Transcript - Revolutionizing Higher Education for Working Learners in a Rapidly Evolving World with Eloy Ortiz Oakley, President and CEO of the College Futures Foundation Episode 159
Release Date: 01/20/2026
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:00:00]:
Far too often, we assume as educators what they need instead of actually asking them, the employers and folks in the community, what they need. So we need to do all of those things, and we need to do it in a way that is as intentional as the way that we have been designing our curriculum for the last five decades. We have to have the same intentionality around designing curriculum in the multiple other ways that we now know work and work well for working learners.
Christina Barsi [00:00:34]:
The workforce landscape is rapidly changing, and educators and their institutions need to keep up. Preparing students before they enter the workforce to make our communities and businesses stronger is at the core of getting an education. But we need to understand how to change and adjust so that we can begin to project where things are headed before we even get there. So how do we begin to predict the future?
Salvatrice Cummo [00:00:59]:
Hi, I'm Salvatrice Cummo, Vice President of Economic and Workforce Development at Pasadena City College and host of this podcast.
Christina Barsi [00:01:08]:
And I'm Christina Barsi, producer and co host of this podcast.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:01:11]:
And we are starting the conversation about the Future of work. We'll explore topics like how education can partner with industry, how to be more equitable, and how to attain one of our highest goals, more internships and PCC students in the workforce. We at Pasadena City College want to lead the charge in closing the gap between what our students are learning and what the demands of the workforce will be once they enter. This is a conversation that impacts all of us. You, the employers, the policymakers, the educational institutions, and the community as a whole.
Christina Barsi [00:01:45]:
We believe change happens when we work together, and it all starts with having a conversation. I'm Christina Barsi.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:01:53]:
And I'm Salvatrice Cummo. And this is the Future of work.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:01:59]:
Hi. Welcome back to the Future of Work podcast. I am your host, Dr. Salvatrice Cummo. Today we're speaking with Eloy Ortiz Oakley. Eloy serves as the President and CEO of the College Futures foundation and is the former Chancellor of the California Community Colleges. And previous to that, he was the President of Long Beach City College. His work has focused on equitable access to education and economic mobility, aiming to reshape higher education to serve better today's diverse student population.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:02:32]:
Today, we'll explore innovative approaches to education that meet the needs of working learners and how educational institutions can better prepare students for the evolving workforce. Eloy, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:02:46]:
It's great to be with you. I'm doing well. How are you?
Salvatrice Cummo [00:02:49]:
Excellent, Excellent, excellent. Thank you so much again for taking the time to chat with us here at Pasadena City College. And The Future of Work podcast. And, you know, one of my favorite first questions is always how we got here. So my question to you is your path to higher education. What sparked your interest in advancing these equitable opportunities and serving the working learner?
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:03:11]:
Well, I came into higher ed as a working learner after serving four years in the Army. You know, I didn't go to college right out of high school. I went into the military and, you know, I served for four years. I became a father along the way. When I got out of the military, I was working odd jobs for several years, and then I came across a community college. I decided that it was time to get my higher education because it was clear to me that the only thing separating me and the work I had to do from those who were making money off the work I had to do was a college education. So fortunately for me, I found Golden West College. I just happened to stumble onto the campus, pick up a class schedule, and I enrolled in courses at Golden West College.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:03:56]:
So ever since then, I've been part of the California community colleges. All my kids have gone through the California community colleges, especially from the neighborhood I grew up in, Southeast Los Angeles. College education wasn't a priority. It was not then. It still isn't today. And for learners like me or for learners that I grew up with, that's what drove me, and that's what continues to drive me, is, you know, higher education shouldn't be about luck. I got lucky.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:04:27]:
There's a lot of people in my community who are a lot smarter than I was or I am, but they didn't come across community college. They didn't come across a counselor that helped them. They didn't come across a boss that encouraged them to go to college. And I did. So that's what's kept me going ever since.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:04:44]:
Excellent. Excellent. I love the fact that you are really open about. You were a working learner. You stumbled across community colleges and the value of community college did. For your own personal endeavors and professional endeavors. And that speaks true to a lot of our adult learners now and our working learners now. I think that you would agree that our working learners now are facing different challenges.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:05:10]:
Challenges like a traditional educational model. Right, right. And challenges like AI and the implications on curriculum with AI and the speed at which occupations are being produced and the speed at which industries are changing because of advanced technologies, yet we still have very traditional educational models. And so my question to you is, we know this, right? We're in it, we live it, we breathe it, we read it. We study it. Why is this group unique, working learners? And what challenges or obstacles are they encountering that we're not talking about, that we should be talking about?
