Joe Fuller: It’s a classic Econ 101 incentives problem: How can policymakers induce postsecondary institutions to prioritize workforce and career development outcomes over traditional measures of academic attainment? Texas has emerged as a national test case for aligning postsecondary funding with workforce outcomes. Its model, centered on “credentials of value,” ties public investments directly to student success in the labor market. What was the thinking behind this bold reassessment of the education-to-employment connection? What are the early returns? And what can other states and federal policymakers learn from this initiative?

Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m your host, Harvard Business School professor and nonresident senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, Joe Fuller. I’m pleased to welcome Harrison Keller to our HBS podcast studio. Dr. Keller is president of the University of North Texas. Prior to assuming that role in 2024, he served as the Texas Commissioner of Higher Education. In that capacity, he led the state’s groundbreaking reform effort. We’ll talk about the Texas context—including its data-rich public records—the legislative process leading to the new funding model, and the model’s early implementation. We’ll also talk about how the reforms have been received by educators and employers and consider the post-reform landscape of supports, incentives, and accountabilites. One notable result is a rise in the number of short-term skills acquisition programs—often called “nondegree programs”—backed by state financial aid for the first time. We’ll also discuss Dr. Keller’s data-informed academic, workforce, and economic development agenda at the University of North Texas. There—and statewide—the workforce reforms are putting more resources behind efforts to help students and employers take advantage of Texas’s buoyant employment market while navigating ongoing AI disruptions. Well, Dr. Keller, welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast.

Harrison Keller: Thanks for the opportunity. I’m delighted to be here to talk about our work in Texas.

Fuller: Could you tell us a little bit about yourself? And now you’re the new president of the University of North Texas, but how did you find yourself in this field of higher ed and focused on employment to transitions to employment from education?

Keller: Yeah, so my path would be a little more nontraditional path. All my academic training is in academic philosophy, mostly moral and political philosophy, and I got a great education. I’ll always be indebted to the philosophy departments at Notre Dame and Georgetown. But I got interested in that because I was interested in how opportunities should be distributed and what it means to flourish as a human. And sort of I blazed my own trail, came back to Texas, and worked in the Texas Legislature, also got picked up at the University of Texas at Austin. And so, over about 20 years, I was back and forth between UT and the state capitol a couple of times and then had the opportunity to serve as Commissioner of Higher Education for the State of Texas for about five years. I just about a year ago started as the president at University of North Texas.

Fuller: So, Harrison, during your five years as commissioner, Texas adopted a sweeping set of reforms relative to higher ed that really caught the attention of the higher-ed community. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had in all sorts of different states where they ask about the reforms in Texas, reflect on the reforms in Texas. Some people praise them. Some people are concerned by them. But could you tell us what triggered that, and particularly this whole notion of building talent under the motto of “Building a Talent Strong Texas”? Where’d that come from?

Keller: Texas had higher education goals, focused on educational attainment of our younger working-age population. And, frankly, I think it had run its course. It wasn’t getting a lot of traction at the capitol or among institutions. Also, we were already seeing some warning signs in public opinion polls about higher education. So Governor Abbott and I talked about that, and I suggested that there might be some ways we could raise the bar if we would focus explicitly, not just on educational attainment but on credentials that are of value in our economy. One of the incredibly rich assets that we have in Texas is great data about our educational systems and our workforce data. We can link all that data. And so we had the capability to be able to ask ourselves some tough questions about what kinds of credentials translated into economic opportunities for students. So we became the first state to condition our state goals on the value of credentials in our state economy. Another part of that was, we broadened the scope of the plan. So we weren’t just focused on the young working-age population, but our entire working-age population because we also have a need to upskill and reskill our incumbent workforce.

Fuller: Let’s unbundle that a little bit. So, as you mentioned, you are one of the states that has this wonderful advantage to be able to link education records all the way through to tax records so you can see how people progress through the system as they move out of formal education into the workforce, which is something I wish we did federally or we could do it every state since it gives you wonderful insights. You mentioned that the previous approach ran its course, wasn’t really moving the needle. What do you attribute that to? Was it, were we operating off the wrong metrics? Had we just gotten that as far as it could go, and we were just getting the people that could make their lives accommodate what we were offering but couldn’t go beyond that? How do you explain it getting stuck?

