Policy Reviews

In April 2026, the House Education and Workforce Committee passed ASWA 2026 — a WIOA reauthorization that extended the law's authorization through 2032 while leaving largely unaddressed the labor market challenge it will govern: the accelerating displacement of workers by AI systems across occupational categories that previous automation waves left untouched. The Senate's 2024 draft had included AI workforce transition provisions. They did not survive. The workforce policy framework governing the country's response to AI-era disruption was just extended through 2032, largely unchanged.

Credential inflation — the expansion of degree requirements beyond what job performance actually requires — is not a data anomaly. Evidence from the Burning Glass Institute, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and Brookings Institution confirms it is a policy-addressable market failure with measurable costs distributed unevenly across the workforce. This analysis examines its three primary forms, who bears the cost, and the three policy levers with the most documented traction.

The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act was signed into law on July 22, 2014. A decade later, its authorization has lapsed, its funding has eroded, and Congress is debating reauthorization that would restructure core elements of the system. This analysis examines what WIOA was designed to accomplish, what the evidence shows it has actually delivered, and what its next decade needs to look like — as a reauthorization bill advances on a party-line vote through a Senate with an uncertain path ahead.

Active registered apprentices reached approximately 678,000 in 2025 — an 88 percent increase from 2015. These are genuine gains that still leave the United States with apprenticeship participation well below one percent of its workforce, a fraction of rates in Germany, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom. This analysis examines where state-level expansion is producing results, where structural barriers limit scale, and why federal inaction remains the system's ceiling.

More than half of U.S. states have taken formal action to remove degree requirements from government hiring since 2019. In the private sector, 85 percent of employers now report using skills-based hiring practices. Yet despite widespread rhetoric, only 0.14 percent of new hires at companies claiming skills-based practices actually lacked a college degree in roles where degrees were previously required. The policy is right. The implementation is where the work remains.