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:05:49]:
Well, there's a lot to unpack in that question and I'll first start with the fact that this demographic of learner has never been more important to the state or to this country. And the reason I say that is one. Working learners, adult learners, they are the traditional student today. More than 60% of people enrolled in post secondary education today, whether in California or across this country, are learners 25 years or older. People working with families. More and more 18, 19 year olds are in the same situation. We live in a state that's a high cost state. People have to work, they have to figure out how to raise their family, how to pay rent, how to, how to feed themselves and their family.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:06:36]:
Many working learners are not only supporting their young family, but they're supporting their extended family. So for many reasons, this demographic has become critically important. They're critically important as well because they are in the workforce now. Many of them in California alone, more than 6 million of them have had some college, no degree or no college at all. And they're working. And the skills that you need to continue to be competitive in the workforce, the skills that you need to be able to stay employed today, continue to change rapidly. And working learners need access to some sort of postsecondary education, an opportunity to upskill and to reskill continuously. And if we don't get it right now for these learners, then our economies are going to suffer because every learner will have the same challenges.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:07:27]:
Every learner is going to have to upskill and reskill multiple times, regardless of whether they got their bachelor's degree or associate's degree, they're going to have to continuously upskill and reskill. So it's, it's incumbent upon a state like California to figure this out and figure this out fast because this is going to make or break the California economy. It's already breaking the California economy because you see the challenges that working learners face every single day, the disparity in wealth, the challenges that they're having holding down jobs, holding down opportunity to pay rent. So for all of those reasons and many others, not to even mention the ethnic and racial backgrounds of most of our working learners, the income disparities that they already face, for all those reasons, we need to get this right and we need to do it with urgency.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:08:21]:
And I think not. I think, I believe when I hear you say access to postsecondary education and our working learners do need access to that. It's not enough, Right, that they're in the workplace for any of us, really, to be quite honest with you. I believe that there's also equitable access to employers and employer partnerships. And I believe strongly that it's incumbent upon the community colleges to create that access for our students. We've seen it. It's built into our narrative as a community college. I believe that we could do better, could certainly do better at it.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:08:55]:
You know, I can only speak for PCC and our efforts, but I'd love to hear through your lens how you envision these partnerships really helping our working learner align their new skills. And if you've seen any specific partnerships that you'd like to talk about, you know, let's share those as examples. And I'm talking to obviously someone who lives and breathes this work. Right. But I think for our listeners, sometimes our listeners may not really understand the value and the impact an employer, partner and private public partnerships can have, not just to the institution, but most importantly, the access to the student. So talk a little bit about your perspective on that.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:09:36]:
We live in an environment today, and we have for several decades. We just haven't really embraced it. Where first of all, learners, by and large, the majority of learners, survey after survey, whether it's Gallup, whether it's New America, any national or state survey, you see where learners are asked about their higher education experience. The number one reason that they say they want to go and get their education is to improve their economic mobility, to improve their economic outcome, to improve the lives of their family. That doesn't mean that there aren't secondary and tertiary benefits to higher education. That just means that learners today see higher education as a means to greater economic stability and resiliency. And so employers, when they're surveyed, they want skilled workers, they want individuals who can come to them and exhibit a number of soft and hard skills that they can really help support an employer in a community in the state. So the two have to work together, the post secondary provider.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:10:42]:
And this is true not just of community colleges. This is true of regional four-year colleges, of the University of California, of any R1 institution in the state. The two have to work together because as a state, first of all, we're a very big state. We really operate in economic regions, whether that's the Inland Empire, the Los Angeles county area, the San Joaquin Valley. And employers need a pool of talent. And so the education providers need to ensure that they are partnering closely. And partnership isn't even A good word anymore. Partnership is an overused term in higher education.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:11:21]:
Partnership can be anything from just we agree to meet every now and then and see what we can do to work together. Rather, we need a very close relationship and understanding that this relationship is necessary for both employers to receive the talent that they need and the information that they need about the talent coming as well as for the post-secondary providers to understand the changes that are happening in the workforce. And so where it works, you see huge benefits, particularly institutions that are designed around this model. And there are certain, certainly examples, certainly, you know, community colleges are a great example, but no longer the best example. Community colleges, many of which have arms, such as PCC or my old institution like Long Beach City College, arms of which are squarely focused on the employer. But the institution as a whole does not see that as an important relationship. And so to my community college colleagues, I'd say that design principle has to quickly change. The entire enterprise needs to be focused on the economic conditions of their learners in the communities that they serve.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:12:39]:
And so when it works well, it works well, just as it works at Pasadena City College or Long Beach City College. When there's that alignment, you see employment happening in the community. Learners from the community are connected to employers in the community and have that opportunity for economic mobility. But some of the best examples I see are in places like the University of Maryland Global Campus or Western Governor's University to a certain extent. Asu, they are designing with the working learner in mind. They are designing around those needs, they're giving them information, they're giving them information in real-time about the skills they're obtaining and the skills that they're going to need to articulate in the workforce. And those are examples that we in the community college space need to look towards so that we can continue to improve that real-time information and that opportunity to truly embrace the needs of working learners. Because the reality is whether you're 17 or whether you're 37, 57, you're coming to community college for that specific reason.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:13:49]:
And we need to do a better job of ensuring that we have the relationships with employers and that we're giving the learners the information that they need to have the economic future that they're looking for.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:14:00]:
Yes, and I really appreciate you saying that. Workforce efforts, relationships is not solely reliant on one area of the college, but rather it's embedded in the fabric of the college and workforce is fluid. Pathways to workforce can be seen and demonstrated across all pillars of the college. And it truly is everyone's responsibility. That's why our students come to us. So I really, really appreciate you saying that. And the other golden nugget that I got from that response was you said that these other institutions or these other enterprises are designing with the working learner in mind, which you and I both know requires a certain level of flexibility. Right? It requires a certain level of flexibility into these pathways.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:14:48]:
And so I pose this question to you is like, how do you envision creating more on ramps for those students to gain these working credentials?
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:14:57]:
Well, certainly in my day job at College Futures, we are laser focused on creating more on ramps. And what I mean by that is there should be multiple paths to skill acquisition in the employer setting. If you're working with an employer, creating opportunities in that setting, translating the skills that you've learned on the job into other marketable skills. Employers working with post secondary institutions to offer upskilling opportunities on site. There are many employers in the state, whether Disney through Disney, Aspire, Walmart, Chipotle, Verizon, who have invested heavily in upskilling and reskilling the employees. We need to see more of that. The other thing we need to see is multiple pathways from the current post secondary providers. And since we're talking about community colleges, community colleges need to find more and better ways to personalize the learning to the needs of the learners in their communities.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:16:02]:
The beauty of community colleges is that they are part of communities. We need to do a better job of understanding the needs of the various learners and not just building a one size fits all opportunity for learners who decide to come onto our campuses, sit in our brick and mortar classrooms, and then, you know, be given the knowledge that they're looking for on the schedules of the administrators and the faculty, that is no longer going to work. Fortunately, in my view, we live in a place and time where learners now have agency. They are voting with their feet. We see that time and time again where regional colleges or regional universities exist and they're not offering the learners what they're looking for. Those learners are walking with their feet, they're voting with their feet. And so multiple pathways could mean a number of different ways of delivering teaching, learning comp C based models, short upskilling models, seat time, credit models, Yes, I think we're going to live with that for quite some time to come. But experiential learning models, there has to be multiple ways as well as multiple ways to access that learning.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:17:17]:
For example, having opportunities to enroll every month, not just at the beginning of the semester, having asynchronous and synchronous learning opportunities. So all these have to be part and parcel of the normal way that colleges organize and design for their learners. And understanding what their learners need is another piece. You know, far too often we assume as educators what they need instead of actually asking them, the employers and folks in the community, what they need. So we need to do all those things, and we need to do it in a way that is as intentional as the way that we have been designing our curriculum for the last five decades. We have to have the same intentionality around designing curriculum in the multiple other ways that we now know work and work well for working learners.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:18:13]:
What do you think is going to get us there? All those things are important. We know this. We inherently know that this is what it's going to take. But. Or that's the direction we need to lean in towards. But what is it truly going to take for us to. I don't want to use the word disrupt, but in essence that's what we're kind of doing just to almost reimagine and reorganize and reignite this very traditional system in which we work in.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:18:37]:
Well, I think we are at a point, and I know my colleagues in the faculty, my colleagues in the administrations and colleges and universities throughout California don't like it when I say this, but they no longer have a choice. We no longer have a choice. The disruption is here, and there's a reason why. There is billions and billions of dollars being poured into education technology companies that are providing numerous ways of helping learners access skills. There's a reason why a really quality university like Western Governor's University is growing by 6, 7, 8% every month. They're just shy of 200,000 learners right now. So the institutions that finally decide to disrupt themselves to make this happen are the ones that are going to thrive in the future. We see a lot of this happening in the California State University system here in California.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:19:38]:
California State University system is reckoning with some decades long challenges that they've never decided to address. The same thing is going to happen to community colleges. It's already happening in the far north, it's happening in other parts of the state. And so, you know, to my colleagues, I say, we've talked about this ad nauseam for the last 10, 15 years. Going forward, unless you take this seriously, then I'm afraid that fate is going to take over and those who decided to ignore it are going to find that they're going to be facing some serious problems.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:20:13]:
Right. It makes me think about too the enterprises like or entity and entity like the Calbright College. Let's unpack that just a little bit. You know, that was kind of our system's attempt to be flexible and work with our working learners and allowing for all the things you just shared. Right where we're designing programs with the student in mind. Do you have or can you recall, are there any success stories that kind of come forward to you that show the impact on why this works and how a skills focused approach in higher education is where we need to scale in?