Keller: I think in higher education, we’re used to being able to stipulate the value proposition. And, on one hand, it’s important that, for example, mathematicians are the best judges of what counts as doing mathematics or scientists are the best judges of what counts as doing science. But when it comes to educating people and graduating students with credentials that are going to create economic opportunities for them, we don’t get to stipulate the value proposition by ourselves. And so there’s a disconnect between many of the credentials that have been created on the higher education side and that are awarded and the direction that our economy has been headed. So I lead the University of North Texas, it’s the largest university in the Dallas–Fort Worth region, and the DFW region has been growing like crazy. So, by 2030, we’re projected to be the third largest metropolitan statistical area in the U.S., past Chicago. There’s incredible growth in job opportunities, geometric growth. We’ve been making incremental progress in awarding higher-ed credentials. But the most common degree that’s being awarded in the DFW area right now is a general studies degree. So there’s not necessarily a clear line of sight between those kinds of degrees, whether it’s a two-year or a four-year credential, and the kinds of jobs that are being created right now in the DFW area.

Fuller: Well, that seems to be a nationwide phenomenon. About 70 percent of community college enrollees are in general studies, and I’m afraid the data in terms of employment outcomes is not very impressive in terms of general studies. So not a surprise that you are focused on that when we’re talking about Dallas. But if we talk about Texas more broadly, if I’m not mistaken, if it were a separate country, it’d be a top 10 economy, and it’s highly diverse. You’ve got all the different elements. You’ve got energy, you’ve got process industries down in Houston, you’ve got great medical facilities, you’ve got technology leaders like Dell. How do you accommodate such a diverse economy and create talent pipelines for each of them?

Keller: So first, as a native Texan, I feel like I’m obligated to point out Texas is huge, bigger than France. We have more than 30 million Texans. And you’re right. If we were still our own independent republic right now, we’d be the eighth largest economy in the world. But Texas is really a collection of different kinds of regional economies. Texas has grown a lot over the last decade or so. Most of that growth is concentrated in metro areas—Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, the Rio Grande Valley. In more than 100 counties, the population actually has been either flat or declined over the last decades. And Texas is served by a wide variety of colleges and universities. We have our Texas State Technical Colleges. We’ve got 50 different community colleges. We also have 37 public universities. And so one of the things that’s important for us to do is to understand what those job opportunities are like, how they vary across the state. And what we are increasingly prioritizing at UNT and working with other institutions, with chambers [of commerce], with EDCs [economic development councils], with employers, its looking a little more deeply into that data about what kinds of jobs do we see expanding, what kinds of skills are employers looking for, what kinds of credentials have currency with employers?

Fuller: How did that reflect itself as you worked through the task of pulling together what’s called House Bill number eight, often called “HB 8” in the higher-ed community? Walk us through the process for thinking through that really, fundamentally, a new approach, as instantiated in that legislation, and also how’d your experience in the Texas legislature help you navigate that?

Keller: So House Bill 8 was a massive community college finance bill that we passed in 2023. And so there was about two years of work that went into preparation for the passage of that bill. There was a public commission. There were a number of technical studies and policy research. We worked very, very closely with higher education policy experts from across the state, across the country, very closely with community college leaders. We polled the Texas public. We held regional listening sessions, and we distilled all of that into an ambitious set of goals. And the centerpiece of that was a complete overhaul of the community college finance system, where we had driven about 80 percent of the funding to community colleges based on seat time, based on the kinds of courses that they offer. And now in Texas, 95 percent of the state funding to community colleges comes through an outcomes-based formula. And that’s based on the number of credentials of value that are awarded by the institutions, also students transferring or hitting 15 hours in structured co-enrollment programs with universities, or high school students taking 15 hours that apply to either academic or workforce credentials. So this was a sea change in the way that we were funding community colleges in a number of respects. So one is just that focus on credentials of value, focus on outcomes versus the seat time and the inputs. That funding was also adjusted where the colleges get more funding if you have a student who’s low income or a student who was not college ready when they enrolled. And they get even more funding if you have an adult learner who’s been out of school for a while because they have complex needs that make it more expensive to educate those adult students. And then, in addition, the system is all dynamic. So it’s not sum-certain appropriation. It’s really based on the actual outcomes that the colleges produce. And there’s a settle-up process at the back. The idea was to try to align the incentives for the colleges with the kinds of credentials of value that the state needs and markers of progress of students transferring or even in high school working toward credentials that would translate into real value for the students, for the employers, for the taxpayers. That was a pretty dramatic shift in how we fund the colleges. But one other piece that I do have to call out there is that that’s 95 percent of the system. The other 5 percent went to shore up the funding for smaller property-poor community colleges. Our community colleges are funded, in part, on their local property taxes. And we had colleges where one penny of tax effort per $100 of valuation will generate more than $1,100 per student. We have colleges where a penny of tax effort will generate about $11 per student. And so part of the system now equalizes some of that tax effort to shore up those property-poor colleges to make sure that they’re able to offer instruction, they’re able to offer programs. That’s a small part of the state system, but essentially doubled or more some of the state funding for those small colleges overnight. There was a lot in the design of this new system for everybody to get on board with, and they did. In fact, the bill passed on final passage unanimously in the Texas House and in the Texas Senate. Also, there were no floor amendments that were added onto that bill in the Texas House, and that’s something, and working around the Texas Legislature for more than a quarter-century, I’ve never seen.

