(Illustration by Patric Sandri)
Tiffany Conner talks like it was yesterday. “I remember what I wore. I remember what I had for lunch.” Over Zoom, she’s smiling broadly. “We walked across the street to this little restaurant. I got a cheeseburger and french fries. And Sheryl, who trained me, let me try sweet potato fries for the first time ever. And now I love sweet potato fries.”
It was her first day of work as a quality-support representative at Cargill, a major agribusiness firm with headquarters in Conner’s hometown of Wichita, Kansas, where she untangles logistical knots for the company’s wholesale clients. Her new boss picked up the lunch tab.
At her previous position, in a call center for a global telecommunications firm, Conner couldn’t make ends meet. “When Cargill called, I just sobbed like a baby,” she says. The wages and benefits—401(k) contributions, healthcare, college-tuition assistance, paid vacation, and personal days—were a major upgrade. But “it’s not all about the money.” Before Cargill, Conner had not known that people could enjoy their employment. “I called my mom, freaking out because everybody was so happy at work.”
In 2024, Conner was 32 years old, raising an 11-year-old son on her own, and pursuing an associate degree at a community college in Wichita, when she found what she needed for her next chapter. Spero (Latin for hope) is a 16-week sprint that provides working adults from modest backgrounds with many of the skills routinely acquired by middle-class college kids: how to leverage personal relationships to get connected to prospective employers; how to frame their skills and experiences in application letters; how to prepare and dress for job interviews and send polished thank-you notes. A joint venture among regional employers, community organizations, and a local university, the program began with charter funding from the Koch Foundation, the charitable arm of Wichita-based Koch Incorporated. Spero also promised to expand its students’ occupational horizons, introducing specific jobs and entire occupational sectors that are typically unattainable without postsecondary credentials. Conner was a member of Spero’s inaugural class.
“A lot of us had these skills, but we hadn’t used them in so long,” Conner says. “And it was really the connecting with people that made the difference. It was getting these important people in Wichita who hire to see that just because we don’t have the degrees or the experience doesn’t mean that we’re not going to be rock stars.”
Coauthor Mitchell Stevens met Conner last winter on the campus of the W. Frank Barton School of Business at Wichita State University (WSU), a public institution that has served the city since the early 1900s. He was there to learn about a growing movement to renegotiate the relationship between education, employment, and the arc of the life course in the United States. In a nation that has long framed attainment of four-year college degrees in young adulthood as the ideal pathway to prosperous lives, employers, philanthropists, entrepreneurs, and, increasingly, established institutions like Wichita State are reimagining education after high school. On the university’s architecturally unassuming urban campus, Woolsey Hall, the home of the Barton School, stands out: a gleaming wedge of zinc tile and glass designed by the global firm Gensler. Having graced the pages of several national design magazines, the building would be right at home in Austin, Texas, the tech suburbs lining Route 128 in Massachusetts, or California’s Silicon Valley.
But this is Wichita, whose 660,000 metro-area citizens inhabit a state whose politics were made famous 20 years ago by Thomas Frank’s best-selling What’s the Matter with Kansas? The city’s deep strengths in agriculture and manufacturing (Cargill, Koch, Johnson Controls) won’t surprise those who might place it in “flyover country,” but Wichita is in the business of flying too. Its pro-business climate, dedicated family enterprises, and nearby McConnell Air Force Base ensure it remains a global hub for the light-aircraft industry (Bombardier, Textron). Anxieties about rural brain drain that beset politicians and planners throughout the Midwest sit lightly here.
Barton’s four-year BBA and two-year MBA degree programs consistently supply managers and executives to regional businesses. But Spero specifically was what Barton’s dean, Larisa Genin, most wanted to talk about with a visiting Stanford University professor. The no-fee program, supported by grant funds and philanthropy, is built to give working adults alternative pathways that complement Barton’s traditional academic offerings.
