Rachel Lipson: Bridging Business, Education, and Policy to Build a Better Workforce

Ben: What does it take to connect the very disconnected worlds of academia, government, and industry, all of which are involved in workforce development in different ways? Why does the US keep defaulting to the same types of education and training programs? And what would it look like to do something different? My guest today is Rachel Lipson, a researcher and policy entrepreneur affiliated with Harvard, Brookings, and the Aspen Institute. Her work sits at the intersection of education, business, and economic policy. Here's our talk.

Ben: Welcome to The Economics of Work. I'm excited to welcome Rachel Lipson. Rachel, you have so many affiliations I can't even count them: Harvard, Brookings, the Aspen Institute, doing so many cool things, all seemingly related to workforce development and social mobility. Excited to chat about all of those. Welcome.

Rachel: Thanks for having me. I'm a little embarrassed, but I've been calling this the portfolio phase of my career, because I've got a lot of different hats I'm wearing. But it's fun. I like it.

Ben: I feel like we'll probably see a lot more portfolio careers. Or maybe we will.

01:03 Business, education, and policy

Ben: Being in all these different parts of the economy, I feel like you're well equipped to weigh in on how they all relate to each other. How would you describe the relationship, as you see it, between academia, nonprofits, the federal government, and local government? How do they fit together, and how should they?

Rachel: Good question. Sometimes I refer to myself as economist-adjacent, so I'm often in a translation role across these different spheres. I tend to think of it as a Venn diagram of business, education, and policy, with academia sometimes touching all of those. The most exciting stuff, and the space I like to be in, is where those three circles converge.

01:58 Where business fits in workforce development

Ben: Interesting. Where do you see business fitting? I was thinking of these as education and government, maybe with sub-circles in that Venn diagram. I think of business as existing kind of outside workforce development, as I see it. But maybe that's not how it is, or how it should be.

Rachel: On the average day in the field of workforce development, that's probably more true, but certainly more than I'd argue it should be. A lot of the most interesting conversations I have these days, the ones where I learn the most, are with real companies that are hiring people. They're the ones who best understand what skills they're going to need and what models are going to work for them. And I'd argue that's especially true right now. If the speed of technological change is picking up, the ones positioned to stay in touch with how it's moving are the folks who have to adopt by virtue of having a profit motive. I'm afraid that if the education system is divorced from that demand signal, more than ever, it's not going to be able to keep up.

03:26 The CHIPS Act's demand-driven approach

Ben: I think that sounds right. You've been involved in the CHIPS Act and industrial policy. If we use that as an example of a government priority where all these things need to converge, where you need education to line up with what employers want, how did that play out? Where did it fall apart? Maybe it didn't fall apart; maybe it was a smashing success on all fronts. What's your assessment?

Rachel: Well, not to toot our own horn, but I think what we did on the CHIPS Act was pretty innovative, and it's an outlier from how government typically thinks about workforce development. Most of what we do is fund supply-side interventions, meaning we give out grants or formula funds to colleges or other types of training providers. I've also been making the case that historically we've done that mostly through an anti-poverty, employment policy lens, not a US competitiveness and innovation policy lens.

CHIPS flipped that on its head in a lot of ways. Industrial policy in and of itself is rare: it's unusual for the US government to select an industry and make direct investments in companies. The workforce piece ran parallel to that. In the law itself, the incentive money to construct and operate new semiconductor manufacturing facilities goes to companies, so the workforce money also flowed that way. That meant we were working in a demand-driven way that most government programs don't. Ultimately, the workforce dollars we deployed as part of the CHIPS Program Office flowed through companies like TSMC or Amkor. We had a structure in which we wanted them to work with organizations and partners in their communities, but they were in the driver's seat in deciding how to spend that allocation, and what kinds of solutions would be useful to them in getting these facilities online.