Fuller: Obviously, a lot hinges on this concept of credentials of value. Could you tell me a little bit about both how that’s defined? How is it kept fresh and up to date, and how is it communicated to both schools and learners?

Keller: So the way that the basic methodology works is you look into the data and ask, “Well, what are the earnings like of a Texan who only has a high school diploma?” Then you compare that to the earnings of a Texan who has whatever the credential is that’s in question, whether it’s an associate’s degree or a bachelor’s degree. We netted out financial aid. We netted out also opportunity costs and then basically asked the question, “Are you better off? How quickly do you break even on your investment in that degree?” Is it more or less than 10 years, for example, for a bachelor’s degree or for an associate’s degree? If you’re not better off, then we don’t want to count that credential toward our state goals, and it shouldn’t be a fundable credential under House Bill 8. So now, what’s happened is that the state’s continued to refine that definition of credentials of value. They’ve made some statutory tweaks this last time. But the fundamental principle remains the same: You want to make sure that students are better off for the kinds of credentials that they earn. This is a concept also that I’ve taken over to the University of North Texas with me. One of the things that made all this possible is during the pandemic, the governor prioritized higher education for some of the more flexible stimulus funds that were available to the governors, and most of that money was used for financial aid or for expanding workforce programs. But we did use some of it to modernize that state data infrastructure and also to power new advising tools. So students and their families can go to mytexasfuture.org. You can see different kinds of jobs that are available, what they typically pay. You can look at higher-education degrees and what they typically pay. And then, as a university president, I can look into the data and I can see by program what the earnings are like for my graduates. I can also see what the debt profiles are like for my graduates. And that helps us know where we need to focus our attention.

Fuller: So this concept is being applied at the level of field of study, what’s specific program you’re taking at a community college or four-year degree-granting institution as opposed to bachelor’s degree, associate’s degree. Not to make this too pointed, but your background is in philosophy and at least around this campus, philosophy is not a subject that immediately comes to mind as a field in which you make a handsome income being a philosopher. You may have great psychic income, but cash and wallet may be less so. You made the transition into education and into government. How would you capture that distinction? It’s baked into the actual income performance of people with that degree, historically?

Keller: Yeah, I have to say maybe it depends on what your philosophy is. But we have the ability, like at North Texas, we can look into that data and we have for all our undergraduate and all our graduate degree programs. We can see for philosophy and for all of our other programs how quickly do students break even on their investment. So, if I were still teaching philosophy courses, I might want to advise a student differently who just needs to finish that bachelor’s degree and get a job. So you might want to say, “Well, how might you want to embed different kinds of microcredentials that might expand your options?” So while you’re pursuing your philosophy degree, if you pick up a project-management certification, for example, you just got a broader range of options. If you’re on a path to law school, maybe we ought to have a track that helps prepare you for that transition. If you’re thinking about graduate school and philosophy, we need to have a very serious conversation about academic job markets. So having that data, both for the student and then also for the faculty, is incredibly powerful. And so two questions that I often get when I talk about this work around the country, one is people will say, “Well, what about the humanities?” They’re worried that if we’re going to focus on workforce, that the humanities will be left behind. Well, we actually look into the data and one of the things we see is that, well, sure, the time to break even is going to be longer for a philosophy degree or an English degree, a history degree than for an engineering or computer science degree on average. But these are credentials of value. Employers actually do really value these skills. They want people who can communicate, people who can think critically. We can make an argument that it should be a time for the liberal arts to shine. The other question that I get is people say, “Well, what about the faculty?” And there I have to say, what I have found, at least at my institution at the University of North Texas, is we have a terrific faculty senate. We’ve got a terrific faculty. They haven’t had access to this kind of data. And I think most faculty at most institutions haven’t had these kinds of tools. And to be candid, at most institutions also, there hasn’t been a lot of support for faculty to be able to work on these issues. So there’s this mythology that faculty don’t care about their students, or they’re just focused on their research. I haven’t found that to be the case with my faculty. But you’ve got to get behind the faculty innovators, provide them with the tools, provide them with support, and make it clear that this is work that we value. So we are standing up new kinds of infrastructure at UNT to support our faculty in this hard work on curriculum and curriculum design to make sure that our curriculum is coherent, but also that there’s a clear line of sight to the skills that students are going to need.

