--- title: "Cage Match or Common Ground: Higher Ed, Skills, and AI" slug: "byron-auguste-opportunity-work-cage-match-or-common-ground-higher-asu-gsv-2026" author: "Byron Auguste, Ted Mitchell, Jane Swift" date: "2026-04-14 12:00:00" category: "Premium" topics: "ASU+GSV 2026, conference transcript, AI in Education, Higher Education" summary: "This session explored whether skills-based hiring and college degrees are mutually exclusive or complementary, moderated by Jane Swift with panelists Byron Auguste (Opportunity@Work) and Ted Mitchell (ACE)." banner: "" thumbnail: "" --- > **ASU+GSV 2026 Summit** | | Unknown ## Speakers - **Byron Auguste**, Opportunity@Work - **Ted Mitchell**, ACE - **Jane Swift** ## Key Takeaways - This session explored whether skills-based hiring and college degrees are mutually exclusive or complementary, moderated by Jane Swift with panelists Byron Auguste (Opportunity@Work) and Ted Mitchell (ACE). - The panelists reached strong consensus that college is not the only path to opportunity, citing 70 million Americans skilled through alternative routes (STARs), while also affirming that higher education remains an incredibly important institution that needs to better identify, label, and assess the skills it develops. - A key insight was Mitchell's argument that higher education operates in a "world of proxies" where degree labels substitute for actual skill assessment, and that colleges must "tear their own paper ceiling." The discussion concluded with the impact of AI, where Auguste warned that AI's disruption extends beyond direct job displacement to the entire career pathway ecosystem, and argued that AI tools must be put in the hands of people with contextual knowledge of unsolved problems. ## Notable Quotes > "We need to have skills as a currency of operability so that if you can do the job, you can get the job." > > — **Byron Auguste** > "Higher education is a world of proxies... we have not been good for our students in naming and assessing skills. So I think we've got to get better at tearing our own paper ceiling." > > — **Ted Mitchell** > "College can be, is, should be much more a bridge to opportunity for millions of people. But we can't make it a draw bridge that pulls up behind and leaves everybody else on the outside." > > — **Byron Auguste** > "AI is such a general purpose technology that yields so much to our purpose. I think AI is like amplified intention. What are we trying to do with it?" > > — **Byron Auguste** > "In the AI world, how can we change every college experience to focus on those critical thinking, those communications, those imagination skills that we're counting on differentiating humans from machines." > > — **Ted Mitchell** ## Full Transcript We'll be right back. Well, thank you. This is our annual version of what will she say. So when they invited me to be the moderator, I was like, well, everybody knows we'll do the prep session. I may or may not say what is on the briefing sheets, but it's fun to have those anyway. It's great to be here with two August colleagues, but this is we are hoping to settle what is I think a fairly significant debate going on in the workforce area. As was said, I have been in policy areas, but today as the CEO of education at work, I'm really working at the intersection of higher education in the workforce. I like to think of myself as a talent developer. That's very highfalutin. But what we are going to figure out is skills-based hiring, college, are they mutually exclusive? Can they exist together? Or is it a fight to the death, a cage match, if you will? So the first thing I want to do is to introduce my two terrific panelists, Ted Mitchell, who comes at this, from the higher-education angle, representing the American College Council on higher education. I guess you don't call yourself higher education. Why not? Just wait. It's coming. Okay. And also, and I practice this, Byron Auguste, who is the, see, Auguste, I use that, right? But that's not how you say his name. So it's an Auguste conversation, but our panelist is Mr. Auguste, who is the cofounder of Opportunity at Work. And he has sparked, really, the skills-first hiring movement and the tear-the-paper-ceiling campaign. So the media, my favorite group of people, have spent the year, I haven't lost that in 30 years of being out of politics, have spent years pitting the skills-first hiring movement and the skills-based hiring movement against college degrees. And so we're going to take three rounds to really get to the bottom of whether or not this is really a myth or fact. And so the first myth that we are going to look to tackle, and they told me that I should say let's go at the beginning of each round so my panelists would know. Is there anyone else here from Massachusetts? Please raise your hand. Do we actually say let's go in Massachusetts? No. We say LFW. Okay. Do we actually say let's go in Massachusetts? No. We say LFG. That's a Tom Brady thing, but I don't think I'm allowed to say that here. So I'll just say LFG, but that's how you say let's go in Massachusetts for any of you who are going to visit. All right. So starting with the biggest myth, college is the only legitimate path to a skilled life. LFG, Mr. Mitchell, what do you think? Of course. This will keep us moving quickly. Comma. No, of course it's not. And I think that what's an even more interesting question is, is college at all a pathway to meaningful work? But that's round two. Right. So, Mr. tear the paper, ceiling campaign. Well, we know that college is the only legitimate path to a career. We know that college is not the only path to professional success. We have 70 million Americans who don't have college degrees but who are skilled through alternative routes, like mainly from work on the job but also in military service and community colleges and like, well, lots of programs that are kind of represented in this room. But above all, like, people are learners. And we have, on the one hand, we have 4 million stars in high wage jobs, more than twice the average job titles being CEO and software developer. But on the flip side, the barriers to stars have actually squeezed out 8 million stars from paths to upward mobility in the last 20 years, and we're sitting right now with 30 million people stars who have actually skills for jobs that pay about 50% more than the ones they're in. So there's a huge unlock still. So I don't think we can say that it's like a level playing field, and I think there's clearly lots of advantages to college, but we are already seeing lots of pathways to professional success. Can I ask you, so I've been running a call center for Intuit TurboTax for the