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:20:55]:
I'll try to give a couple of examples. First of all, I'll go back even further. Coastline College was created in the Coast Community College District. I know it's been probably now 40 some odd years. Coastline was created as a distance learning community college. I took courses at Coastline when I entered Golden West College because they were the most accessible courses I could take. I would literally go rent a VHS tape at the library for a class on American history. I would sit in a room and pop it into a television and watch the course whenever I had time.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:21:34]:
So it was that kind of innovation that allowed a college like Coastline to be created and to begin to thrive. And it's still thriving today. And then we created Calbright College, which was designed to introduce the concept of competency based education, which was already purchased, pretty well known and well used across the country, but not in California. And a college that was strictly designed to be centered around skill acquisition for working learners. And we did this before the pandemic, not knowing we were going to have a pandemic. But it's these opportunities that allow us to look at the learners that we serve and provide a number of different pathways. And that's certainly how Coastline worked for me. That was my hope and still is my hope for Calbright College, which is now 7,000 enrollments strong.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:22:25]:
You know, recently signed an MOU with Western governors University. So all those credits transfer and will continue to transfer. We have now, I think about a half dozen pilots in the state of California piloting competency based education. So we need to do more of that. But we're going to have to do it on steroids going forward. We've got to do it with urgency. This is not an attempt to undermine any of our colleges or any of our faculty in structures. This is an attempt to create numerous more pathways that allow learners from any background to be able to access the great learning that happens on community college campuses.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:23:04]:
And so learners are being driven to that learners can now just go on to YouTube, can go on to skillshare can go on to any of a number of places to get the skills that they need. So we in community colleges have to really take this seriously and ask ourselves, how can we create more value for our communities and how can we remain relevant in a society, in a point in time where access to knowledge is at everybody's fingertips?
Salvatrice Cummo [00:23:32]:
It absolutely is. I mean, the intention to just serve at scale, right? It's really our response. And I, I appreciate that conversation or that piece of this conversation because, you know, I have a 16 year old at home who is challenging me, right? And saying, you tell me what the value of college is because I can learn any skill by myself. I don't need that experience. And she's testing my patience. I have to be honest, she's certainly testing me right now. But it underscores what you just said, right? Like there's ample information at everyone's fingertips. And it is not so much the information or the skills that are being learned itself, but rather the experience of the college and the support that it provides the student.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:24:23]:
So it's yes, instruction is important, yes, to learn those skills are important. But what I'm hoping for is that our learners are also equally valuing the support of which an institution can provide. And so along that same theme, right, what are you looking at as an essential shift that higher education needs to move towards in order to support our working learners?