Fuller: How do you track what metrics are getting tracked, and how often are they refreshed?

Keller: First of all, we have analyzed all of our undergraduate and graduate degree programs where we look at the earnings, we look at the debt profiles to understand what’s that historical return on investment, how quickly do students break even in their investment? We bring that data into dialogue with our data at the institution about, “Well, what are the costs of delivering these programs? What margin do different programs generate, or how much do we have to subsidize different programs?” And then the third thing that you have to consider is demand. So, when we’re looking at wage data, you’re looking in the rearview mirror. And, of course, our workforce needs are changing incredibly fast. So you also have to look at the data on job postings, and we have to listen to employers about what they need, what they think they’re going to need. And what employers are telling me from every sector is their workforce needs are changing faster than they expected and sometimes faster than we understand. And that’s especially because of the rise in artificial intelligence. It is really important for us to be at the table with employers working through these issues together so that we understand how those needs are changing, we understand the problems that they’re wrestling with. In this last legislative session, one of the ideas that we proposed to the legislature that we’re excited about—and they got behind us on this idea—is, we are actually organizing a regional hub at UNT, but in partnership with employers, with chambers, with economic development corporations, with community colleges, with other universities to do two things. One is to work together to understand how our regional workforce needs are changing. And the other thing is to set the stage so that we could coordinate better across institutions. The traditional view in higher-ed institutions has been much more supply side. So you might say, “Well, we train teachers and Texas Women’s University trains teachers and Dallas College trains teachers, so we must all be competitors.” And then you zoom out and put together we’re nowhere near together meeting all the needs for teachers for our region. That’s true for construction managers, for data analysts, for other critical fields. So we need to take a different approach, where we work the demand side of the problem.

Fuller: So you mentioned earlier that the legislation did not set an absolute funding limit. It wasn’t “sum-certain,” is the phrase you used. If I’m a school, and I’m performing well and getting more funding, what happened? And if I’m now under pressure because I’m not creating credentials of value, what happens?

Keller: Some schools really leaned in, especially the State of Texas had not funded short-term workforce programs through the community college finance system. Also we created new access to financial aid for those programs, which we’d never done before. So there are some of the community colleges that have really leaned in and doubled their workforce programs just over the last couple of years. And we’ve seen some extraordinary growth in the workforce-education programs. So, if you’re a college that is producing more of these credentials, more of these credentials of value, then you can draw down more funding. And we actually included an element in the finance system for a dynamic adjustment. So, if you’re outperforming the projections on the positive side, where your funding could be adjusted, so you could draw down additional state funding—which, the idea is you’d need to do that because you’re going to be hiring more faculty. Your costs are going to be going up as you’re moving quickly to meet the demand. On the other side though, if your enrollments are going down, then you could lose funding. And if you underperform the expectations, you could actually owe funding back to the state. And there may be cases where the colleges could actually lose funding as a result. But for those colleges, they would be on notice well in advance that this could happen. And we try to work closely with the colleges on the rules so that there would be a long glide path. There’s an upside, but there’s also a potential downside in this new system.

Fuller: I think one of the things that’s highly attractive about the program is this broadening to really just focus on outcomes. We don’t really care about what credential you got just as long as it motivates you to get on a path that’s going to give you some economic independence and security. It is going to be incredibly challenging to keep up with the rate of change, because we certainly see in our research here at the Management of the Future Work Project that employers are being surprised by how fast things are changing. And really the whole skills system in the United States cannot be accused of being all that nimble; it takes a while to respond. What are the takeaways you think that other states or the federal government should be taking from what you’ve been doing in Texas?