06:02 Workforce policy as competitiveness policy

Ben: It's interesting hearing you frame workforce development through this competitiveness justification. Just this past weekend, kind of randomly, I found a book on my bookshelf called Technology and Employment, written in 1987, the year before I was born. A long time has passed since then, and I picked it up because I was curious whether we're still having the same conversation. We're obviously talking about technology and employment a lot today. What struck me was how much of the focus then was hand-waving past employment effects in the name of international competitiveness. In the '80s, the big boogeyman was Japan. Everyone was saying we were going to be overtaken by Japan and the US had to retain its competitive edge, and therefore whatever happened on the employment-displacement side just wasn't that important, because we had to obsess over competitiveness. I thought that was an interesting framing. I never really think about the employment effects of something through the lens of international competitiveness, but it sounds like it can be a powerful justification for making the right policy moves. What do you think of that framing?

07:48 How little the US spends on job training

Rachel: First, that's interesting. I want to see the book. I think it's both a powerful narrative tool and, what I've been trying to get at, a framing that implies doing things differently. People in the workforce development field kind of know this, but I'd argue we've been lying to ourselves. A lot of people talk about it one way, but if you look at how most of the funds flow, and at the levels of investment over time, the US spends second to last in the OECD on active labor market policies. That's our job-training bucket. It also includes employment services: how do we help people who are out of work get into a new job, through things like job search assistance or other types of coaching? This is not an area where we've invested a lot of money, and it's gone down significantly in real terms over time.

If you look at the main workforce development law in the United States, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, it's peanuts compared to what we spend on higher ed. The actual money in it for training is probably a few hundred million dollars a year. And it's all categorized by disadvantaged groups you're supposed to help. There's one bucket for young adults who are disconnected from the labor market, and another for adults who have to meet very stringent disadvantage criteria. That means there are very few dollars aligned around making strategic plays for priority industries. That's just not how we've designed our system. So you may hear people talk about US competitiveness and its connection to workforce development, but I'd argue that's not the reality of how we've set things up, at least on the federal side.

10:11 Is this abundance for workers?

Ben: So the case you're making is that this shouldn't just be seen as a lever for social mobility and poverty alleviation. It should be seen as a path to being more productive. Is this a little bit Abundance-y in your mind?

Rachel: Yeah. What should I say? I was kind of surprised that Abundance didn't tackle more of the questions around human capital and labor. I'll just say that.

Ben: If you're listening, Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein, we're coming after you. No, I think it's a good point. It does seem aligned: if we want a society that does well for everybody, we should be thinking about productive capacity.

Rachel: It's that, but I think you can also think about it this way. If we don't have enough electricians in the US to expand the grid and bring new power capacity online, that's not just a private return on investment. There are spillovers onto the productive capacity of the entire US economy. The same is true for nursing shortages, and, since I know you and I both have young children, I'd say the same for daycare teachers. There's a set of jobs whose pipelines we've probably systematically underinvested in, because we've had a very individual focus, and I'd say a compliance focus: check a bajillion boxes to make sure this person is as poor as they say they are and really qualifies for public support. The net effect is that we basically haven't created a functioning system of non-college alternatives, where you get some training but not necessarily a four-year degree, for some of these really important fields.

12:22 Where immigration fits

Ben: As you think about making our capacity more productive, I thought it was interesting that you described the supply side of this market as the education funnel. That makes sense; it is a source of supply. But another source of supply is immigration. That's where my head would go: if I thought about increasing labor supply, I'd think, more people. Is that part of the conversation, or is it a different political issue?

Rachel: To be honest, in most places it's really not. When I was in the federal government, in the CHIPS office, I wore both hats: I was the workforce person, and I wound up being our immigration person too, thinking about special visa categories and the ways the Commerce Department might or might not be able to support people who were strategically important to the semiconductor sector. But it's not simple. The types of jobs I focus on, the ones that require some training, often also have licensing requirements and such, so there are frictions to immigration being an easy solution, even if you opened the spigot. I do think it's a good point that the two should probably be in conversation with each other more than they are. But for a variety of coalitional reasons, they usually aren't.

14:01 Founding the Harvard Project on Workforce

Ben: Opening up the conversation on these topics seems to be driven by these nonprofit-type institutes, and I think of the Harvard Project on Workforce as one of the pioneers in opening the conversation on how to think about these topics. You were the co-founder. Can you tell us the story of the Harvard Project on Workforce? What was its genesis, and what is it really all about?