Spero is just one expression of a growing coast-to-coast effort to diversify the paths that move people between education and employment. We have been studying this movement as social scientists, seeking to understand how it fits into our national commitment to higher education over the past century. Through direct subsidy, tax exemption, and philanthropic largesse, Americans have serially turned to colleges and universities to solve their largest problems, from waging wars and enabling economic prosperity to remediating inequality and ensuring civic harmony. Yet in recent years higher education itself has become a problem. Steadily rising college costs, mounting student-loan debt, and tepid degree-completion rates, coupled with deepening economic and political polarization on the basis of educational attainment, have led growing numbers of people to question the value of higher education and the complicated social contract that sustains it.
As scholarly observers and participants, we have become convinced that this moment offers opportunity for renewing the promise of higher education as a vehicle for economic prosperity and civic flourishing. For decades, the guiding imperative of higher-education finance, policy, and philanthropy has been to convey as many bachelor’s diplomas to as many young people as possible. In Spero and programs like it across the country, we see the outlines of a different model—one we call a learning society.
Despite its history of democratizing higher education, the United States has failed to ensure its affordability. In Canada and Western Europe, higher education is primarily a public-sector enterprise.
A learning society is not a single program or institution but a concatenation of institutional and cultural changes just beginning to cohere around some increasingly shared convictions: that learning should be recognized and rewarded wherever it happens, not only when a college degree certifies it; that investment in learning should be shared among all who benefit from it; that people should be supported through career transitions across our steadily lengthening lives; and that paid work and education should be organized so that people are able to work, learn, and care for their loved ones all at the same time. We also are convinced that realizing this vision requires unsettling deep presumptions that have long defined what counts as educational common sense.
The Credential Society
Colleges and their credentials are so embedded in our national life that their power can be hard to fully see. Well over 5,000 colleges and universities receive formal recognition and subsidies from the federal government. Their academic entry requirements shape the curriculums of K-12 schools. Residential real estate values are closely tied to K-12 school quality, which home buyers often assess by the proportion of graduates who head directly to four-year colleges. Employers sort job candidates and determine pay and promotion by the number, kind, and prestige of college degrees they possess. People use school credentials to size up potential lovers and marital partners—a phenomenon so pervasive and fateful that an entire social-science subfield is devoted to “educational assortative mating.” Postsecondary education is a major vector of philanthropy, receiving more than $60 billion in charitable giving each year.
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All of this means that even while less than 40 percent of American adults possess four-year bachelor’s diplomas, colleges and their credentials shape lives and life chances for all of us. Higher education is the primary ladder our society offers young people for social mobility, whether they aspire to be social workers, professional athletes, or corporate titans. College experiences are fundamental features of middle- and highbrow American culture, a fact affirmed by the frequency with which people adorn their clothes and automobiles with the names and insignias of their alma maters. In the title of his classic 1979 monograph, sociologist Randall Collins called this social ordering The Credential Society.
The credential society is an astonishingly recent phenomenon. In the 1930s, less than 5 percent of American adults possessed four-year college degrees, which were the purview of those headed for a handful of learned professions (clergy, law, medicine) or those obtaining luxury grooming and networking as children of the nation’s most privileged families. While college students were few in number, colleges themselves were all over the place. Beginning in 1636 with the founding of Harvard College, the religious faithful of many different denominations founded their own institutions to train ministers and schoolteachers in keeping with specific faiths. Businessmen on the steadily expanding Western frontier often partnered with religious leaders to found civic institutions—colleges, churches, libraries, parks—that might signal future greatness to real estate investors and otherwise dispel Eastern-establishment suspicions of frontier provincialism.
The federal government encouraged college founding too. Congressional passage of the Morrill Acts of 1862 and 1890 endowed states with grants of land that they could use or sell to create institutions of higher learning that would extend higher education to a much wider swath of the American public. The so-called land-grant colleges quickly became anchors of brainpower and technical capacity serving the agricultural and extractive industries of the South and West.
The institution now called Wichita State University partakes of this history. Opened in 1895 as Fairmount College by the (Protestant Christian) Congregational Education Society, the school was acquired by the city government and rechristened the Municipal University of Wichita in 1926. It was the first municipal university west of the Mississippi. Its mascot, the wheat shocker (WuShock today), referenced its young men’s working lives harvesting Kansas’ hallmark commodity on nearby farms.