last eight weeks, and so all of our college students who work there all use all these acronyms. I thought there was one I didn't understand because they kept putting RR in the chat, and I was finally like, because I have to ask my kids all the time, what do these things mean? RR means restroom. I didn't know what that meant. But we're using the word stars. Yeah. I'm not sure everybody uses that. Could you just spell out what S-T-A-R, how we're using that word? So stars means skilled through alternative routes. And I'm sure you all knew that and didn't need me to clear that up, but in case we keep using that word star, just, and RR means restroom. All right, keep going. But the most important part of that is skilled. Right. It's like what are you, not what are you not. So college is not the only path opportunity. I work with lots of college students. I will also tell you, I grew up in my path to college, was paid for by a wonderful plumbing company, and many of my cousins and uncles are still in a skill trade. All of them worked very hard to send their children to college. What I see today with our students is that it's skills plus, skills and experience, and a college degree that brings a lot of value if you find that opportunity in the right way. So if college is not the only path to opportunity, what is the solution for most young adults or most not so young adults? How do we find opportunity for more workers in this rapidly changing world? How do we find opportunity for more workers in this rapidly changing economy? Why don't we start this time. This is still question one, by the way. We haven't even gotten to question two. You'll know when I say LFG. So I think there's one thing about what does an individual do and that depends on their circumstances and what opportunities are before them, but in terms of how the system should work, it is really critical to tear the paper ceiling, meaning not that college isn't valuable, not that a degree isn't valuable, not that there's something wrong with using that paper as a ceiling to keep other people out which is to say we need to have skills as a currency of operability so that if you can do the job, you can get the job. That's number one. Second, we need to give people so many more ways to show what they can do, whether they're in college or not, whether that's projects and demonstrations and builds, whether that's work-based learning, whether that's apprenticeships. There's a lot of ways to do it. And finally, you have to have a way for really valuable learning to actually lead to higher earnings wherever that learning took place, college, not college, et cetera. That's what we have to do. So let me go back to my little teaser about whether college is the right path. How many of you are doing something with your life that is described on your business card the way it was described on your diploma? Not a lot. So I would argue this goes back to a fundamental problem that we have in higher education and have had for centuries is that we teach a lot of skills, but we don't identify them, we don't label them, we don't assess them and we don't name them. Higher education is a world of proxies. How many of you are history majors? Man. How many of you are economics majors? Okay. In either case, that label is a proxy for skills. And I think this isn't a cage match. Byron and I are good friends and we think about this all the time. The problem in college is that we have not been good for our students in naming and assessing skills. So I think we've got to get better at tearing our own paper ceiling. We've got to get beyond that piece of paper that says economics and say what analytics, what communication, et cetera, et cetera. And so in a way, I'm hoping that higher education can follow the work that Byron and his colleagues are doing in coming up with nameable skills, a taxonomy of those skills, a variety of different ways in which they can be developed and a variety of different ways in which they can be assessed. That's on us. So I think we're violently agreeing, which makes things really boring. You don't want to provoke me into trying to make this more interesting. I just ain't going to warn you about that now. But if we're agreeing that this is a skills-based world and we need skills and college is one of the ways but not the only way you can do that, folks still think there are parts maybe of college. I think you were saying the diploma and how the transcript may be obsolete. Are there other parts in a skills-first world, right, where we know we have a lot of opportunities, right, where we know we have to recognize multiple ways of learning, where employers should put more emphasis on what students know, what I see and the reason I'm doing the work I'm doing, what employers have basically done is added to the requirement for a degree, years of experience. I'm trying to solve this riddle for this generation of every entry-level job requires three years of experience and nobody is hiring entry-level workers. So in my little mommy magic wand I'm trying for thousands of students to figure out how to get you three years of experience without any entry- level jobs. No problem. These are the things that moms do. But with all of those things together, what does, are there things at college that are obsolete or that need to be done completely differently? LFG, so you know it's a second question. Sure. I think it's the absence of. So I want to move your question into credit for prior learning. So we assume when students come into college, especially 18 to 24-year-olds, which is a declining population and actually the minority of college students, but we still treat everybody who comes through the door as if they're starting at the same place. They're not. Some need a lot more work in some areas where they're high schools might not have been great. But even more come to college with a boatload of experience that we need to identify, experience and skills that we need to identify and give them credit for. We've been doing this for military for 40 years. Imagine an army medic. Got a GED, goes into the army, comes out of the army as a, after a two-to-a-half year military service. He has a, after two tours of duty, I want to be a nurse. Well, do they have to start at the beginning of human anatomy, biology? They sure shouldn't. And so we're able to provide college credit for that military experience that puts them on a different pathway. That's a way of in part building up a student's sense of self, sense of worth, giving credit to the work that they've done and the people they're becoming. Gene, I think that there's a lot that college can do better and needs