We learned last week that for the first time, the Department of Labor will administer the federal Talent Search Program, one of the longest-running TRIO grants, on behalf of the Department of Education. ED says the grants are now fully aligned with the Trump administration’s “reindustrialization agenda” and its America’s Talent Strategy, which prioritizes stronger links between postsecondary education and the workforce and seeks to scale registered apprenticeships.
The shift in priorities for Talent Search is one of several signs that policymakers increasingly see higher ed through a workforce lens. Earlier this month, the Bipartisan Policy Center released its own strategy for the future of the American workforce. The report envisions an ideal of K–12 educators and postsecondary education aligning their programs to the skills employers need and that states prioritize.
Some higher ed leaders have expressed alarm at what they see as attempts to mold higher ed into workforce-training institutions. These two arenas have always overlapped as postsecondary pathways, but universities and colleges are right to question what could be lost if the boundaries between the two evaporate entirely. But the push for more workforce development isn’t just coming from policymakers: Students, parents and employers also increasingly want to see straight lines between educational programs and jobs.
The institutions that don’t find a way to respond to ever-louder calls for workforce training in higher education risk being left behind. Worse still, institutions that don’t figure out this balancing act risk deepening the stratification of higher ed, in which lower-income, underrepresented students are disproportionately channeled into skills-focused short courses while wealthier students are afforded the luxury of four-year degrees that still confer a 75 percent earnings premium.
The good news is that many institutions are rejecting the false binary between staying true to their missions and developing the future workforce. The solution, of course, is both-and.
In a recent conversation, Susan Burns, president at the University of Mount Saint Vincent in Brooklyn, N.Y., told me about soon-to-be finalized partnerships with nearby trade, tech and allied health certification schools that will both embed skills training into the curriculum and create pathways for students to receive university credit for industry-recognized credentials. When I asked Burns how she balanced those partnerships with the institution’s liberal arts tradition, she referenced its Catholic identity, rooted in the mission of the founding Sisters of Charity: “to share in the ongoing mission of Jesus by responding to the signs of the times.”
Skills training has also proven to be an antidote to the higher ed skepticism many politicians hold, she said. When lawmakers tell Burns there are too many colleges and universities in the country, she reminds them how many nurses and allied health-care professionals they graduate: “The conversation turns and suddenly it’s about workforce training.”
For Burns, the sign of the times is clear: Higher education must integrate career readiness with the liberal arts, not treat them as competing priorities.
Ursinus College, a small, private liberal arts institution in Pennsylvania, also fits the profile of a college in need of radical change. It missed its enrollment targets for fall 2025. Last month, it announced it would cut 30 faculty positions. In a visit to Inside Higher Ed’s offices recently, interim president Gundolf Graml (appointed after Robyn Hannigan was let go by the board in October) told us about APEX, Ursinus’s new skills- and experience-based curriculum built around career coaching and interdisciplinary hubs. Students from different majors work on solutions to societal problems—ethics and AI, climate change, public health—and pursue experiential learning with local and national employers.
“What we have built is not a career services program layered on top of a liberal arts degree. It is a curriculum redesign that treats career development as an academic endeavor,” Graml said. I asked him how the new curriculum fits with Ursinus’s liberal arts mission. “This is liberal arts at work,” he said. “Not students studying in isolation within a single discipline, but learning to think and act across boundaries in ways that the most pressing challenges of our time demand.”
Graml recognized that no single initiative will put the college back on strong financial footing; he and his team are also working on “disciplined cost management,” enrollment growth, revenue diversification and philanthropic investment. Still, he said, “APEX is an important driver within that broader strategy because it directly addresses the question families and students are asking: What will this education prepare me to do?”
It’s not just liberal arts institutions that are looking to better integrate in-demand skills with valuable degrees. In the latest episode of Inside Higher Ed’s podcast The Key, Sonya Christian, the chancellor of the California Community College system—the largest in the country, serving 2.2 million students—told me about the system’s Vision 2030 strategy. One of its priorities is using AI to scale a credit-for-prior-learning framework across the 116 colleges in the system.
“Higher ed shouldn’t be an ivory tower concept. We should recognize learning where it happens,” she told me. At the same time, the system wants to make sure that those skills are building toward an associate or baccalaureate degree—what Christian called a “centuries-old currency” that’s recognized everywhere, even across national boundaries.
“In all the skills conversation, we can’t lose the value of that degree for the worker, because in terms of long-term career, economic and social mobility, that’s valuable,” she said. “So we’re holding both in the same space and not saying, ‘Hey, degrees are not valuable, it’s all skills,’ but, ‘It’s kind of a both-and.’”
Colleges and universities have played a pivotal role in America’s global competitiveness for decades, and they can continue to do so, but only if they evolve. That means meeting demands from students and employers for more workforce preparation. And as AI reshapes the world of work in ways we’re just beginning to understand, a both-and approach to degrees and skills training is how higher ed can remain essential.
Sara Custer is editor in chief at Inside Higher Ed.