Rachel: Great question. I was a grad student back in the day, already interested in these topics, and I was surprised that even a decade ago, when there was a lot of talk about what non-four-year-degree pathways look like and the future of work, there wasn't a real center or hub for that at the university. Obviously there were individual faculty members doing interesting research, but there wasn't a place where academics, students, and partners around the ecosystem could reach Harvard in a cross-school, interdisciplinary way. That was part of the founding story.

The reality is that it had very scrappy beginnings. The founding team was me; David Deming, who's now dean of Harvard College but at the time was a professor jointly at the Kennedy School and the Ed School; Joe Fuller at Harvard Business School; and Bob Schwartz, originally at the Harvard Ed School. We were just individual people committed to supporting a public good at Harvard, saying we should be doing more in this space and that our collective powers would be greater than individuals working under their own auspices.

To your earlier point, one decision we made was to build it as a big tent. I've always thought of the Project on Workforce this way: if you're interested in this set of issues, there's a home for you at Harvard and an infrastructure to get connected. We don't have an ideological test, or even a methodological one. This isn't just for economists or sociologists. We welcome anyone who wants to work on these issues, because we think it's important for a place like Harvard to be thinking bigger about how we help people make better transitions between education and the labor market.

16:46 Can Harvard drive mobility?

Ben: It's really incredible work, and I love what you all are working on. But I've always felt there's a bit of an irony to this being at Harvard. No fault to Harvard, they're serving a role, but it's very hard to make the case that Harvard is optimizing for economic mobility. In some ways, Harvard is the prime example of a closed club. It doesn't educate that many people, it's small by design, and it produces incredible research, but it doesn't seem to use its platform as an educator to optimize for social mobility. Am I wrong about that? Or is this just a different channel, where Harvard has all these resources and great researchers and is doing a public good in a way unrelated to the purpose it serves for the broader world?

Rachel: Well, first let me say I'm no longer the director of the Project on Workforce, so I'm speaking as Rachel, research fellow, sharing my personal views, which may or may not represent others in the project.

Being inside Harvard for many years, and I'll share, without being embarrassed, that I also went to Harvard as an undergrad and was at the Business School and the Kennedy School as a student, I've been around the Cambridge ecosystem for a long time. But it was only when we started the Project on Workforce that I understood more deeply the different roles Harvard plays in the world. Yes, it's an educational institution. I think you understand the importance of Harvard as a research institution. It's also a major employer in Boston. So there are a lot of different places where Harvard plays.

At the Project on Workforce, we're not intimately involved in delivering workforce development content or in the educational piece of the mission per se. It's been more focused on translating research into practice in the professional world. I've always tried to approach this work with a lot of humility about where Harvard has assets and can uniquely add value, and where it doesn't. In those cases, we love working with community colleges. A great part of the work at the Project on Workforce has been to let them lead and ask how we can amplify the great work they're doing. But things like having extraordinary researchers, access to data, and connection points across a business school, a policy school, and an education school, with future leaders who'll be in decision-making roles across society: if we can play a role in shaping what those leaders do, and what information and insights they draw on, I think we've done a service to the country.

Ben: Totally. At the very least, Harvard has tremendous access. Especially at the Business School and the Kennedy School, it's incredible who you can get in front of. You mentioned community colleges.

Rachel: Wait, can I just quickly say: I know we're in a very different world and a different moment today, but I can tell you that when I was an undergrad, 15 years ago or so, almost no one at Harvard was talking about this set of topics. Everything was college access and college success. All the education research was completely in that space. So I think it's been a net positive for the societal dialogue to have a set of people at Harvard saying, "Yes, and that's not the only answer." That's a powerful message.

Ben: So you're saying the message used to be all about four-year colleges, and now community colleges have entered the conversation.

Rachel: And apprenticeships, and other types of pathways, yes.

21:36 Why trust in four-year college fell

Ben: You've been a big part of that. What else do you think contributed to that change in the vibe? Has it been economic forces, or learning from what other countries are doing successfully? Why are we interested in community colleges, apprenticeships, and things like that?