US entry into World War II dramatically raised the stature of these beloved but often modest institutions. Engaging in a multifront global conflict required an all-hands-on-deck mobilization strategy, and colleges and universities proved essential. Located all over the country and generally trusted by local businesspeople and politicians, they had campuses with organizational capacities for regional coordination and physical plants for training military recruits. Their faculties housed much of the expertise for understanding enemy strategy and technical capacity for defense R&D. And because they were perennially hungry for donors and patrons, academic leaders embraced the revenue and prestige that accompanied federal defense contracts.
(Illustration by Patric Sandri)
So well did college and universities serve the nation in wartime that Congress turned to them at the war’s end to absorb and reward returning soldiers. The Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, popularly known as the GI Bill, included a provision for paying the full cost of college for war veterans. Overnight, the GI Bill changed the meaning of college degrees in the popular imagination from a technical certification or luxury good for the privileged few to a civic gift freely available to the country’s most honored citizens.
By October 6, 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully launched Sputnik I, university leaders and politicians knew the drill. Within the space of 11 months, Congress passed the National Defense Education Act (1958), omnibus legislation that would cement the joint venture between higher education and government in projects of national defense. And as European colonies worldwide transitioned into nation-states in a geopolitical order newly defined by the Cold War, President Lyndon B. Johnson was determined to make the United States a model of honorable democratic capitalism in the 20th century. Johnson put every ounce of his political influence into the passage of legislation protecting Black civil rights and expanding the nation’s educational infrastructure, all the while maintaining the flow of federal money to military defense. Among his administration’s signal accomplishments was the Higher Education Act of 1965, which provided financial aid to help pay tuition costs of high school graduates pursuing college degrees and (in its 1972 appropriation) made additional support available in the form of government-guaranteed educational loans.
In the space of a generation, colleges and their credentials became central to the political and civic architecture of the world’s most powerful nation. The politicians and educators who brought the credential society into existence might scarcely have imagined that college degrees would eventually come to cleave the country into two very different Americas.
The Diploma Divide
Despite its history of democratizing higher education, the United States has failed to ensure its affordability. In Canada and western Europe, higher education is primarily a public-sector enterprise. Substantial subsidies from taxes cover the majority of college costs, and student-citizens make zero to moderate out-of-pocket contributions to tuition. Some countries even extend stipends for living expenses. By contrast, Americans have built higher education as a joint venture in which individuals and their families, philanthropies and for-profit firms, and multiple branches of government variably contribute different kinds of resources to create a plural civic good. In a country that resists centralized state power but embraces education as a mechanism of social mobility, how we pay for college degrees represents a grand compromise between different ways of thinking about the value of cultivating human talent.
The many roles colleges and universities played in frontier settlement and 20th-century warcraft have made them continuous recipients of direct government funding. They also have long enjoyed tax exemptions based on the presumption that active research programs and an educated citizenry produce economic and civic value that benefits all. Individuals, families, and businesses receive tax incentives for gifts and donations to universities. College scholarships are favored mechanisms of philanthropic largesse. The names of especially generous men and women identify buildings, classrooms, and athletics fields on college campuses across the country.
Academic gift giving notwithstanding, Americans have never enshrined education after high school as a right. Even at the height of mass access to higher education during the 20th-century Cold War, policy makers specifically designed postsecondary finance to distribute college costs among multiple parties. Consider government-guaranteed student loans, in which publicly subsidized terms of interest and repayment allow individuals to borrow money for college costs. The 1972 reauthorization of the Higher Education Act introduced direct grant aid—the Basic Educational Opportunity Grant, now called the Pell Grant—to complement the federal student-loan programs already established under earlier laws. The basic logic of the loan program was that both individuals and society at large benefit from college educations. The idea of higher education as a joint venture shapes the basic terms of postsecondary funding that still organize college budgets for government agencies, schools, and families alike.
