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The Lumina Foundation announced a new goal to increase the number of Americans with education and training to 75%.
In 2008, the Lumina Foundation, a national private foundation focused on higher education and workforce development, set a national attainment goal that by 2025 60% of working-age adults would earn college degrees, certificates or industry-recognized certifications. Seventeen years later, the percentage of adults 25 to 64 who have achieved education attainment after high school has increased from 38% to 55%.
“We tried to focus on system change,” said Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of Lumina. “Today, of course, we’re facing a fresh set of challenges—rising costs, doubts about job opportunities and things like the influx of artificial intelligence—have caused people to question whether a college degree is really worth it. … We had to rethink how education creates opportunities.”
With that in mind, Lumina has set a new goal with a focus on credentials and their tangible benefit for individuals and society. That goal is by 2040, 75% of working-age adults (25 to 64) in the U.S. labor force will have college degrees or other credentials of value leading to economic prosperity. Lumina is defining economic prosperity as people earning at least 15% more than the national average for adults with only a high school education. Currently, 44.1% of people have such a credential.
“Today, we’re at another inflection point because college access has improved, but not enough, credential attainment has improved, but not enough,” said Merisotis. “At the same time, questions about the value of degrees and really the time, the expense and the relevance of these programs are in many ways have the potential to undermine progress. Our view is we’ve got to do more to transform higher education, workforce systems in order to meet human talent needs. … Today, we have to make sure that higher education literally serves more people better.”
To reach the 2040 goal, Lumina is prioritizing four key areas: credentials of value, access, student success and redesign. The redesign involves rethinking how education and workforce systems are structured, funded and governed to serve today’s students better. Lumina will invest in these four areas, which includes improving data collection to measure progress toward economic prosperity.
“It’s really about the value of post-secondary education,” said Dr. Courtney Brown, Lumina’s vice president of impact and planning. “This approach ensures that while we increase attainment, because that’s still essential, we also have to ensure that the credentials are valuable to individuals and that they’re leading to really meaningful financial benefits and long-term economic prosperity.”
The labor force being measured includes everyone who is employed, everyone unemployed but looking for work and anyone in the armed services. There is national data that can be disaggregated by state, race and ethnicity, age, credential type and gender. Brown described those as the essential elements going into A Stronger Nation, Lumina’s data visualization tool, available on the organization’s website.
“We’re measuring economic prosperity out of the gate; that’s how we’re going to know the credential has value,” said Brown. “We understand that economic prosperity is more than wages…but we wanted to make sure we had something we could measure. There are other things we can’t measure yet. As our understanding and our ability to measure other things beyond this wage premium, we will begin to add those things.
Over time, she said, “we hope to expand this measure to include return on investment,” adding that Limina plans to look at some non-economic measures, including wellbeing, job satisfaction and community impact.
“We believe this will give us a better, holistic view of economic prosperity, individual and community prosperity,” said Brown.
Merisotis noted that in addition to the work of the Lumina Foundation, state policy leaders, education and training providers, colleges and universities, will all be instrumental in helping the nation achieve the goal.
“I respect and support Lumina’s goal, and I also hope that they think about it in nuanced ways, about which skills for what stage of employment in which labor market,” said Dr. Babette Audant, assistant vice president of institutional effectiveness, research and assessment and dean of academic affairs at Hostos Community College in New York City, who noted that many  community college employees are already working toward these goals. “We’re constantly thinking about that because we don’t want to waste students’ time.
“We’re in a churning environment regarding federal funding, which means state funding for course development and for education in general,” she added. “These are really important goals, but I also feel like finessing, refining, reviewing those goals is going to be critical to not only reaching the goals, but reaching them in a way that is meaningful.”