Rachel: I'm interested to hear your thoughts too, Ben. But look at the time between when I was in college and today. You can look at the polling data, and I wish I had the numbers, but trust in higher ed, mostly conceived of as the four-year university sector, has been on a steady decline. That's just the reality of where public opinion is. Maybe there have been some shifts recently, but the student debt piece, what's happened with student loans and expectations around costs, has played a big role in those perceptions.

But also, and this goes back to what we were talking about before we hopped on, I think there's a lot to learn from community colleges. In a lot of places in the US, it's ingrained in their mission that they're part of the economic engine of a community. In many cases, they see it much more naturally as their job to partner with businesses and help train people for jobs. Most of higher ed has held its nose at that and said, "I, the professor, know better than you, business, about what this person needs to learn and what should go into the courses that make up their degree." We have this other segment of education in the US that just hasn't been built that way, and I think that's very powerful right now.

24:05 Rachel's new book and Colorado's quantum cluster

Rachel: I'll give you one example. For my book that's coming out in the fall, I was out in Colorado.

Ben: What is this? I didn't know there was a book coming out in the fall.

Rachel: There's a book coming out in the fall. It's called The New American Frontier: Job Training for the Next Technological Age.

Ben: Can't wait.

Rachel: I'm excited to hear your thoughts. It looks at regions that have been early to different technological changes and tries to understand what types of jobs are coming online there, and what has and hasn't worked in getting people into them. There's a big focus on community college-type roles, like technicians and the construction trades, that are important to getting high-tech facilities online and into production.

I did a case on the quantum industry in Colorado, which has been built on a longstanding strength in optics manufacturing. NIST is out there in Boulder, and the University of Colorado Boulder has been a leading physics research hub. A bunch of optics companies came out of that and spun off, and they're now really important to quantum, because quantum relies in a lot of ways on lasers, in addition to those super-cold refrigerators. So physics research that led to optics has now seeded a cluster of quantum startups and companies.

I spent a lot of time talking to CEOs and founders of these companies, and also to some of the education partners. A lot of the companies are founded by people with physics PhDs, which makes sense. They have a very specific conception of how the education system works, based on their own experience: I did my bachelor's in physics, then I got my PhD in physics. Maybe you know more physics PhDs than I do, so tell me if I'm wrong, but my sense is that in a physics PhD you spend the first few years in theoretical training, and only at the very end are you in the lab using actual tools. But these companies have to produce actual products that work. Think about the lasers or refrigerators that will power quantum applications: these are real physical products with real iteration. They need people who can solder wires and things like that. And their mindset is, "Well, I didn't get to do that until the late stages of my PhD."

When you talk to them about how they're thinking about hiring, one of them basically told me, "I tried to hire someone with a bachelor's in physics, and they had no experience. They knew nothing about working with these tools or working in a lab, because they'd had zero of that in their physics education." So when they hear about a community college student with an associate degree, they think, "That's half a bachelor's. This person is going to be even less well equipped." But in reality, in a community college optics program, you're working with the tools from day one. Everything is applied. They layer theory on top of the application. It's never "sit through lectures about physics and maybe years later try some of the concepts." It's built in from the start. When the founders hear that, they say, "Oh wow, that's really interesting." It's just a misconception, because the way this whole segment of the US education system has been built is basically the opposite of what they experienced.

So I think we're in a really interesting moment, and I'm interested in your views on this. If some of the experience people used to get on the job is being cut out by AI, we're going to need even more of it in the education system. We should be looking at places like community colleges right now, which have built this into the core design of how they educate.

28:30 AI and the entry-level squeeze

Ben: Totally. When I was getting educated, I had to do a bunch of stuff I would never do on the job, like math proofs. And I thought, "Great, because I'll never do this outside a classroom." There's no world where you'd get someone to do math proofs in their free time. But you could totally learn to program in your free time, or learn economic concepts, or history. You could learn a lot of what you learn in school not just in your free time but on the job. So I thought, "I don't want to learn that in school, because I can do it on the job. While I'm in school, I should do the non-vocational stuff, because it's the only place I'll find it."

