Hi, it’s Dan.

Today, we are sharing a brief excerpt from Managing the Future of Work, the critically-acclaimed podcast from my colleagues at Harvard Business School. Each episode, HBS professors Bill Kerr and Joe Fuller talk to CEOs, technologists and experts grappling with the forces that are reshaping the nature of work.

In this excerpt from a recent episode of Managing the Future of Work, you’ll hear from HBS alum Stephen Moret (MBA 2001), who is the president and CEO of Strada Education Foundation. Stephen talks about aligning post-secondary education, economic mobility, and labor market demand.

You can find Managing the Future of Work on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts. Enjoy.

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Bill Kerr: As job openings consistently outnumber the unemployed, attention is focused on how the labor market’s mismatch in skills disadvantages both employers and workers. For many, particularly those from traditionally underserved communities, the path from high school to a viable career is strewn with obstacles. Yet, despite the friction over diversity goals, there’s widespread agreement that, in better aligning post-secondary programs with market requirements, there’s a shared benefit in prioritizing equitable access. Is it time for a new approach to economic development that elevates the role of inclusive workforce development?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Bill Kerr. My guest today is Stephen Moret, president and CEO of Strada Education Foundation, a nonprofit working at the intersection of post-secondary education and employment. Stephen returns to the podcast after joining us in 2020, when he and Joe Fuller discussed Virginia’s winning proposal for Amazon’s HQ2 expansion. As head of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership, the HBS graduate led the effort, which centered on bolstering the state’s talent pipelines. Today we’ll talk about Strada’s research, programs, and advocacy aimed at improving the progression from post-secondary education and training to career. We’ll look at the effectiveness of state systems and consider the policy options at both the state and federal levels. We’ll also discuss underemployment among college graduates and the bigger picture of workforce development as a component of economic development. Stephen, welcome back to the podcast.

Stephen Moret: Great to be back, Bill. Thank you.

Kerr: Stephen, tell us a little bit about what attracted you to Strada after a career that’s been in economic and workforce development.

Moret: Sure. It’s been an absolute privilege to be here at Strada Education Foundation. I grew up as the son of a single mother in rural Mississippi. If you’ve seen the movie Forrest Gump, you have a pretty good sense of what my upbringing was like. And while we were never truly legally poor, there was that sense of economic insecurity the whole way. And so higher education to me really represented this promise of economic mobility and something that I really clung to as I was getting a little bit older into my high school years and thinking about what was next after high school graduation. Over the course of my career, I mostly worked at the intersection of higher education, economic development, and workforce development. And the common thread of all three of those things, particularly over the last 10 years in an accelerating way, has been the importance of talent. And it was really interesting to me to see how each of those sectors looked at talent development and, in particular, the misalignment between what employers are looking for, what individuals are looking for, and what institutions often are producing. So to me, working at Strada has really represented an opportunity to focus all of my time on the work that I think is absolutely essential to the future of the American Dream in this country, absolutely essential to enabling people to have equitable pathways to opportunity, and enabling employers to meet their talent needs as well.

Kerr: Strada’s got a lot of name recognition, but maybe begin with a little bit about what the organization does. Tell us a little bit about it.

Moret: Sure. We’re the largest nonprofit organization in the country with the singular focus on strengthening the link between education and opportunity. We, like many people that support higher education, really fervently believe in the multiple purposes of higher education. And while there are many benefits to higher education in the United States, that sort of role of higher education as an enabler of economic mobility is one that we want to help ensure happens more consistently—or delivers, rather, more consistently—for individuals, especially those that have faced the greatest challenges historically. So folks that are first-generation students, people of color, low-income students, and so forth, very, very important to us. So our whole focus is helping ensure that those who pursue and complete some form of post-secondary education are able to have good outcomes after they finish.

Kerr: So give us an example of some of the projects that you’re engaged in.