Keller: One is the importance of this data, as you alluded to earlier, Joe. So we’re not looking generally at the value of bachelor’s degrees. We can look much more precisely at the value and demand for particular credentials. I wish we had much richer national data, because what happens is when students leave Texas—so for example, we have one of the best jazz programs in the world. We had, the first degree in jazz studies in the United States was at University of North Texas. So, when a student goes to LA or they go to New York or a student goes to Nashville, they disappear from our Texas data sets. So that’s a challenge for us in trying to understand what’s happening with our students. Another thing that I would highlight would be, the HB 8 is a story about policy innovation, but what gets glossed over is it’s also a story about policy implementation. So we work very, very closely with the key community college leaders. On every major decision, we were sure that we understood their perspective. Sometimes we held forums. Sometimes there was a better idea, and we needed to pivot. But we started the work on the rules for implementation of House Bill 8 before that bill had ever passed, so that we could move incredibly quickly. We had emergency rules in place, and we were into implementation of that bill within six weeks of the governor’s signature. The third thing that I highlight, that it illustrates the importance and power of design research. So we did a lot of work on Building a Talent Strong Texas and on House Bill 8 to understand what the needs are, what the concerns are, of key stakeholders, employers, educators, across the state. When that bill came to the floor in the Texas House, there was a letter on the desk of all 150 members that was signed by all 50 community college presidents and chancellors encouraging them to pass the bill and to keep it clean. And ,again, they did.

Fuller: Well, that integration across constituencies has been the missing element in so many efforts to improve outcomes, which are focused exclusively on funding more education. We certainly saw that when we got all CTE- [career and technical education] and particularly high-tech-oriented, STEM-oriented, which of course are the types of jobs now, which will be severely affected by AI as it gets to be embraced more widely by employers. Well, as you look to the future, not just to the University of North Texas, but for the state of Texas as a whole, what should we be looking for? What are your ambitions?

Keller: Well, so first, we’ve got to take fundamental responsibility for the talent problem in higher education. And that means that we have to work much more closely with employers to understand how those workforce needs are changing. What every employer is telling me in every sector is, because of AI, their workforce needs are changing incredibly fast. That’s disrupting entry-level jobs. It’s disrupting the next jobs that people would get promoted into. So, at University of North Texas, we’re very proud of our programs in the liberal arts, in the creative arts, as well as in business and engineering and other fields. Across every discipline, we need to make sure that students have that opportunity to develop skills, to have experiences, to earn credentials that let them hit the ground running. That’s going to be a combination of internships, meaningful projects for employers that let them translate their skills to different contexts, and also new kinds of partnerships with the faculty, giving the faculty opportunities to do externships with employers, giving the faculty more recognition and support to be partners in this work. I think that’s the only way that we’re going to be able to meet our workforce needs at scale to make sure that we’re going to be able to be competitive into the future.

Fuller: One thing that certainly jumps out of our research data is that the benefits associated with experiential learning—where you are not just in the classroom or in the lab, but you’re in the workplace, especially for younger people—is really inarguable, at least from our data sets, that that’s a missing link for so many young people. So getting people that opportunity to know what a job is about and getting an employer the opportunity to know what that employee is about, a rent-to-own model, it’s going to be very effective.

Keller: Yeah. Well, I think really important in a couple of respects. So, especially for first-generation college students—so more than 40 percent of our undergraduates at University of North Texas—are the first in their family to go to college. They’re blazing trails for their family, for their communities in many cases. So, giving students the opportunity early to be exposed to the expectations of workforce, to learn how they can translate those skills that they’re learning into value for themselves and employers is really powerful. The other thing that’s important about this is that you expose students to opportunities that may resonate and also in some cases may not. And there’s something to be said for internships as a way to figure out what you don’t want to do, as well as what you do.

Fuller: The employers we’re speaking to, Dr. Keller, are certainly astonished by the rate of change in work and really are unable to understand where it’s going to settle, because AI is the first technology we’ve ever had that actually improves itself as it’s deployed. So the bar, if you will, keeps getting higher and higher in certain jobs. Are there employers that you are working with that you think are really on top of this and are making the most of the opportunities that the legislation created for them?

