Re:Learning | Should Working Learners Get a Tax Break?

[THE CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION] #subscribelink [Subscribe Today]( --------------------------------------------------------------- [Subscribe to The Chronicle today to get access to premium content and more.]( Re:Learning Tuesday, June 26, 2018 --------------------------------------------------------------- [Sign up for this newsletter]( I’m Goldie Blumenstyk, a senior writer at The Chronicle of Higher Education covering innovation in and around academe. For more than two years, I’ve been curating this weekly Re:Learning newsletter. Now I’ll be using it to share my observations on the people and ideas reshaping the higher-education landscape. Here’s what’s on my mind this week: Topic A for the new DEW So we may be getting [a new Department of Education and the Workforce](. Or [maybe not.]( Either way, an idea for a new government-matched education-savings program that I heard about last week seems like a perfect fit for the new department. (At the very least, it speaks to the sentiment driving the proposed agency merger.) The proposed Lifelong Learning and Training Accounts are a response to the changing nature of work. The number of people reliant on freelance work for their livelihood continues to grow; so do predictions that robots and artificial intelligence will take away jobs. It’s an environment in which “upskilling” and “re-skilling” seem to matter more than ever before. To help people do that, Alastair Fitzpayne and Ethan Pollack of the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative [propose the creation of savings accounts]( which low- and middle-income workers could each contribute up to $2,000 a year on a pretax basis, as with an IRA. Employers could also contribute, and they would get a tax break too. But the individuals would control the accounts, not their bosses. Account holders could use the money not just for those trendy coding schools but also for training in growing fields like health care and advanced manufacturing. This concept isn’t new. Other countries have done it. I even highlighted a previous U.S.-based experiment in [“The Adult Student,” a report]( wrote earlier this year. That trial was conducted in the early 2000s by the Council for Adult and Experiential Learning. Still, there’s a lot that’s appealing in the latest proposal. For one, unlike many educational tax credits, it’s targeted at people who don’t earn much. It would direct the biggest federal-dollar matches to people at the lowest income levels. It would also limit the tax benefits to accounts with $10,000 or less. The idea behind that cap is to encourage people to tap into the accounts when they need new training and then replenish them for use later in their careers. The ideal beneficiary, Fitzpayne told me, is 25 to 65 years old, “when it’s much harder to go back to school, and they need explicit programs.” As Fitzpayne and Pollack see it, education leading to degrees, certificates, or industry-recognized credentials would all qualify for the accounts. I’ve got plenty of questions about this idea. Will employers be any more likely to kick in for this when many already seem to be cutting back on training? At an estimated cost of $2.5 billion a year, could the tax deduction get through Congress? (For the sake of comparison, the federal government spends $180 billion per year on educational grants and tax credits now.) And perhaps most crucially, can accreditation or another accountability system make sure the money goes to legit training? As Fitzpayne put it, “We don’t want people using this for tennis lessons or wine-tasting courses.” Call me cynical, but I also wonder whether sketchy operators would try to horn in on the action, leading suddenly to a rash of untested ventures promising to train people for industry-certified credentials. A program like this could hold opportunities for colleges, particularly community colleges. Fitzpayne’s sense of four-year colleges is that most see themselves as the places that teach students “to become a lifelong learner,” rather than the ones that provide that lifelong learning. But, he noted, that service could be a direction that more institutions “evolve to in the future.” Judging by what I’ve been hearing in recent months from deans and provosts of continuing education, I’d argue that the evolution is well underway — not everywhere, to be sure, but watch that space. Beyond video games If you spend time with techies in education, you inevitably start hearing about how virtual reality could change teaching. We’re still a long way from the era when it becomes a ubiquitous feature, but professors who talk about the power of VR as a teaching tool make a compelling case. (See, for example, [this video]( in which Stanford University’s Jerry Bailenson describes how VR can teach empathy, altruism, and why we should all use less toilet paper.) Of course, there are questions about its cost — and its cost-effectiveness. Earlier this month, my colleague Beth McMurtrie spent two days at a national symposium at Yale University at which faculty members who are experimenting with the technology shared their experiences. She saw holographic brains and took virtual flight. As she describes in the latest edition of our [Teaching newsletter]( the groovy show-and-tell glitz was tempered by some down-to-earth discussions of ways to help professors surmount the steep learning curves and navigate the ethics of virtual experiences. By the way, if you aren’t getting that newsletter yet, you can sign up via [this link](. How am I doing? This is the third week of this revamped format for the[newsletter.]( It’s a work in progress, and I’m still cooking up some fresh ideas for this weekly feature. But what do you think so far? What do you want more (or less) of? What topics would pique your interest? What would bore you to tears? I’d love to hear from you, either on those questions or if you have any other questions or story tips: goldie@chronicle.com. Goldie's Weekly Picks From The Chronicle --------------------------------------------------------------- [The Single Best Way to Help Older Students? ‘Colleges Shouldn’t Make Adults Do Scavenger Hunts’]( By Goldie Blumenstyk Speaking from his own experience, Mike Krause, executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission, says colleges should help veterans, for example, “just enough.” They appreciate peer mentorship, but “veterans don’t need coddling.” [Want to Kill Tenure? Be Careful What You Wish For]( [premium] By Lee Gardner Restive administrators and trustees may see tenure as a burden. But eliminating it could bring unanticipated costs. [Thinking About a Merger? Read This First]( By Stephen Spinelli Jr. One year later, here are some lessons learned from the combining of two universities in Philadelphia. 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