But higher education fit very differently into the national economy and individual life chances when the federal loan program came into existence half a century ago. Back then, when only 10 percent of US adults possessed four-year degrees, education after high school was hardly a necessary condition for economic security. The country’s manufacturing economy was booming, enjoying its relative advantage over the European and Asian countries whose industrial infrastructure the war had decimated. Many of the same white men—and their sons—whose military service had been rewarded by the GI Bill enjoyed high wages, generous benefits, and retirement pensions from union victories enabled by postwar affluence. In other words, bachelor’s degrees and advanced diplomas were still “nice to haves” for the most privileged sectors of the American electorate. At the time, fiscal policy that shared the cost of education after high school between government and families seemed sensible to many.
Deindustrialization changed that equation. Major advances in transportation, communication, and computational technology from the late 1970s forward made it ever more attractive for companies to move manufacturing and, later, white-collar work to less expensive labor markets: first to so-called right-to-work states less friendly to unions in the southern and western United States, then overseas. Union power eroded, then virtually collapsed across many industries. Academics and politicians began to emphasize the importance of a “knowledge economy” in the United States, in which jobs in the white-collar managerial, financial, and technical-services sectors would supersede the nation’s prior strengths in production and extraction. For evidence, they pointed to consistently higher annual and lifetime wages for workers who possessed four-year college degrees. The idea that college degrees were necessary for social mobility and economic security became so pervasive as to become common sense.
This was good news for colleges and universities, for whom student tuition and fees had always been essential funding streams. Even as the rights movements of the 1960s and ’70s cooled and the 20th-century Cold War concluded, higher-education leaders could still claim that their schools were essential servants of the national project of assuring economic prosperity for all Americans. Civic and philanthropic organizations across a wide political spectrum joined the chorus. By the turn of the century, “college for all” had become a national goal embraced by politicians, business leaders, major foundations, and academics alike.
From frontier cowboys and Tom Sawyer to today’s tech-bro college dropouts, one can trace a clear line of favor in American culture for self-made types who have little need of formal schooling. This makes the rise of the credential society all the more remarkable.
To be sure, a few contrarians voiced concern. As early as 1970, University of Pennsylvania sociologist Ivar Berg and his coauthors made national headlines by positing “the great training robbery,” in which educators were far overselling the importance of formal certifications as necessary components of human-capital development, pointing out how convenient this line of thinking was for those in the business of purveying academic credentials. Thirty years later, another sociologist, Northwestern University’s James Rosenbaum, in his 2001 book, Beyond College for All: Career Paths for the Forgotten Half, argued that college educations were generally beneficial for those who had graduated from high school in the top 50 percent of their classes. But for the millions of men and women poorly served by K-12 education, tying dignified and career-laddered employment to additional school credentials was a recipe for overall decline in national economic vitality and dangerous levels of education-based political conflict.
But critics were far outnumbered by boosters, who included virtually all educational social scientists and academic leaders. They had stakes in this game. By the year 2000, decades of Cold War-fueled government largesse to higher education had been replaced by a narrative of public-sector scarcity and fiscal restraint. The postwar Baby Boomers who had attended college in the 1960s transitioned into late adulthood, and so too did their policy priorities—from education to healthcare and eldercare. The grassroots tax revolts that had begun with California’s passage of Proposition 13 in 1978 rippled across the country. Higher-education budgets lost their privileged place in state legislatures, public appropriations leveled or shrank, and colleges sought to sustain revenues by raising tuition and courting affluent students from beyond their traditional recruitment pools. Their efforts were buoyed by the college-for-all doctrine, whose central tenet was that college educations remained reasonable investments despite rising tuition costs and debt, because people with four-year college degrees so consistently enjoyed higher earnings and job security.
While that common sense has proven sound for those who manage to complete bachelor’s degrees with minimal debt in a reasonable time period, many others have had unfortunate or even disastrous encounters with higher education. State legislatures can specify how much their own public institutions are able to charge state residents, but beyond that, college fees do not have regulated ceilings in the United States. For decades, federal programs put no limit on what schools could charge to be eligible for receipt of Pell grants and guaranteed loans. This is almost surely part of the reason why retail college costs have risen faster than the overall rate of inflation since 1980. Student-loan debt metastasized to more than $1.8 trillion by the end of 2025 and continues to rise—a fiscal crisis that still awaits a systematic national response. Meanwhile, the degree-completion efficiency of the national postsecondary sector remains lackluster at best: Approximately 64 percent of those entering four-year degree programs complete them in the space of six years.
