significantly increase credential production particularly for underserved communities, but that is within our reach and while it requires about a $198 billion investment, in a state like California that’s not an overwhelming number.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So getting to this 70% goal by 2030 means that we are going to have to do quite a bit of work, since we’re currently at fifty six percent. Your organization, College Futures Foundation, is calling for 70% across every demographic group you mentioned. Why was it important to reframe the goal around equity across groups rather than any single statewide average?

Eloy Oakley
Yeah, so a state like California is very similar to states across the country. If we just continue to go down the road that we’re going, we will see increase in credential attainment in states like ours. But it won’t translate to the same economic lift because the workforce continues to become more and more diverse. The workforce continues to be more heavily dependent on working learners, individuals that are between twenty five and sixty years old. The pipeline of K-12 participants is in decline and will continue to be in decline. So we really need to do a much better job of people who are already in the workforce, adults, working learners, people who are balancing jobs and family.

Our systems of particularly public higher education in California were not built for that demographic of learners. So we really need to reimagine the way that we approach this and see it as an opportunity. See it as an opportunity to expand the economy in California, not just as the typical argument around equity and you know ensuring that communities of color or low income communities across our state or other states receive the same benefit of the California Dream or the American Dream. This is really about how to build an economy for the future. How to ensure that we have a workforce for the future and how do we ensure that people across all backgrounds can thrive in the new economy.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Eloy, the listeners may be thinking, hmm, when you talk about adults and the system that they need, isn’t that the community colleges? And you ran the community college system here in California as well as being the chancellor for Long Beach Community College. I was wondering if you could just give us a little bit of detail on what is the system that we need?

Eloy Oakley
Yes. So the California community colleges like the national community college system was built for learners who don’t necessarily have the same access to a traditional four year residential college experience, and that’s a great benefit to a state like California. California has the largest community college system in the country. And so our colleges are still built on a model that expects learners to show up in person, expects learners to go through a 16 or 18-week session, enroll two or three times a year. While that kind of access has done a great amount of work for the economy of a state like California — it certainly allowed me to be able to access higher education in California because I went to a community college after I got out of the US Army — but it still is limiting in the in terms of the number of working learners that it can serve.

One of the other questions we asked Georgetown was if our public systems in California — which again I’ll remind folks that we have the largest public systems of higher education, the largest public research university, the largest regional four-year university and the largest community college system in the country by far — even if they were optimized at full capacity, we still wouldn’t be able to reach the 70% attainment goal. So we need to add an additional layer of support for working learners in a state like California. Learners who can’t go on campus, learners who need a hybrid approach, learners who can learn while they’re in their place of employment and don’t have to go to a college campus.

So this is going to cause us to sort of reimagine how we show up for working learners in a way which we haven’t been able to do prior.

I love our California community college system. It does tremendous work. Two million students are being served, but two million students is not enough to get us to the goal.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
You mention additional layers being needed that working learners need perhaps a hybrid system, maybe decoupled from the academic calendar where they don’t need to show up in person. Are there any dots to connect between the current system and what the report has found, which is that six of twelve demographic groups are on track or will be falling short in terms of this attainment gap.

Eloy Oakley
Yeah, I think the report highlighted a very important data point, which is the largest and the fastest growing demographic group in the workforce is people of the Latinx background, Latinos, and that demographic group has the worst attainment of all the demographic groups in California. So if you think about it, if we don’t do something different — broadly speaking, but also specifically for that demographic group, which is the largest and the fastest growing segment of the California workforce — we’re gonna have a huge problem going forward.

So, it highlights the dots that we need to connect, we need to rethink how we’re serving the that demographic group, as well as other low-income demographic groups who are in communities that are not well served by the economy right now. And these are not just communities of color, these are rural white communities, these are far north communities that are disconnected from the current economy or are connected in a way that is only producing low wage work.

As we reimagine the system, we have to reimagine it from both the supply side and the demand side of the equation. Yes, we need to produce more credentials, but those credentials also have to be tailored to the jobs that are being created in the regions of the state, making sure that we’re building a resilient workforce so that the workers, the learners can continue to access learning throughout their career, and that the jobs that are being created align with wages that allow workers to live and to thrive in in their communities.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So you have been traveling around the state bringing this data forth and inviting action across all the regions of the state. And I wonder what are the what’s the feedback coming to you, especially with these populations like the older working age adults, the low income Californians, the Hispanic Latino population where the gap is the greatest?

Eloy Oakley
Well, in some ways, particularly when you’re in places like the inland empire or Central Valley, this is not news to those communities. This has been going on for quite some time. These are communities that have been underserved historically. So while seeing the number and seeing the impact that their communities would have on the overall number in California and understanding it from an economic point of view is new to them, but the problem is not. They’ve seen various variations of solution trying to be applied to this situation.

If you look at places like the Inland Empire, you have the challenges of a lack of capacity of postsecondary institutions compared to, say, Orange County or the Bay Area, and a lack of well-paying jobs. But what we know from places like the Inland Empire and what we’ve seen from the study that Georgetown did was more than fifty percent of the jobs that are being created will require additional skills, will require some type of credential. So we need to be preparing those communities now so that they can access those jobs and so that those employers have a workforce so that they’ll stay in those communities and continue to build the economy.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
And so your report calls for a historic public level of in investment. What’s the size and shape of it and what would pay for it?