But that really means that when you start a job, you can't do much of anything, and you rely on on-the-job training. I don't know if it was like this for you, but at my first job, I don't think I was very good. I had to work a lot harder just to be minimally acceptable, working long weeks to do things that were kind of easy. I was very unequipped. In some way, our training is subsidized by the employer. So if we're now in a world where AI systems lessen the need for entry-level labor, I suspect entry-level wages will be quite low, maybe even negative. At that point it's basically education.

Rachel: That's depressing. What do you think we should do about that? I'm trying to work on some of those questions at the moment, because I perceive that this has been underweighted in the policy dialogue. I think there's an acknowledgment that, if you look at the data, the only place you can really see early effects right now might be the entry-level segment. But then everyone seems to say, "They'll be fine. They're young, they'll learn, and in the long run they'll be better off than older workers." Who knows, maybe that'll prove true. But we also know from the econ literature that people who graduated into normal recessions, not even structural shifts, saw really long-run detrimental effects. And if you look at the booing of AI at graduations, and at polling showing young people are the most negative, I feel we should at least take seriously that there may need to be some kind of serious intervention targeting this segment of the workforce, and we should have some ideas in our pocket.

31:55 Will we skip the mental workout?

Ben: Totally agree. One thought I've been kicking around is a little half-baked, so let me try it out on you and see if it makes sense. I was thinking: if you do something the easy way, that's a shortcut, and you don't learn. You could use AI to produce some work output, and you don't learn to do things the hard way, and your development suffers. Fine. But a lot of people exercise, and when they exercise, they don't have robots lift weights for them. They understand they have to do it the hard way, because that's how you grow. So people do know that if you want to grow and develop, you have to do things without the help of machines.

But then, going back to the other side: since we no longer require physical labor, some people exercise, but a lot of people have become very obese. Maybe the same will happen with intellectual exercise. If we have this crutch, some people will learn to do things the hard way, and good for them, they'll be the exercisers among us. But there will be non-exercisers too, and things could look very bad for them for a long time. I'm a little nervous about the non-exercising population in the mental domain.

33:39 School as a low-stakes place to fail

Rachel: That's interesting. The only thing it made me think of: when I was in business school, I was very skeptical of all the soft-skills classes on leadership, negotiating, and things like that. I wanted to do technical things and become a deep expert. But when I look back at my education and think about what was most valuable, the opportunity to fail in a setting where the stakes were pretty low, around these work skills, was one of the most valuable things I gained. So I wonder how we create those kinds of environments for people. In a business school section, you do a case, and sometimes the incentive is to drop the biggest bomb: say something crazy and see if you can rile up the room. When else in your life can you do that? Once you're in a job, the stakes are really high, and you don't want to be risky about what you try. I don't know if this exactly gets at your point, but I've been thinking about it a lot too: taking advantage of education as the place where you can have some risk appetite, try stuff, and understand what resonates with other humans, and why.

35:17 Grade inflation and college as summer camp

Ben: It does feel like that. I teach a course at NYU-

Rachel: What course is it?

Ben: It's called The Future of Work, which tracks. I love that course. The students are great, I really like the topics, and I like talking about it. But it does feel low stakes. Teaching in general feels a lot lower stakes than it used to, and that idea of dropping a bomb and failing just doesn't seem to happen anymore. When I was teaching economics and econometrics, people struggled more, I think. Maybe that's the nature of those courses, but that's the vibe I'm seeing.

Rachel: Do you mean from the students, or from the culture of higher ed changing? What do you think it is?

Ben: It's hard to disentangle those two things. But since I started teaching, in 2010, which was a long time ago, grade inflation has been on the rise, so people expect higher grades. I think courses have gotten easier. The education part of higher ed, at least four-year degrees, seems to be eroding, but the signaling element is still there, and the network element seems quite strong. Did you ever go to summer camp as a kid?

Rachel: I did. I went to many years of summer camp.