This is the context in which Donald Trump surprised the national political establishment with the remarkable success of his first presidential campaign. Trump pressed hard on feelings of abandonment among working-class white people who had long been privileged recipients of public largesse and civic recognition. His campaign brilliantly convinced this demographic that college-educated Americans had secured a cartel on economic opportunity—at taxpayer expense. And just as the college-for-all advocates could point to reams of data demonstrating the material value of postsecondary degrees, critics could point to steadily rising college costs, runaway college-loan indebtedness, tepid completion rates, and a growing disparity in the overall life chances tied to levels of educational achievement. By 2016, the diploma divide had split the nation in two.
After College for All
From frontier cowboys and Tom Sawyer to today’s tech-bro college dropouts, one can trace a clear line of favor in American culture for self-made types who have little need for formal schooling. Our vernacular betrays this skepticism for higher education: Ivory tower, egghead, and academese do not code as compliments. This makes the rise of the credential society during the second half of the prior century all the more remarkable. How was it that a country with such ambivalence about higher learning came to organize its social order around the possession of college degrees?
Regional boosterism, 20th-century warcraft, and college sports are all part of the answer, but employer hiring practices are what ultimately sealed the deal on college for all. As access to college became more widespread, college credentials offered HR officers convenient tools to sort, rank, and screen candidates. A college degree is prima facie evidence that its possessor has successfully navigated a complicated bureaucracy over many years; has been schooled in organizing time and juggling multiple assignments; and has been exposed to a gauntlet of writing, analytic, and teamwork tasks. The inherent status of college diplomas hasn’t hurt either. Making four-year degrees prerequisites for a job enhances the luster of the job itself. And it is all perfectly legal: Excluding people on the basis of absent or less prestigious diplomas makes it easier for employers to use credentials as covers for less legitimate forms of discrimination.
Yet jobs that do not require college-level coursework have always existed. Many of them are service and retail positions historically staffed by women and rarely unionized: cleaners and eldercare and childcare workers, cooks and food servers, store clerks and stockists, often in industries with thin profit margins that further encouraged employers to minimize labor costs. As college degrees increasingly became prerequisites for reasonably salaried, benefitted, and career-laddered employment at the end of the last century, low-paying service jobs were increasingly the ones available to people outside the skilled trades.
Wall Street exacerbated the quietly growing college divide. As management scholar Peter Cappelli deftly explains in his 2023 book, Our Least Important Asset, companies underinvest in their workers not simply because they want to cut costs, but because financial accounting protocols do not recognize spending on people as an investment. Conventional accounting rules recognize as assets only what a firm owns, and employees are never placed in that category, however much value they create. Spending on physical assets is capitalized and depreciated over time; spending on people—training, development, retention—is credited as an expense, indistinguishable from other costs. Since firms lean on their financial statements to signal value to investors, they face a strong disincentive to invest in employees, even when everyone might ultimately benefit from their doing so. For workers unable to bargain collectively and without the credentials to access better jobs, this approach has proven disastrous. The very people businesses depend on are officially defined as costs to be cut.
So it is little wonder that Walmart, by far the nation’s largest private employer, made waves in corporate America in 2015 when it implemented substantial wage hikes for its frontline workers and dramatically expanded its internal training and mobility program for all of its 1.4 million US employees. Flying under the banners of Walmart Academy and Live Better U, the training programs provide a full complement of certifications online and at more than 200 physical locations nationwide. Importantly, the training investment has coincided with a firm-wide commitment to bracket the importance of legacy-college credentials in hiring and promotion. The company now claims that 90 percent of its associate positions do not require college degrees. As it stated in 2023, “Walmart believes the U.S. workforce system needs to transition to a system that recognizes and understands skills in the same way it recognizes and understands college degrees.” The company’s philanthropic arm, Walmart Foundation, has carried the message beyond the firm, extending $140 million in grants to support what it calls “skills-based advancement”—training, hiring, and promotion practices that subordinate the importance of college degrees. The world’s largest retailer is now a major provider of learning opportunities for men and women left behind in the era of college for all.
