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Community colleges play a key role in driving talent development in the United States, producing workers with the kinds of training that employers need while enhancing economic mobility for students. There has been a push among policymakers at the federal and state levels to hold community colleges accountable for the employment outcomes of their students, with funding and legislation that endorses models that strengthen college partnerships with employers.

In this report, the authors systemically examine the type of career services and college-employer partnership practices in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields across three states - California, Ohio, and Texas - and a sample of community colleges that operate within them. In addition, the authors investigate the challenges that these colleges face in facilitating student employment and the ways in which state policies may have influenced practice. They reviewed state policies and collected interview data from 134 participants, including state and system leaders, college leaders, program heads and faculty, career service leaders and staff, and employers.

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This review focuses on how to effectively increase access to and quality in higher education in developing countries. One hundred and seventy-five research papers on the impact of higher education policies and methods of provision on access, quality and gender issues in developing countries, available in English language, were systematically reviewed. The majority of the studies fell into six main categories: affirmative action; cross-border, distance and open education; financial policies/programmes (including cost-sharing policies and student loan programmes); technical and vocational education and training (TVET); and institutional type.

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Although there is great interest in attracting talented and underrepresented individuals into public-sector careers, there is also concern that graduates of colleges and universities may not be considering the public sector and that government agencies are not doing all they could to attract the next generation of workers. This report seeks to help bridge these gaps by identifying the most promising strategies that public-sector agencies, colleges and universities, and community organizations can pursue to increase the flow of talented and underrepresented workers into public-sector careers.

This report examines one regional public-sector workforce, that of Southern California, but many of the issues and strategies that the authors identify are broadly applicable to other regions. These strategies focus on two fundamental goals - increasing underrepresented students' awareness of rewarding opportunities in the public sector and making public-sector organizations more diverse - that should reinforce each other.

There are a variety of facilitators and barriers to attracting high-quality diverse talent to the public sector. Key findings include: (1) College and university students have low awareness of the range of opportunities available in the public sector; (2) Many students view public-sector work as a way to improve their communities, but they also tend to have a variety of negative perceptions about public-sector work; (3) Job-seekers place a high value on workforce diversity. The Southern California public-sector workforce reflects the racial and ethnic composition of the local population in a general way, but Hispanic and Black workers in the sector are much less represented in the highest earnings group; (4) Internships often lead to applicants being more competitive for employment, but there is a perception that public-sector internship opportunities are not widely and equitably publicized to potential audiences, thus limiting the diversity of the applicant pool; (5) Agencies, colleges, and students all rely on informal connections and personal networks for recruiting, but informal networks tend to connect people of similar characteristics and exclude people from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds from opportunities; and (6) Government hiring processes are often very lengthy and complicated, which may limit the pool of talented and diverse applicants with the knowledge, patience, and resources to persist through these processes.

The authors make a range of recommendations including: (1) Consistently articulate leadership commitment to increasing recruitment of talented and underrepresented individuals into the public sector; (2) Communicate the benefits of public-sector careers: Emphasize the public sector's purpose-driven mission, employee benefits, and job stability, and publicize improvements; (3) Improve the awareness and sharing of job and internship opportunities, including by making job titles and descriptions clearer and helping students navigate the hiring process; (4) Foster preparation for career entry and retention by promoting funded internships and mentoring and professional development programs; and (5) Institutionalize connections between government and higher education.

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In fiscal year (FY) 2016, RAND Project AIR FORCE conducted a study for the Air Force Air Education and Training Command (AETC) of inefficiencies in the nonrated technical training pipeline. The goal of this research was to identify ways to improve the efficiency and responsiveness of the Air Force's technical training enterprise for both officers and enlisted personnel. The study identified many opportunities to improve the technical training planning process, resource allocation process, and the flow of students through the technical training pipeline. Perhaps the most significant challenge that we identified was how difficult it is for the process overall to respond to changes in the demand for trained airmen, particularly when requirements change in the year of execution. The inability to rapidly right-size the instructor pool was a central shortfall. With the results of this effort in hand, AETC began to look outside the Air Force for insights and best practices upon which they could draw.

AETC asked us to investigate two models of particular interest: (1) how colleges and universities, institutions that similarly face fluctuations in enrollments and demands for coursework, right-size their instructor corps and (2) best practices associated with supply chain management. In addition, AETC asked us to explore one potential solution - a flexible instructor pool - to address the challenging problem of rapidly sizing the instructor corps to respond to changing requirements that occur late in the planning process. Each of these three topics, as posed by the Air Force, is examined in a separate part of this report. In this summary, we offer a brief overview of the findings and recommendations based on these analyses and concluding thoughts on the benefits the Air Force can realize from implementing the types of flexible resourcing options discussed.

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