to. And there's a real temptation for college. I mean, no faculty senate ever voted for college to be the only path to the middle class. That's not a thing that college said, that universities said. In a sense, the degree has been weaponized by the way it's being used in employment. But at the same time, colleges and universities are incredibly important institutions that should take their role in learning more seriously and should actually reject their role in sort of bifurcating our society into some sort of feudal society where some people are talent, some people are labor, and other people are surplus to requirement. That's B.S. And we've got to break it. And college has to be part of solving it, even if college didn't invent that problem. So I think if you look at the math, just like you can't write off like what everyone's learning on the job and like half the skilled workforce that is skilled through alternative routes, you can't write off the incredible capacity and capability, just the incredible gift we have of this higher education system. And college can be, is, should be much more a bridge to opportunity for millions of people. But we can't make it a draw bridge that pulls up behind and leaves everybody else on the outside. You know, one of the things you said, Zoe, is I'm trying to like solve this. How do you find work for students when there's less work for entry level? I think the skills first, as opposed to the label, may work in solving this work-based learning where we don't have enough internships. But we have plenty of jobs. But isn't that what that five years of experience is really asking? It's another kind of proxy. Right. What do you have for skills? But also most students going into college think that they have to get those skills through an internship. We don't have enough internships. But what we've been trying to think through is we have all these empty jobs, which is a lot of what we do. How do we take the jobs that are empty and put them in a job that we don't have? How do we take the jobs that are empty and make those the same equivalent of internships? Which I think you're saying how do we take prior learning and make that the same equivalent to a, you've achieved the same competency and the same skill level as you would in this course. Yeah. And even if somebody doesn't use that college credit. Right. I really care, the same draw bridge sense that Byron raised. I really care that if people later in life choose to go to college, that they're able to translate what they have been doing into the currency of the realm, into the college credit. That's right. So we've solved the whole what are we going to do about college systems. So now let's solve the other one about what happens when AI makes entry level jobs obsolete. This is three. This is three, which is a good thing because we're almost out of time. So and I'm not going to opine on this because I have so much to say based on the work we've done this year into it with AI. But doesn't AI, Ted, make the college degree more relevant? Don't we need students who can think critically and problem solve? And if so, how does that work with the reimagining we just talked about? As long as higher education pursues the development of those skills. And I think that for many students who are in higher education, who are in sort of anonymous lecture halls in very big places, who regurgitate what they learn in order to pass the exam, I think we need to up our game and say in the AI world how can we change every college experience to focus on those critical thinking, those communications, those imagination skills that we're counting on differentiating humans from machines. Awesome. Yeah. I just think one thing is we have to recognize you can gain those skills in lots of ways. Ted, I agree with you in the way that colleges should make those skills more central to the college experience. But you can learn those skills as a roofing contractor. You can learn those skills as an insurance agent. You can learn those skills in a lot of different ways. And remember that things are changing so quickly. It's not just about people coming out of school, whether that's high school or college. It's all the people that are already in the labor market. And so I think the focus needs to be not just on the college to career transitions but to career transitions in general. And Opportunity at Work and the Brookings Institution just released a pretty comprehensive look at the impact of AI on economic mobility. And I think the conclusions from that are, first of all, you have to look at the how people move through the labor market. So when you think about like a call center representative, well it's very troubling how many of those jobs might be eliminated. But the blast radius is actually much larger because it's all the people who would have moved into that job and then all the ways they would have moved out into sales jobs, other jobs. And so it's both the employer pipeline and sort of people's opportunity. Take that across 70 gateway jobs plus the college to career transition, you've got a big challenge. On the other hand, some of these destination jobs that were relatively close in skills to call center workers, they too can be augmented by AI and maybe we can shrink the skills distance so that people can move into these other areas. But this is something we have to do on purpose. We have to make it a design problem. AI is such a general purpose technology that yields so much to our purpose. I think AI is like amplified intention. What are we trying to do with it? And I believe that if we are pouring trillions of dollars of capital into it, we have to start solving new problems and we have to solve it with new problems solvers. We have to put these tools of problem solving into the hands of people with the contextual knowledge of the unsolved problems. And I think there's so much that can be done with that and it's not an either or. It's a combination of these skills. So we're going to change fundamentally all of our systems, higher education, the workforce, investment system, check, check. All of these things are incredibly easy to do. And we did it over their lunch. So yay for us. And I didn't swear. Somebody call my mother. Thank you all very much. And we stayed on time. Enjoy the rest of your conference. Thank you. --- *This transcript was put together by our friend [Philippos Savvides](https://scaleu.org) from Arizona State University. The original transcript and additional summit resources are available on [GitHub](https://github.com/savvides/asu-gsv-2026-summit-intelligence). Licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).*