Moret: Sure. We’re very active in the research space, exploring opportunities to improve outcomes for individuals, opportunities to improve alignment with the labor market as well. We do quite a bit of grant-making and supporting organizations that do work in this space. We also increasingly are getting into public policy development and advocacy at both the state and federal levels, as when we really think about large-scale—kind of ecosystem-scale—change, a lot of that really is going to require public policy change. Another sort of unique aspect of Strada has been that we have both acquired—and in some cases created—new national nonprofit organizations in order to address some of the specific challenges and opportunities that we see in this space. And if you think about this work, everything we do focused on strength and the link between education opportunity, there’s really five big enablers of equitable pathways to opportunity through post-secondary education that really represent the central focus of our work. The first one is clear outcomes. This is really all about ensuring that states and the federal government have the education-employment data systems in place to enable everyone involved—learners, institution leaders, policymakers, and even employers—to be able to make well-informed choices about post-secondary education programs. The second one is quality coaching. For most learners who grow up in a highly educated, affluent family, they get most of what they need to know about education and career pathways just around the dinner table. But for those who grow up in more challenging circumstances, providing quality education to career coaching or advising in both high school and college is absolutely essential. And that’s something we’re doing a lot of work on. The third big focus area is affordability, which sort of speaks for itself. The fourth is work-based learning opportunities, like paid internships and apprenticeships. These are things that really reliably and substantially improve outcomes, not only for individuals, but for the employers who hire them. And then, finally, employer alignment—ensuring that the way that we fund post-secondary education doesn’t discourage institutions from providing those high-wage, high-demand programs that consistently lead to good outcomes for students.

Kerr: Well, in a Venn diagram, I certainly think there’s a lot of overlap between the research you’re doing and the types of research that our project has been engaged in. And so I think we can break down and think about a lot of different pieces here. I’d like to begin with some of your work that is state-by-state. So we think a lot about geographic disparities in this country, which are probably—well almost certainly—have been growing over the recent decades. So I’d love to hear a little bit about the work you do about post-secondary education pathways to work. And are there some states that are really standout that we can point to or places where there’s persistent problems?

Moret: Sure. Well, I think, if you step back and look at the modernish history of higher education—if we go back, let’s say the last 50 years, maybe 50 years ago—perhaps the central focus at that time was access. How do we make sure people can attend college? The last 20, 25 years or so, the completion agenda has really been the big focus. Let’s make sure people not only go, but that they can finish those credentials. We’re right now at this transition point to a greater awareness and a sense of urgency around outcomes—making sure that, if people do get access, if they do complete, that they have good outcomes after they complete. And really one of the central actors in this whole ecosystem is states and state policymakers. We, in early April 2024, recently published the first State Opportunity Index. And while the U.S. in general has roughly the best higher education system in the world, we’re not doing as well—at least not as consistently well—in ensuring that people have good outcomes after they complete. If I was going to call out perhaps two or three states that are doing some interesting, compelling things, certainly Texas on data systems, on employer alignment, some of the things they’ve done with how they fund technical colleges and community colleges. Virginia around targeted interventions to help close gaps between what higher education is producing and the outcomes individuals receive, as well as alignment with the labor market. I think the big takeaway from this report, the State Opportunity Index, is, despite a lot of good things that are happening, there’s a tremendous amount of room for improvement in every state in the country.

Kerr: Can you give a sense of numbers and a relative scale? If we thought 10 was outstanding, the best we could make it, where is Texas, Virginia? And then, also, what’s the span? How much better is Texas than one of the lowest-performing states?

Moret: It’s a little tricky because if you look across indicators, there are two of them, for example, that to the best of our understanding that really every state is trailing in. One of them is quality education-to-employment coaching at the high school, and certainly at the college level. We don’t believe that any state has nailed that yet, including those that I suggested were doing great work. Likewise, on work-based learning, roughly 75 percent of recent college graduates, public college graduates in the U.S., have not completed a single paid internship prior to graduation. But everything that we’ve seen suggests that probably all the states are really underperforming in those two things. So I’m a little hesitant to point out those differences. Overall, it’s a much more mixed and nuanced picture.

Kerr: Okay. If you characterize things that you, the attributes, the traits, the behaviors, the ways that the successful states are approaching it, is it a willingness to experiment? Or is it highly aligned public-private partnerships? What are some of the traits that you say, if you’ve got that, you’re going to be heading in the right direction?

Moret: I think the first one—attainment—is very important, and there’s been great progress on educational attainment rates in general. But if you think about most states have adopted sort of a singular attainment goal, like a single number—like, let’s shoot for 55 percent or 60 percent of our adult population, let’s say, with a post-secondary credential—the challenge with that is, without further nuance, there’s risks that you have, growing underemployment on the one hand, and at the same time, even though more people are getting credentials, there’s a persistent percentage of high-wage, high-demand jobs that aren’t getting filled for key employers in those states as well.