Ben: In summer camp, you learn a lot, right? You're not being educated, but you're surrounded by other kids, and the stakes are actually quite high. There are social things you learn. I don't know about you, but I've fallen on my face and embarrassed myself socially, and those feel like learning experiences. I wonder whether living on a campus with people, four-year college as summer camp, is actually useful in a non-direct-education way, in a way community colleges don't offer to the same degree.

37:59 Elite colleges and the value of networks

Rachel: I think that's right. There's a paper by John Friedman and colleagues on the returns to the most selective colleges in the US. If I recall, they think a lot of the effect is that it's not just signaling. You learn something useful about how to interact in that particular context, the very elite world of high achievers, and there's a skill set around that which sets you apart for life. I should check with John, but I think that's a mechanism. Have you seen this paper?

Ben: No, but it sounds really useful.

Rachel: All that's to say, if that's what four-year college becomes, there are a lot of questions. Does it need to be four years? Is the structure of majors optimally set up to get you that outcome? There's a lot of rethinking to do, even if we accept that as a primary purpose. And if I were advising a college today: you've probably seen the research on the sheer number of applications going through automated tracking systems these days. It's massive.

Ben: For jobs.

Rachel: For jobs. So it matters more than ever: do you know someone who can put in a word for you? Is there an actual human who's going to vouch for you? Whether it's a college network or another network, it seems to me the ROI of having a network is only going up, not down.

39:55 Should community colleges train for local jobs?

Ben: Totally. It's a very dark thought for mobility, but it seems right to me. Let me go back to community colleges. One thing I never quite know what to make of is the idea of community colleges being about a local community. I get that that's where economic activity happens. But as an outsider, it also seems important, in a way, to let declining communities decline. Are we protecting against that too much?

Rachel: By having a community college?

Ben: By having institutions that incentivize place-based economic activity and training.

Rachel: This is actually something I wrote about back in grad school. In a lot of states, community college systems don't really operate as a system, and I think they should, more. Way back when, I visited a community college right on the Mexican border in Imperial County, California, called Imperial Valley College. Do you know that part of California? It's mostly agricultural, with a lot of first-generation Mexican immigrants whose families have worked in agriculture. There's no four-year institution in the county, apart from a small satellite campus of San Diego State, so if you're going to stay local and enroll in higher ed, the community college is basically the only game in town.

In workforce development, people have traditionally been told to align to the jobs in their local labor market. That's been the longtime rule of the game. But when you go somewhere like that and say, "Align to the jobs in your local labor market," they say, "Well, there aren't a whole lot of jobs here today that pay wages worth someone investing multiple extra years of education." So what should that college do? I think it's probably a multi-pronged thing. For one, I'm interested in the role of educational institutions in supporting entrepreneurship and being the incubator for their community. In a lot of cases, they are a center of economic activity. The best community colleges do this. In Lorain County, Ohio, they co-locate manufacturing companies on campus. They're an economic development attraction tool. It's really wild what you can do when you do it well.

But also, if someone from Imperial County goes to Imperial Valley College and gets a healthcare credential, they should be able to access healthcare postings and jobs in San Diego or LA that might be the turf of another community college. My sense of how this works, not just at community colleges but in public higher ed broadly, is that each school says, "These are my employers and these are my jobs." They're not sharing them to create a unified labor market, asking, "As the California community college system, don't we want to deliver good jobs for our students? And if geographic mobility is one lever of that strategy, shouldn't we support it?" I don't think that's been a strength of community colleges. But it's a broader challenge in US political economy right now, so I wouldn't hold it against them specifically. Who is acting to encourage people to move out of their communities?

Ben: We need to relearn the lessons of free trade, both within the United States and between countries.

44:34 What Tesla learned from Austin Community College

Ben: Let's imagine a world where companies get really good at evaluating candidates. Do you think that lessens the need for formal credentials, relative to education without credentials?

Rachel: I'll give you another community college example, because I think it's an easier case to imagine in hands-on, production-type roles. One of the cases in my book is Tesla's Gigafactory in Austin and its partnership with Austin Community College, which went from zero to gangbusters, over a thousand students a year, in just a few years.

