Aligning Postsecondary Education with Regional Workforce Needs: A Tale of Two States

“The United States faces a…competitiveness challenge rooted in a shortage of a diverse, highly skilled workforce, particularly in vital cross-disciplinary fields such as data science and analytics, cybersecurity, and information technology. To address this challenge, the Business-Higher Education Forum [BHEF] launched the National Higher Education and Workforce Initiative, employing a model of strategic business engagement with postsecondary education to meet the highest priority workforce needs. Through the initiative, the education forum plans, launches and assesses projects, partnerships and scaling strategies that are designed to enable business and higher education to move from transactional engagement in low-touch, piecemeal activities to strategic, long-term partnerships that align postsecondary education with workforce needs. Two of these projects—in Maryland and Ohio—offer models of such partnerships” (p.436).

 

This report describes the BHEF and presents case studies from Maryland and Ohio.

 

“The [BHEF]…[is] the nation’s oldest organization of senior business executives and presidents of higher education institutions….The [BHEF’s] process of building its evidence base for solutions involves several steps, the first of which is a comprehensive review of the research literature on science, technology, engineering and math—otherwise known as STEM—undergraduate education. The second is the development of a system dynamics model, which, in its initial version, produced…insights and informed BHEF’s model of strategic business engagement” (p.437).

 

“BHEF’s model of strategic business engagement with higher education aligns five levers, or strategies, to move from transactional relationships to strategic partnerships between the two sectors. When fully implemented, the model enables business and higher education to effectively build sustainable, high-impact regional projects to increase student interest and persistence toward degree completion and to align undergraduate education with emerging workforce needs” (p. 439).

 

“BHEF’s goal is to develop regional demonstration projects that lead to national adoption” (p.440).

 

(Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

“Lessons learned from BHEF’s activities to date…[contribute the following insights to the field of]…four-year STEM undergraduate education” (p.440). “Cybersecurity in Maryland” (p.440) “The first cohort of advanced cybersecurity students started their studies in fall 2013—less than two years after the program was first conceptualized—and in its first two years has approximately doubled its enrollments over projected demand. As a second…achievement in its cyber-related work in Maryland, the Business-Higher Education Forum supported a partnership between the University of Maryland Baltimore County and Northrop Grumman that resulted in the launch of the UMBC Cyber Scholars program. The program has a strong focus on increasing diversity in the cyber workforce, and draws on significant insights gained through the university’s…Meyerhoff Scholars program…and UMBC’s Center for Women and Information Technology” (p.440). “Data Science in Ohio” (p.441) “Due in part to its high concentration of data-driven companies and regional efforts to catalyze innovation and workforce development around a rich diversity of leading higher education institutions, Ohio was a natural choice for BHEF to build partnerships focused on data science and analytics….BHEF facilitated a process by which a range of partners came together to determine the workforce skills needed in data science and develop undergraduate tracks in the field. Case Western Reserve announced the launch of a new undergraduate major and minor in data science in 2014, designed to prepare a new generation of data science experts who will improve performance in health, production and manufacturing and energy” (p.441). “National Scaling and Networks” (p.442) “BHEF’s vision for this dimension of its work is to sustain a national network of experts from higher education, business and government who can serve as the intellectual hub of undergraduate cybersecurity and promote cooperation around cybersecurity education among the academic, business and government sectors. The group has been growing steadily. BHEF plans to launch its national data science network in Columbus in the fall of 2015, bringing together participants in data science projects under development in Florida, North Carolina, New York, Ohio and elsewhere” (p.442). (Abstractor: Author and Website Staff)

• Last Updated:
• Created:
• Resource Publication Date: 2015
• Author(s): Barkanic, Stephen.
• Organizational Author(s): The Council of State Governments
• Resource Availability: Publicly available
• Posted by: Wesley Peterson
• Posted in: Workforce System Strategies