Kerr: Okay. One of the other bodies of research you’ve been doing has been with the Burning Glass Institute, and you’ve looked a lot at underemployment among college graduates. So tell us a little bit about the root causes of that underemployment. And what are some of the takeaways of that research program?

Moret: The vast majority of individuals who pursue a college degree, particularly a bachelor’s degree or beyond, envision some kind of college level sort of professional employment outcome, if you will. And over the long arc of time, that’s generally been true for most students, certainly true for most students today, but not by a wide margin. This most recent report (pdf), we did a very in-depth analysis of many millions of resumes of actual college graduates and looked at the actual occupational outcomes that they have. And what we found was slightly more than half of new college graduates are underemployed. We’re not measuring whether someone got a job in their field, we’re measuring whether they got any kind of college level occupation. So, for example, an engineer who goes to work as an investment banker or a management consultant would still count as a college-level employed outcome. So roughly half of folks are not initially in a college-level job. But even more important, what this report showed is that underemployment is very sticky. The strong majority of those folks who start out underemployed will still be underemployed 10 years later. And there’s a significant implication of that, not only for the quality of work and the further human capital development that they would experience, depending on the occupation they’re in, but also the vast majority of the time, there’s either no additional college earnings premium or a very small college earnings premium, compared to what a college-level employed graduate would get. We originally partnered with Burning Glass Institute in 2018 for the first edition of this work, which was called the “Permanent Detour”. This second edition had several really interesting new features. One is that, field of study is the single-strongest predictor of whether someone would be in a college level job or not. The second-strongest predictor was whether or not someone completed at least one internship. And for those individuals that completed at least one internship in college, their likelihood of being underemployed went down 50 percent—five zero—compared to those that did not. We already believed in that—your work and others at Harvard have validated the importance of internships. But this was yet one more piece of that story. We looked how underemployment varies by state, and while it does vary a good bit, interestingly, the vast majority of the states are within a few percentage points of each other. So underemployment is high, really, nationwide. And then finally, we looked at how underemployment varies based on whether someone got an additional education beyond a bachelor’s degree, like a master’s degree, a PhD, and so forth. And we did find a very sharp reduction in underemployment for those that go on and get additional education. It might even explain in the last 10 years, the last decade or so, the U.S. census said—it was either last year or the year before—that over the last decade when they reported that there was a 50 percent increase in the percentage of the U.S. population with a master’s degree. I suspect a lot of that is actually folks going back to get an extra credential that gives them a better outcome.

Kerr: So. Stephen, imagine you’re in a conversation with leaders of these post-secondary institutions, which have admittedly—especially right now in April 2024—lots and lots that are on their plate and that they’re trying to juggle. What are some of the things—we’ve mentioned, internships, we’ve mentioned work-based learning. What are some of the best things that they can activate to minimize this gap?

Moret: Absolutely. Very important for any student who’s planning to go directly into the labor market after they finish their undergraduate degree, to really start the career exploration process in earnest as early as possible in their college experience, if not before. Too many students wait to the last year or even the last semester to scramble and try to find a good job—particularly important for those students who are pursuing a field that has higher risk of underemployment after they graduate. Second is exactly what you mentioned, internships. I would argue every college in the country should be encouraging all of their students to have at least one, if not multiple, paid internships before they complete college. It’s a much lower-stakes decision to take a six- or eight-week job in the summer and then go back to school than it is to move across the country for a full-time position after you graduate. I think, in general, giving students better information about outcomes would also be helpful—not necessarily to encourage them to study something different, but just enable them to go into the experience with open eyes and really understand, okay, if you want to study this particular field that has a high risk of underemployment, it means all the other things that you might do to improve your outcomes come even more important. One example of that would be someone, let’s say studying a liberal arts field that doesn’t have much math intensity, might want to get a minor in data science or statistics or something like that, that would make them a little bit more likely to get a college-level job after they finish.

Kerr: Yeah, I can imagine the educator also turning it around and saying, it would also be helpful if, on the other side, the employers did this, this, and this. And so let’s look at that part of the workplace and people being hired up to their potential. What role should employers play in shaping the education, the training programs? Should they broaden the aperture of the degrees that they are valuing as they look at potential candidates?

