The Chips Act Shows How to Invest in Education
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The Chips Act provides $13.2 billion focused on R&D and workforce development.
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About the author: Stanley Litow is Accenture professor of the practice at Duke University and a trustee at the State University of New York. He previously served as president of the IBM Foundation and is the co-author of Breaking Barriers: How P-Tech Schools Create a Pathway From High School to College to Career.
Lost in the fights about government spending and inflation, one piece of federal legislation that garnered substantial bipartisan support has already demonstrated evidence of early success.
The Chips Act makes large-scale federal investment in innovative research and manufacturing of microchips. It has already stimulated private-sector investment designed to take the microchip industry from decline in the U.S. to the forefront of economic development. Micron and IBM have announced investments of roughly $120 billion in New York State to build facilities to manufacture and develop innovative microchips. Those announcements follow Intel’s decision to invest $100 billion in Ohio, along with investments of nearly $5 billion from Qualcomm and GlobalFoundries. These decisions made by only five companies won’t be the end.
But what many don’t know about the Chips Act is that its significant federal spending goes beyond manufacturing, innovation, and incentives for research and development. The act provides $13.2 billion focused on R&D and workforce development with a specific investment in education and in science, technology, engineering, and math skills. It will offer a real pipeline from schools, to college, to career for many students. Language in the bill and action in response will specifically focus on education institutions that have been disproportionately left out of growth in STEM education.
While it was clear to many when the legislation was drafted that job growth without investment in workforce development would yield less than was desired, it has not received the attention it should have. Now is the time to change that, and to use the law as a model for further action.
How? A lesson from America’s past, which I gleaned from access to the IBM archives while writing a book, will help put this into context. In 1946, IBM’s then-CEO Tom Watson had lunch with the president of Columbia University, which hosted the company’s first research laboratory on its campus. The lunch was originally arranged for one hour to focus on research. It wound up lasting four hours when the discussion shifted to education and an unprecedented agreement to jointly focus on the development of what was at the time an unheard-of new academic discipline: computer science. The academic discipline was essential to the development of the entire information technology industry. This lengthy lunch helped spread computer science across education institutions around the world, helping to drive a high-growth industry that fueled economic growth for over a half-century.
Set the clock forward. The Chips Act has already stimulated massive commitments from companies to match federal investments with private-sector investment in research, development, and innovative manufacturing. The same kind of public-private partnership is now an opportunity to address improvement in workforce skills and education.
Under the Chips Act, education institutions partnering with the private sector can maximize the billions in federal investment by using the funds to incorporate workplace skills and STEM education into their academic curriculum. It can also ensure that paid internships and experiential learning can be fully integrated into the education experience with companies providing mentors and support for both students and faculty. Students prepared with these skills, postsecondary degrees and credentials will find available jobs in other industries as well, like health care, banking and finance, all of which are currently struggling to find workers with the education and skills needed. If Chips only focused on industry incentives and research with no focus on education and workplace skills, the opportunities created would risk going unfilled.
Education has far too often been a divisive issue. And yet the need for an effective pathway from school to college to career, especially in areas connected to labor-market growth and opportunity, seems to be the issue that unites almost everyone. It’s especially appealing to students who want and deserve a bright future. The Chips Act can be a model for national growth in industries as diverse as information technology, health care, business and finance and even the arts.
Education, business and government leaders are planning to come together for a national education summit focused on pathways from school to college to career in Washington this February. They’ll be looking for examples of success and the policy changes needed to bring them to scale. The Chips Act will be one clear example not only of what to do, but how to do it. But real success will be when the approach linking investment in industry growth with workplace skills and education growth, via public-private collaboration, moves from example to sustainable reform. It is definitely possible.
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