First, one piece of this that's interesting from a policy perspective is that Texas gives funding to companies to do training specific to their needs. Basically the only criterion is that you have to work with and through the community college system or another nonprofit training provider. A lot of people on the left don't like models like this. It's an analog to what I was describing with CHIPS, and they view it as a corporate giveaway. A lot of economists have historically objected too: you're subsidizing firm-specific skills, so why are we giving money to Tesla? They should be doing this themselves. But I think a lot of that conversation has missed the fact that Austin Community College wound up working not just with Tesla but with a bunch of other manufacturers in the region. That's partly because they got really good at it by being incentivized to overcome the frictions: working closely with a leading-edge company, getting the equipment, building up instructor capacity. That has spillovers, letting them offer that kind of training to many other employers.

The second thing: at the start, it seemed like Tesla was going to use the community college channel for some of its soft commitments around local hiring and showing it was working with the local ecosystem. Then they measured the productivity of people on the floor. These cohorts got a short training, we're talking eight to 10 weeks. They're hired as Tesla employees first and paid, then they go to the community college and learn the basics of manufacturing, working with robots, and so on, and then they come back as Tesla production associates. Those workers were measured to be more productive. So Tesla decided to send all its people through that channel: everyone they hire off the street now goes to the community college first, because they're seeing returns relative to people coming in with no experience.

That's interesting to me. Someone should run the full academic study to understand the mechanism, the secret sauce of what the college offers that made workers from that program more productive than the ones hired straight off the street. But it's at least promising that education institutions have something pretty valuable to offer here, and that there are ways to set this up so the two complement each other.

Ben: It's a great example, because that's clearly a pure education effect. It's not about signaling or anything else.

48:48 What Rachel hopes for her daughter

Ben: One final question for you. Let's fast-forward 16 years, when your daughter goes off to wherever. What do you think she'll be doing?

Rachel: Oh man, what a question. I hope she's happy. I think she'll be doing something with people. I'm already very focused on her social interactions. I think community is one of the most important things we have. Sure, I'm sure she'll be competent at working with machines in ways you and I can't even imagine. But the thing I feel confident I can pass along to her is how to build community: how to build relationships you can trust and rely on. I think that's really important for being a happy human who contributes to this world.

Ben: Very admirable goal. I hope it happens.

Rachel: What about your kids?

Ben: I hope the same. My wife is a psychologist, and when my oldest daughter, who's five, asks what she does, my wife says, "I'm a feelings doctor." Then she asks, "What about you, Dad?" And I say, "I'm a doctor of work." She's such a daddy's girl that she says, "I want to be a doctor of work." Of course I shouldn't take it seriously, but part of me thinks, "Oh yeah, I really hope you become a labor economist." Maybe everyone wants their kids to do what they do, as a way to feel close to them. It feels like we're figuring out something that isn't well figured out, and I guess I hope the next generation figures out what we haven't been able to. That seems nice. But when I say this to my wife, she says, "You've got to let her do whatever she wants. Don't be prescriptive." And I say, "Okay, you're really getting ahead of this issue," because it will be an issue.

Rachel: I think there's an optimistic way to look at all this. My great-grandparents who came to the US literally could not have conceived of what my day looks like. But they'd probably say, "Oh, that seems pretty good compared to how we have it." One of them was an ice laborer in New York City, literally carrying bags of ice around before refrigerators. So I'm actually hopeful that our kids and grandkids will look back and say, "I can't believe you were doing these menial tasks, wasting your time in spreadsheets and writing emails." That's my optimistic hope for her future.

Ben: I hope so too. This conversation is work, kind of. We're mixing the two.

Rachel: We're very lucky that this is what we get to do.

Ben: Yeah, right. Maybe we'll keep progressing along this dimension. Rachel, thank you so much for being part of the show. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Rachel: Thank you so much. This was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me.

Ben: The Economics of Work is brought to you by Revelio Labs, workforce data for research and benchmarking. If you enjoyed this episode, please remember to rate, review, and subscribe. It'll help us reach other curious listeners. I'm your host, Ben Zweig. Our producer is Cole Wagner. Thanks for listening.