(Illustration by Patric Sandri)
Hidden Talent
As college credentials have become more prevalent, so too has ambiguity about what specific underlying skills and capacities they represent. Declared majors and academic transcripts carry little specific information about what job applicants have obtained from college studies. And whatever is learned in college is, almost by definition, academic—not applied—knowledge. College graduates may be generally educated in certain strands of academic discourse but often arrive at workplaces without “real world” experience, unable to effectively apply their academic knowledge in true business situations. This is part of the reason a corporate learning industry has grown along with the increasing number of certifications. It is now a billion-dollar-a-year sector providing training services directly to employers. It is also why large organizations now routinely have in-house learning-and-development departments as part of their HR function.
As vice president of human resources, Cara Chennault-Reid heads that vertical for Koch Inc. and its 130,000 employees worldwide. Stevens talked with Chennault-Reid about the company’s ongoing effort to identify and grow talent in new ways. This is how we first learned about Spero: Chennault-Reid’s encouragement was partly what inspired Barton School Dean Larisa Genin to get the program started. “Larisa would often begin conversations with our leadership team by promoting certain degree programs or recommending specific master’s degrees as ways of developing employees or finding talent,” Chennault-Reid explained. “Because our approach to this challenge is different, we encouraged her to think about how she was working with us and come up with something that was outside the box.”
Estela Piedra, 32, is another graduate of Spero’s 2024-25 inaugural class. A decade earlier, she worked as a college-readiness tutor and attendance clerk at a Wichita public high school. She also waited tables at her uncle’s restaurant in town and was enrolled at Wichita State to pursue a career in healthcare. Piedra was finishing up her junior year when her mother received a stage IV cancer diagnosis. Piedra decided to take a gap year to focus on her family. “But one year turns into two, and then now you have these jobs … How do I go back?” she recalls. She found a position as a teaching assistant that represented a modest promotion and stayed four years, still waitressing at night to make ends meet.
Then a relative told her about Spero. Piedra was reluctant at first, but “my aunt pressured me, and I was like, ‘Can somebody have two jobs forever?’”
A human-capital system long organized around a single credential currency has become a bewilderingly complicated marketplace with no regulator, shared value metrics, or coherent rules of equivalence and exchange.
Through Spero, Piedra landed her current job in Koch’s HR division, where she helps employees navigate leave applications. The position doubled her salary and brought her into an entirely new world. “The way that people speak around me … They learned all of this in college,” she says. “I’m just running with it and trying to pick up everything I hear.” But the challenge hasn’t dampened her enthusiasm for the job. “This is somewhere I could see myself long-term.”
Spero graduates represent a category of talent called “hidden workers” in an influential 2021 joint study by Accenture and Harvard Business School: They are desirable candidates who remain invisible to employers because of search, recruitment, and promotion routines that eliminate them from consideration. Job descriptions that formally require specific educational credentials, recruitment protocols that return repeatedly to the same sources, assumptions that new hires will be more flexible and ambitious than in-house employees, and siloed internal job trees that discourage horizontal movement within firms—all of these conspire to “hide” held talent from the very firms that claim to need it most. Joint research published in 2024 by University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business and The Burning Glass Institute suggests that more than 10 million workers could be eligible candidates for managerial roles in their firms were it not for such barriers that preemptively exclude them from eligibility.
As the college-for-all narrative has waned and scaled alternatives such as Walmart’s Live Better U have gained visibility, enthusiasm for what are variably called “alternative credentials” or “microcredentials”—certifications of learning that are not college degrees—has exploded. Educational entrepreneurs from Silicon Valley to Wall Street recognize the huge business potential for a credential marketplace in which legacy bachelor’s and graduate diplomas no longer enjoy a virtual cartel of supply. The financial performance of a few short-form online learning providers, including Coursera and MasterClass, coupled with the looming challenge of AI technologies to disrupt workplaces and oblige ongoing skill development, has made for a Wild West-style expansion of educational business. Trainings and certifications of dazzling variety now vie for attention among corporate learning officers and job seekers alike. Credential Engine, a nonprofit organization supported by the Indiana-based Lumina Foundation, documents the availability of some 1.85 million different learning certifications. A human-capital system long organized squarely around a single credential currency—accredited degrees from legacy-college degrees—has become a bewilderingly complicated marketplace with no regulator, shared value metrics, or coherent rules of equivalence and exchange.
