A version of this piece originally published on October 7, 2025. Minor adjustments have been made to account for time references and improve readability.

The political conversation is pitting the idea of “skills” against America’s education infrastructure. We really need both skills and education, and we need to improve how we offer both to meet the demands of an unpredictable workforce environment in the coming years.

You might have seen this last year:

First, respectfully, college has almost always been a “debate” for many lower and middle-income Americans, mainly because college has been a nice-to-have for them due to cost. The conversation isn’t exactly a stunner in that context.

Yet, I did find this story as a good example of something I have been mulling over. Because politics only comes in primary colors, the conversation increasingly is a debate between “skills”—meaning tangible work stuff that gets you employed—and what for simplicity I’m going to call “education”—meaning school and college instruction for which the professional value is not immediately obvious.

To give you an example of what I mean, here is Education Secretary Linda McMahon, speaking about options other than college at a… college graduation a month earlier:

McMahon again in an op-ed:

I’m not exactly a big fan of how higher education is built, but I also don’t think this is the problem—or supported by what we’re seeing in workforce.

Shedding degree requirements, alone, has done very little to improve the hiring prospects of people without degrees—because employers still haven’t fixed the hiring part. Too many hiring systems still aren’t built to gauge if a worker has the skills to do a job.

Constructively, it’s also a bit silly—and a bit out of step with how hiring actually works—to look at someone’s ability to do a job as whether they are the right human-shaped packet of “skills” as proven by their having been processed through a program with those “skills” on the label. The people I trust the most on skills-first hiring—including some of the originators of the degree removals McMahon mentions—are very, very clear that good skills-first hiring isn’t about degrees versus no degrees. Why? Because someone could acquire job skills that are incredibly useful—and lucrative—in a degree program that doesn’t match their job title and nominally appears “worthless on the job market.”

You also really can’t have “skills” without “education” if you want to get a stable job. It’s part of the reason why education can, and should, be better at making sure students are prepared, not just passed on.

Last fall, I was at a Hill briefing held by the Coalition for Adult Basic Education, or COABE, during which there was a note that not being able to read is a severe disadvantage in getting one of the construction jobs that the Trump Administration would like to expand. Half of the young people without jobs who are ages 16 to 21 “cannot read well enough to be considered functionally literate.”

I wasn’t able to stick around for COABE and friends’ visits to individual Hill offices, but I suspect I know a couple things they talked about. The Administration had just held up billions in adult education funding, and House appropriators had proposed slashing dollars that could support adult literacy that could be key to getting people hired into construction jobs the Administration considers very important.

Relatedly, there also is the very minor detail that we’re entering a time period of American work where no one knows what the hell is about to happen. A day after the COABE briefing, I was at an event at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where the Chamber and the College Board—which, as the proprietors of the SAT, have a bit of an interest in this debate—announced a new AP course in business that awards high school students a credential useful for getting a job and college credit.

After the event, I caught up briefly with College Board CEO David Coleman. He told me about how the idea to offer both the credential and credit was to preserve “optionality” in an uncertain time due to rapid technological change and evolution of work.

In other words, why choose between “skills” and “education” when we don’t know what future workers will need?

Well… why are we?

If it isn’t obvious, I think we really need both skills and education, and we need to make both better so they can blend into each other for an uncertain future for the American workforce.

Hard skills often aren’t permanent, they’re Polaroids. Yes, employers are going to tell you all the Polaroids they’re missing today because they only see what they don’t have today. But those might not last—which is something you miss if you are only waiting for employers to tell you what they need.

That makes it a bad idea to, say, label a degree program as “worthless” because you don’t see an immediate match to a job title. One, the skills learned in that degree program might turn out to be awfully valuable tomorrow. Two, not everything useful to a job is a thing you’re explicitly taught, and thinking that is part of the problem with both sides of this debate.

We need future workers to have a suite of skills that allows them to adapt from job to job and pick up those technical skills for as long as they are needed. That only happens if those workers’ educational base gives them the tools and belief to do it. If the work of tomorrow’s adults changes every three or four years, then I would rather have them want to learn than struggling for someone to tell them what they’re supposed to learn next.

I don’t think we can get there with the current education system we have. It remains far too exclusionary in lower- and middle-income areas based on too-early assessments of ability, often based on strategies that can make learning miserable and make them feel bad if that way of learning is not a fit for them. It’s why I’m a big fan of things like Montessori, which teaches kids at a young age through activities and interests.

Or put another way, the point should be building education and skilling that gives experience that helps young people figure out what they want and how to get it, to build upon what Kathleen deLaski told me last year about how colleges can make graduates more job ready.

In that sense, it’s great that the CEO of Ford can do that for his kid. What we need now is to be able to do it for more kids.

But that’s not the conversation we’re having.

I have quite a bit in the fire this week—including a cross-country move out of D.C. for at least a couple years—so hopefully y’all enjoyed this week’s trip down memory lane, which felt terribly relevant based on what I’ve heard of late.

A few odds and ends:

Where there always seems to be plenty is THE MONEY. Workforce Pell’s final rules are out. I have thoughts about missed opportunities. I’m sure I’ll have something about apprenticeship, and I’ll also have some thoughts on what it means that the sitting U.S. senator who chairs the HELP Committee finished third in his primary. Seems relevant.