Keller: One of the things that’s striking to me is how I hear similar things from employers in multiple sectors. So, whether it’s Peterbilt in Denton, Texas, where they have robots and humans working alongside each other and more and more parts of that process are automated—so they roll a new Peterbilt truck off the line now every five minutes, and that’s getting shorter and shorter thanks to automation and thanks to the integration of AI in that process. Well, that has implications for what their workforce needs to look like and what they need to do to remain competitive. But it’s also true when I talk to folks at Fidelity or Goldman Sachs. So the kinds of things that entry-level analysts used to do to cut their teeth in the consulting world now can be automated. And that’s disrupting not only those entry-level analyst jobs, but the next jobs that those analysts would be promoted into. So that’s got a significant impact on how they think about their workforce. When I talk with them and talk with other employers—we’ve got major health systems like Baylor Scott & White as one of the major employers. They’ve got more than 30,000 employees just in the DFW area, or TIAA is expanding what they’re doing in the DFW area, Lockheed Martin—so there’s challenges not only on that entry-level worker side, but also we’ve got a major challenge in reskilling and upskilling our incumbent workforce to be able to work with AI, to be able to incorporate these new tools into our processes. The number one area across every sector, employers are saying that they need closer partnerships, they need help is in dealing with AI.

Fuller: Well, we have a major project here at Harvard Business School on this whole issue of reskilling and upskilling precisely for the reasons you mentioned, that in the future, the idea that I’m just going to go into the spot market and hire somebody I’ve identified I need is going to be really hard, and you’re going to have to do a lot more growing your own. And, frankly, most companies just are not very well configured to deliver that learning and training, and many of them have cut back on their training budgets in the last couple of decades.

Keller: One of the striking things to me is that a lot of employers that offer educational benefits offer that more as a generic way of retaining employees. And one of the things that I think is going to be important for us to leverage with the employers is connecting dots between those educational benefits and the career paths and the new kinds of skills that we need employees to have. So I think there are some tools in the toolbox that we could definitely deploy a little better, and that’s true across most of the employers that I’ve talked to.

Fuller: We’ve alluded several times to the threats that AI poses to the workforce. I think there’s an example of something that’s going to benefit immensely from the deployment of AI to link credentials with outcomes, to link performance management systems to training. So employers could be more systematic about isolating variables that explain highly productive workers who stay, don’t turn over rapidly, to evaluate programs dynamically to mix and match elements of programs. And so there are going to be some real benefits to the workforce. Let’s talk a little bit more broadly though. We read regularly in the papers, for example, that everything from the U.S. Navy can’t keep its construction program on target, let’s say, for nuclear submarines because they can’t find enough pipefitters. TSMC, the giant integrated circuit company headquartered in Taiwan, has complained that under the CHIPS Act, they couldn’t find the engineering talent to move forward building these major new fabs and was also being constrained back in the day by the Biden administration from just bringing in the talent from Taiwan to accelerate the current construction of these fabs. How should we think about this as a country and labor force as a source of competitiveness?

Keller: So we’ve talked a lot about individual opportunity for students, for their families, regional economic competitiveness. But zooming out, we’ve taken for granted that the United States leads in innovation. And that’s been important for our economic prosperity, but also essential for our national security. Right now, given the pace of change in our economy and in technology, the major point of friction to the economic competitiveness to our national security is in our talent pipeline. So, when I talk to employers across our region in defense-related industries, which is a broader and broader scope of industry—not just including folks at Lockheed or Bell Helicopter, but also in logistics, in mining, and in various aspects of our economy—they’re having trouble being able to source the talent that they need. One of the major employers told me they could hire every engineer from Texas A&M every year, just that one employer, and still not have enough. Texas A&M has 25,000 students in its College of Engineering. It’s the largest college of engineering in the state of Texas. That’s just one institution and one employer. So it gives you an idea of the urgency and the scale of the challenges that we face. So this is something also we’re taking on at University of North Texas. We’ve recently kicked off, in partnership with employers, a national security and economic strategy initiative to analyze these issues, pulled together, in partnership with current and former military and defense related industries, to look at the connections between economic strategy and national security. I, myself, as a former Navy reservist, this is something very close to my heart. But I believe especially our public universities have a responsibility to contribute to national security. And again, that major point of friction right now seems to be in that talent pipeline.

Fuller: Well, Dr. Harrison Keller, president of the University of North Texas and former Commissioner of Higher Education in the great state of Texas, it’s been such a pleasure to hear from someone who is right at the coalface and advancing this very, very innovative and exciting legislation in Texas to put an emphasis on outcomes for learners, not just credentials. Thanks for joining us.

Keller: Yeah, thanks for the opportunity to talk about our work in Texas and for Building a Talent Strong Texas. It’s been a great conversation.

Fuller: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcast. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.