Eloy Oakley
Well, you can look at it a couple of ways. One is strictly speaking, it’s about a $198 billion investment over those thirty years. Currently the state already– just if you just think about the public systems alone, not including Cal Grant and other support for the private nonprofits — it’s nearly $100 billion already, so while it sounds like a big number, one, if we made better use of the current investment and then found a way to add additional investments specifically targeted to the increasing the capacity in the way that would need to reach the 70% attainment goal, according to Georgetown’s own economists, that break even happens at five years. So after five years you begin to reap the benefits.

Five years is not a huge number. It’s not a long time. If you think about it, it’s within the second term of the next governor. So the next governor could be reaping the benefits of that investment by the time he or she hits their second term. So it’s doable. It would require leadership, it would require convincing the American or the California public that this is worth the investment. But the numbers are definitely there.

The return on that investment could be as high as $4.4 trillion, but it could be higher because what this report does not count is the compounding effect in future generations. Because as you know and your listeners know, if you give opportunity to a generation of workers that didn’t have post-secondary education before, future generations are more likely to participate in post-secondary education and continue to reap those benefits and continue to compound the return on that investment.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
College Futures leadership in this space and in this work is part of an alliance of shared goals from a very committed set of players nationally. I wonder what levers have been found that have produced the most gains on the national front or in other states, and which are still out there that you think that we should experiment with?

Eloy Oakley
Yes, so as you mentioned, this this is become sort of a national movement in a variety of different ways. First of all, the larger funders in this space, you know, our sister organizations across the country, from Gates to Lumina to Strata and others, are all looking at this as places of investment that they’re making in states and in systems across the country, states have taken this up.

I’ll mention Colorado. Colorado has done a lot of work over the years to realign its postsecondary ecosystem more closely aligned with its workforce ecosystem, so much so that recently Governor Polis collapsed several executive agencies in order to more closely work together. You also see this at the federal level with the recent legislation to enact what’s now called Workforce Pell and to get the nation moving on creating shorter term credential pathways for Americans of all backgrounds. So this is a movement.

I think the levers that that California can still try to get to and pull on are thinking about the role of employers and how employers play in this space. So many employers across the country have their own upskilling and reskilling programs. You think about Walmart or Disney or Chipotle or Verizon…many of these employers have already begun to find ways to reskill or to upskill their own workforce. So it’s thinking about state policy that encourages that, that connects it more directly to the workforce demand in the state of California.

Data systems are key to this. I think the cradle to career data system in California is gonna be key and other states are standing up their own data systems. So I think all that combined is sort of leading us down this road.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
And what would success look like for you in five years? Not in the 2035 finish line, but in the interim. What are markers where you think we can make progress?

Eloy Oakley
Well, I think certainly having closer alignment between supply and demand in the various regions of the state — aligning programs of study with value in the workforce in the marketplace — is something that we can start today and it in many cases has already started because of the accountability structures that the federal government has put in place for colleges and universities. We have the data, we have the insights to know which programs to study are actually creating value in regions across the state.

We need to double down on that. We need to create more accountability structures so that learners better understand when they enter into a program of study what is the return on investment, what should they expect, what kind of jobs are on the other end of that, and to hold institutions more accountable for ensuring the handoff to the employer. We can start to do all of that now and all that would align with the goal over the thirty plus years.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Now Eloy, you have a podcast called The Rant, which is an excellent title for podcasts.

Eloy Oakley
Yeah.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
So I would love to end our podcast with the following question. Do you have any rants on the future of learning that you’d like to share?

Eloy Oakley
Boy, how much time do we have? Well I do think that what I’d like to focus on — and you know, Van, in many ways you were sort of at the leading edge of my rant here — because you have been working on the interface between communities and employment, labor and employment, employers, and that’s really where we’re at now.

This is not a question of whether or not higher education is of value. This is a question of ensuring that we create more value, taking responsibility as educators to ensure that 98% of learners that enter college or university expect an economic lift from their degree, their credential. That should not be a point of discussion. That is just a clear, transparent expectation that we should have for our institutions.

So, you know, instead of running away from this issue or hiding because we as educators — and I don’t particularly enjoy what’s coming out of Washington DC — but the reality is what’s coming is what has been brewing in cities and states for years…this discontent with where higher education is, the lack of transparency. It is the least transparent industry left in America, and the lack of outcomes that people are obtaining. I mean, we have this huge student debt crisis. That crisis was created because a lot of people got into programs of study that didn’t fulfill their expectations and we need to think about that and we as educators need to accept the responsibility for that and find a way to move forward in a way that’s much more transparent and much more accountable.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
And Eloy, where would listeners find your podcast?

Eloy Oakley
Well, they can certainly Google The Rant podcast, but it’s also on YouTube, it’s on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, all the audio. But you know, if you’re just on YouTube, you can just Google The Rant podcast and it’ll pop right up. We welcome anybody to join us on The Rant.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Well, thank you very much, Eloy, for being with us today. It’s so great reconnecting with you.

Eloy Oakley
Yes, it was great connecting with you as well, Van, and thank you for the work that you’re leading.

Van Ton-Quinlivan
Likewise, I am Van Ton-Quinlivan with Futuro Health. Thanks for checking out this episode of WorkforceRx. I hope you will join us again as we continue to explore how to create a future focused workforce in the nation.