Entries by Allison Wiley

Scaling Workforce Development to Meet the AI Moment: What You Need To Know

A new Work Shift brief by Matthew Muench, who founded Lucerra Impact Advisory after serving as head of jobs and skills for JPMorganChase Global Philanthropy, argues for a four-wave framework to understand the past 40 years of workforce development progress. He uses this framework to chart out what it will take for the next generation of workforce thinkers to finally achieve scale in the AI age.

Why Don’t Philanthropists Build Anymore?

The United States is living through a second Gilded Age. But unlike yesterday’s magnates, today’s billionaires prefer to write checks to existing organizations. They should instead build institutions that last.

Learning Throughout The Life Course: In Dialogue with Anne Trumbore

Anne Trumbore is Chief Digital Learning Officer at the Sands Institute for Lifelong Learning at The Darden School, University of Virginia, where she is responsible for creating a strategy to expand access to world-class education and advance Darden’s mission of providing transformational learning experiences to learners globally. Drawing on experience establishing and leading Wharton Online and early-stage roles at Coursera, NovoEd, and Stanford’s Online High School, Anne has helped pioneer new forms of student-centered online education. She is the author of The Teacher in the Machine: A Human History of Education Technology (Princeton University Press, 2025) and was a 2025 Stanford Futures Fellow.

The Microcredential Maze: Why The U.S. Is Falling Behind

With hundreds of millions of online credentials issued every year, the meteoric growth is vastly outpacing the growth of conventional degrees and course credits, and offers a potentially existential threat to some forms of traditional higher education.

Why We Need to Pivot from a “Schooled Society” to a “Learning Society”

Learning Lab Director Lark Park, who has known Mitchell Stevens for more than a decade, caught up with him after the launch of the Learning Society on Stanford’s campus in February 2026. This conversation is about why he launched it, a brief history of the policies and forces that have shaped education and workforce, and what the revolution or evolution of a Learning Society might look like in the future.