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:24:50]:
The first thing that needs to happen is there has to be a cultural shift. You can whiteboard policies and practices all day long, you can pass legislation, we've done that multiple times. But you can't force the culture to change. The culture has to decide to change. The people who are living the culture need to decide that it's time to change. And that cultural shift needs to involve not looking back and saying what we did was wrong. That's not what we're asking. What we're asking is to look forward and say, based on what we know from the past, how can we commit to and intentionally begin to reimagine how we serve our learners? If we go back to the beginning of community colleges, that was the entire purpose, to create a whole different way of delivering learning to a demographic of learners who hadn't access learning before.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:25:48]:
They were coming in droves out of World War II. And that was a truly American design. Community colleges are the only truly American higher education design. Everything else has been handed to us. And so we can't rely on the culture that was handed to us. The exclusionary culture of higher education, the selectivity that we learn to value. Instead, we have to think about how to democratize that learning. So it begins with the culture.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:26:15]:
Just because many of us came out of those selective institutions doesn't mean we need to continue those practices. So we need to allow ourselves the opportunity to experiment, the opportunity to think of different ways of reaching learners, the opportunity to leverage technology and to use it in a way that gives us more and better information about our learners, gives learners more and better information about their learning, and empowers faculty, not replaces faculty. So that's the first thing that needs to happen. And then from there, it's a matter of design, being committed to design from the point of view of the learner, not the point of view of the institution. I mean, think about in the community colleges setting, One of the most, I would say, outrageous things that I see is we have segregated learning into basically three buckets. Credit learning, not for credit learning, and non credit learning. It's all learning. You are teaching skills and teaching knowledge.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:27:19]:
But we as educators have made this so complicated for the learner.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:27:24]:
Yes.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:27:25]:
If we can just take a step back and understand that learning is learning. Learning provides a. A sequence of skills that allow a learner to, you know, be able to do something different, be able to think about a problem differently, instead of complicating it in the ways that we have. And so I think if we can do those things, then we will find the solutions. I mean, competency based education wasn't some brainchild of some genius. It was just a means of thinking about delivering teaching and learning differently, measuring it differently, and then finding the best way to do that. You know, if we can just do that, I think we'll be in a much better position than we are today.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:28:07]:
Right. And I also see that just. And it's not an easy shift, you know, cultural shift. No, cultural shifts take time, but they take a level of commitment that is, it just takes a higher level of commitment. Right. And it takes everyone being on the same page.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:28:21]:
It takes everyone being on the same page. But you know what also forces culture to change is moments in time like the one that we're at. I mean, before the pandemic, you know, when I was serving as chancellor, I would hear constantly how impossible it will ever be to get the system to go online, to get faculty to go online. And then, you know what happened? A pandemic.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:28:42]:
That's right.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:28:43]:
And guess what happened? Everybody had to, in some way or another, go online. And then, you know, I kept hearing from the faculty how wonderful it was. Well, here we are. We are in one of those moments. This is a global shift, a global shift in technology and expectation, in public trust. We have lost the public's trust, and so we need to view it in much the same way we viewed those first few weeks of the pandemic.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:29:10]:
And I think my biggest takeaway, too, from that statement is that we're at a state of evolution that we've never seen before. We're moving at a rate we've never ever seen in history have seen before, which is great, but it also creates unintended, you know, anxieties around how do we adjust and how do we evolve and how do we be better at fill in the blank and willing to serve. You know, our listener spans across many different areas. I mean, we have students who listen. We have practitioners, administrators, policymakers. What is one message you would like our listener to understand from this conversation or our listener to take with them and put into action? What would be that one thing?
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:29:55]:
I would say the one thing is we need to act with urgency. And I say urgency, not fear. I mean, this isn't about fear of the future. This is about the urgency of the future. The future is here. We have not always recognized it, but we can see it every day in our lives. There probably isn't one person today that is not interacting with AI in one shape or form or another. Doesn't matter who you are, whether you're on your banking app, whether you're correcting, you know, your spelling on your email, whether it was co pilot or Grammarly or Gemini, everybody is impacted by AI today.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:30:36]:
That was not true 18 months ago. So the speed at which things are changing is going to continue to get faster and faster. And so just in the same way that we reacted as educators, creating community colleges throughout the country, serving all the vets and the working people that needed to access higher education after World War II. That was a historic cultural shift for this country, and community colleges led the way. We need the same kind of reckoning today, and we need the same kind of leadership from our colleges today.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:31:18]:
That was a stellar way of sunsetting this conversation. I foresee, if you're willing and open to future conversations, to unpack some, again, nuggets that you put out there that I absolutely loved. Thank you very much for this conversation. And if our listener would like to reach out to you, your organization, what is the best way to do that? We'll be sure to enter it into the show notes.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:31:42]:
Well, anybody can access what we're doing in College futures@college futures.org I'm easy to get to either LinkedIn or the ramp Podcast website or just at college futures at eoakley@collegefutures.org Excellent.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:31:59]:
Thank you so much. We'll be sure to enter all those other information into the Show Notes and and again thanks. Thank you very, very much and we look forward to future conversations and if we I could be of service to you and your organization, please don't hesitate to reach out.
Eloy Ortiz Oakley [00:32:12]:
Well, thank you and it was great being with you. Thanks for the great questions.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:32:16]:
Thank you.
Salvatrice Cummo [00:32:18]:
Thank you for listening to the Future of work podcast. Make sure you're subscribed on your favorite listening platform so you can easily get new episodes every Tuesday. You can reach out to us by clicking on the website link below in the Show Notes to click Collaborate, Partner or just chat about all things Future of work. We'd love to connect with you. All of us here at the Future of work and Pasadena City College wish you safety and wellness.