The Job Reports Real Warning Is About Education and Workforce Policy, Not the Economy

When I read the jobs reports in recent months showing consistent labour shortages, I don’t react like an economist. I react like a former classroom teacher, K–12 principal, who most recently served as a professor of education. After 25 years of watching students move—or fail to move—from school into work, the signal is clear: this is not primarily an economic slowdown. It is the result of how we govern education and workforce preparation.

Employers still cannot find workers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey shows millions of unfilled jobs in health care, construction, manufacturing, logistics, and skilled trades. In a normal downturn, vacancies fall quickly. They haven’t. That contradiction tells us the problem is a mismatch, not a collapse.

Many of us saw this trend coming years ago. As a principal, employers routinely told me graduates arrived with diplomas but lacked basic literacy, numeracy, and workplace readiness. Today, I hear the same concerns from my university colleagues—especially in STEM—who struggle to teach students who are weak in math, even as those degrees lead to the highest-paying jobs. People want work. Employers want workers. The system between them isn’t delivering.

During the post-pandemic hiring surge, employers lowered standards just to stay open. As conditions normalize, expectations are returning: reading instructions, showing up on time, working safely, and learning on the job. Workers who could be absorbed during an emergency labor market are now unemployed, while jobs that require real skills remain vacant.

Education never corrected course. Pandemic learning loss simply exposed weaknesses that were already there.

I began my career under No Child Left Behind. NCLB had serious flaws, but it was honest about outcomes. Schools were judged against a common yardstick. Results—especially for disadvantaged students—mattered. Improvement meant something. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA) altered that. Accountability softened, enforcement decentralized, and outcomes became negotiable. Graduation rates rose, but readiness often did not. As a principal, I watched schools get better at moving students through the system without ensuring they were prepared for work or further training.

Degrees became substitutes for skills.

In The Economics of Equity, which I edited with Christos Makridis, we argue that equity should be measured by outcomes—employment, earnings, and mobility—not access alone. From that perspective, recent jobs reports are not surprising. It is the predictable result of rewarding participation instead of preparation.

Employers now use credentials as crude risk filters—not because degrees signal competence, but because they reduce uncertainty. That locks capable people out while leaving many graduates underemployed. Credentials sort; they do not prepare.

This is why the shift of career and technical education and workforce-aligned programs toward the Department of Labor matters. That shift is already happening. Apprenticeships and sector partnerships now sit closer to labor-market data, employer demand, and wage outcomes than they ever did under education-first governance.

But governance alone is not enough. Without guardrails, the same failures will follow.

Workforce-aligned education must be judged by job placement, earnings growth, and employer retention—not enrollment or seat time. Employers must have real authority over program design, not ceremonial advisory roles. Credentials should sunset if they fail to deliver labor-market value.

States should retain control over curriculum, but outcomes must be comparable. That means restoring NAEP as a true national yardstick. As Makridis and I argued in 74 Million, NAEP is the only assessment that allows apples-to-apples comparisons across states, and its results correlate strongly with long-run GDP Growth. Every fourth- and eighth-grade student should take NAEP—not to punish schools, but to make outcomes impossible to hide and to give parents clear, comparable information earlier than high school exams like the ACT or SAT about how their children are performing and which high school pathways are most likely to support future employment.

Labor voices belong at the table, but they cannot dominate it. Teachers unions and higher-education unions have long resisted accountability tied to employment outcomes, opposed apprenticeships and alternative credentials, and defended rigid staffing rules. Those constraints cannot migrate intact into workforce governance.

The jobs reports are capturing the symptom, not the cause. As an educator, I see it as a warning: if preparation stops mattering, unemployment will rise—even when jobs are available.