Moret: Well, I think to me, the most practical thing that employers could do would be to offer more internship opportunities. Policymakers possibly have a role to play as well. There’s some interesting experiments happening, where states are looking at subsidizing the cost of the paid internship, either directly to the student or to the employer, or both. Folks are less productive as an intern than they be as a permanent employee. I think secondly, where an employer, particularly a sizable employer, is located near one or more higher-education institutions that are interested in meeting their needs, dedicating at least a little bit of staff time to helping advise them on where their graduates are meeting the bar and where there may be gaps. Some of the most interesting partnerships—and this now I’m talking not necessarily just at the four-year institution level, but for community colleges as well—is where some major employers have, in some cases donated equipment or donated staff time to be able to work with them to make sure that what they’re producing is well aligned to what their needs are. And finally—and actually, think one of the biggest untapped opportunities that we’re going to be working on at Strada—is encouraging employers through their employer associations like State Chambers of Commerce, the U.S. Chamber, the Business Roundtable, even trade associations, to advocate for some of the policy changes that are needed to help improve not only outcomes for individuals, but improve their talent pipelines as well.

Kerr: Give us an example of that last one. What on the ground would be happening to provoke these policy changes and try to make for a better overall playing field here?

Moret: Sure. So if you think about those five key enablers or indicators of pathways to opportunity that I talked about earlier, each of those will have one to several policy solutions tied to them that would really accelerate progress. We’re going to be fleshing those out in the coming months. Perhaps the most obvious one would be on the clear outcomes, the first one I mentioned.

Education-employment data systems in the U.S. today, there’s just some really big gaps. Most states, for example, can tell you—or even this college scorecard can tell you for just about any college bachelor’s degree program—what a typical earnings outcome would be. But the vast majority of states actually can’t tell you what kind of jobs people get. Well, that’s really critical, not only for individuals to do their own planning, but critical to really have any sense of supply-demand gaps that are not being met in the labor market. So this is a place where there’s a role that employers can play by adding just a little bit more information, for example, to their quarterly wage reporting, like adding a title or occupation for all the folks who they are already reporting wages for, that would help the state to aggregate and really be able to do these kinds of analyses to produce insights that people could make well-informed decisions based on.

Kerr: Stephen, I wanted to have us maybe add all this up into a picture of what would success ultimately look like here. I know it probably won’t happen in either of our lifetimes, given the pace of change and the challenges that always come up and develop it. But if you had to paint a beautiful success story for where the community college, college completion programs could be with the workplace, what would be that world?

Moret: I believe this is going to happen in our lifetimes. In fact, I think it’s going to happen in an accelerating way over the next seven to 15 years in the U.S. And as we start to see a few states really become exemplars and people can see how powerful the outcomes are, we’ll see not only other states adopt more of these best practices, but also we’ll see the federal government play a bigger role as these ideas have been validated in states. The second thing I want to say, contextually, is that this is not about saying that higher education needs to just be about jobs. This is something that can be done in the context of higher education. Derek Bok, the former president of Harvard, wrote a number of great books, but in one of them, he talked about the multiple purposes of a college education, and one of them he said was career preparation. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it shouldn’t dominate. It’s just about saying that, hey, most people, this is a big part of what they want to get out of it, so let’s do a better job of helping them to have good outcomes as part of that college experience—and, by the way, that’ll help a lot of employers as well. What will that future look like? It will mean that learners—as they’re getting into high school, maybe even into middle school—start to get earlier exposure and personalized advising on how they could connect their interests to potential career pathways and educational programs that would help them get there. It would mean that they would have personalized coaching—at least at the high school and at the college level—along the way to be able to chart a course. And by the way, it’s not just the information, particularly for those folks that are coming from lower-income backgrounds. It’s developing healthy mindsets, overcoming self-doubt, overcoming challenges they face along the way. It would mean that we have affordable pathways to all of these occupations, for everyone that is prepared and willing to do the work. It would mean that everyone has access to quality paid work-based learning opportunities. And finally, if we design this the right way, it will also mean that, not only did they get good outcomes when they finish, but employers will better be able to meet their talent needs as well. We really see this as kind of an integrated set of solutions, and if they can all be implemented together in an integrated way, we really think the whole country is going to benefit from this—not just at the individual level, but employers as well, regional competitiveness, and even national competitiveness, I would say.

To listen to this full episode with Stephen Moret, visit and follow HBS Managing the Future of Work on your favorite podcast app.

Skydeck is the Harvard Business School alumni podcast featuring interviews and insights from across the world of business. It’s produced by the External Relations Department at HBS. Our audio engineer is Craig McDonald.

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Stephen Moret

MBA 2001

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