Alongside the explosion of alternative credentials is the renaissance of the ancient practice of learning a skill by doing it alongside experts. It goes by many different names: apprenticeship, tutelage, mentoring, and the more recent internship and work-based learning. The practice never waned in other parts of the world, but Americans largely replaced it with an emphasis on postsecondary credentials. That’s changing. Business, civic, and hybrid organizational models offering such learning are suddenly everywhere, bearing sunny names that hint at progress, maturity, and growth: CareerWise, Riipen, Per Scholas, SkillUp.
While Spero embraces work-based learning, it is a classroom-based program. It confers microcredentials; students process in a graduation ceremony complete with caps and gowns. Spero coursework additionally carries academic credit that graduates can apply toward completion of associate or bachelor’s degrees. Alex Ziegler, an associate professor of marketing and economics at Barton and a Spero faculty lead, insists on the classroom component. Employers and Spero faculty codesigned the curriculum to close the distance in life experience between Spero recruits and the people they will encounter in corporate workplaces. Beginning with Spero’s charter class, Wichita State faculty worked closely with local community-service organizations to identify and recruit the sort of talent that is so often hidden from employers: capable, responsible, hardworking people who would otherwise be ineligible for the most coveted jobs because of stratified opportunity, limited information, bad luck, or one or two wayward youthful choices.
“What does it mean to actually work for a corporation like Koch or Cargill or Textron, where there are thousands of employees?” Ziegler asks. “You have to follow procedures. You have to understand that you know how teams work. There’s a collaboration piece. There’s also a dress code and, for lack of a better term, communication style. There are disconnects that are easy to overcome once you’re aware of them, but if you don’t spend time on it, it’s tough for you to be successful once you get to an interview.” Spero’s twice-weekly 90-minute sessions (always in person; Ziegler stresses the importance of face-to-face mentoring) offer recruits access to hands-on learning.
Ziegler also emphasizes that employers’ hiring needs are essential components of Spero’s pitch. “Entry-level positions are tough for them to fill,” he says. “A lot of candidates might need only a high school diploma to step into an entry-level role, but they’re just not polished enough. It’s also that with automated HR processes, a lot of the résumés our students submit would be filtered out.”
A New Map of Life
Tiffany Conner and Estela Piedra graduated from Spero’s Career Readiness curriculum, which grooms candidates for entry-level corporate jobs. But Spero also offers a second, parallel curriculum, which provides “hands-on learning for aspiring early-stage entrepreneurs, helping them refine business models, create demand, and access resources,” according to Barton’s glossy inaugural impact report.
Our institutions may need to accommodate a journey with multiple routes through a longer life, with on-ramps and off ramps people can take more than once, in more than one order.
This summer, Ziegler introduced Stevens to AJ Bohannon, one of the Entrepreneurship curriculum’s success stories. When he entered Spero, Bohannon had already accrued a long résumé of business ventures: nightclub owner, certified dog breeder, purveyor of custom cellphone cases, concert producer. The day we spoke, he was putting the finishing touches on an upcoming R&B festival in Wichita. Spero helped Bohannon incubate his latest startup, Shoe Castle, which he described as “sort of a Goodwill for shoes.” He’s brokered serial deals with local sports stars whose retired pairs he sells at a premium.
Like Tiffany Conner and Estela Piedra, Bohannon had spent time pursuing a legacy-college credential back in his 20s. Initially a basketball recruit at Wichita’s Friends University, he transferred to Langston University, a historically Black institution in neighboring Oklahoma, when he fathered his first child. “I’ve lived life a little backward,” he says. “I went and got all the experience, but I hadn’t been to school in 18 years. So I was like, ‘Okay, I need to get back, but I don’t need to take a full load.’” A WSU professor he knew from mentoring and coaching kids recommended Spero to him “because it’s for entrepreneurs.”
Bohannon credits Spero with giving him much of what he needed to get Shoe Castle off the ground. “It helped me with my pitch,” he says. “It opened a lot of doors to angel donors, people who wanted to buy into the business.”
Bohannon is pursuing a major in organizational learning and leadership. He’s on track to graduate in December and plans on continuing for a master’s in sports management, with an eye on a career as an operations manager for a college or professional football team. He’s already interned with the operations manager for the WSU women’s basketball program. He also wants to model a path for his own children. “I have two sons that just graduated high school,” he says. “I don’t want my kids to graduate college before I do.”
What Spero, Walmart’s Live Better U, and the renaissance of apprenticeships all have in common is a recognition that the rules and timetables of the credential society simply do not suit the needs of many employers and the lives of millions of talented, ambitious people. Bohannon’s sense that he has lived “a little backward” is an important tell. It reveals how deeply we have internalized a particular map of life—one drawn for shorter life spans, in which schooling is front-loaded into youth, paid work fills the middle, and retirement waits at the end. As lives stretch well beyond 80 years, that rigid sequence serves fewer and fewer of us. Our institutions may need to accommodate what the Stanford Center on Longevity calls a New Map of Life: a journey with multiple routes through longer lives, with on-ramps and off-ramps people can take more than once, in more than one order.
Seen through the coordinates of that new map, Bohannon has not lived backward at all. It is our institutions that have failed to catch up with him. Undoing credential-society presumptions is hard work, but it comes with the promise of finding novel ways to commingle paid employment, formal schooling, and the learning from experience that is the hallmark of wisdom and mature adulthood.
Toward a Learning Society
The last time we spoke, Dean Genin and her team were busily courting philanthropy with the goal of securing enough to support Spero for a five-year run. The enterprise is still squarely on the charity side of the ledger. Barton’s business model remains the legacy undergraduate business majors and MBA degrees that are eligible for government aid. Credential-society ideas remain baked into how our country organizes, funds, and governs education after high school. Until that changes, myriad incentives will continue to push people and organizations to favor legacy degrees tied to programs organized around classroom seat time, rather than the more flexible, plural pathways to opportunity that programs like Spero enable.
All that notwithstanding, Genin has her eyes open for other novel academic ventures. The gleaming new Woolsey Hall she led the effort to build sits astride WSU’s Innovation Campus, whose 120-acre site, once the university’s golf course, now houses partnerships with a growing collection of global companies, including Airbus, Deloitte, and Spirit AeroSystems. Connecting it all is the triplanked Promise Bridge, its three branches spanning a tranquil pond. “That was our creation to symbolize what Wichita State is doing,” Genin says, “connecting academics, industry, and research.”
Ambitious and entrepreneurial educators like Genin built the credential society by catalyzing public and philanthropic largesse to democratize access to higher education. They did it to help the nation win world wars, to make particular cities and regions more prosperous, to reward honorable citizens, and to temper the harms of gender and racial hierarchies. They likely did not anticipate that their substantial successes would, by the second decade of the 21st century, create a country that stratifies life chances based on four-year college degrees.
That unintended consequence brings with it opportunity—or perhaps obligation—for educators, employers, politicians, and philanthropists to rethink long-standing conventional wisdom that has become anachronistic and unwise at best and cruel at worst: that costly academic programs requiring years of time to complete are the best way to spend young adulthood and reasonable prerequisites for prosperous lives. Spero, and a blossoming population of initiatives like it all over the country, are nascent attempts to move past that. They make it easier to recognize the learning that happens in workplaces and on playing fields, the wisdom that comes from accomplishments like raising children and starting a business, the dignity inherent in sustaining optimism for a next chapter despite late starts and modest means. They offer glimpses, at least, of what a society organized not around school credentials but instead around the pursuit of open futures might look like: a learning society, still under construction, with known and loved academic institutions nurturing it into maturity.
Read more stories by Mitchell L. Stevens & João M. Souto-Maior.