By Eric Johnson

North Carolina is entering a strange economic moment. Less than a year after the sharpest recession in modern history, the state is poised for a booming recovery. After peaking at 13.5% in May of last year, state unemployment now stands at 5.2%.

But that’s not the whole story. There are two ways for unemployment to fall: Either people get new jobs, or they stop looking and drop out of the workforce altogether. Avoiding that second fate means creating an economy and an education system geared toward second chances.

Starting over in a new field or a new career is hard. Employers are reluctant to hire people without direct experience, and going back to school in the middle of your life is daunting. That’s especially true for people with families and financial responsibilities — which is to say, most people. 

For the long-range health of our state and our citizens, we need to make it much easier to find a new career track. The post-pandemic economy won’t be the same as the one we left in February of 2020. Many of the jobs lost over the past year aren’t coming back, certainly not in the same places or with the same set of skills. 

The pandemic closed thousands of small and mid-sized businesses and led to much faster automation in everything from manufacturing to food service. Twice in the past week, I’ve sat down at restaurant tables and discovered that I’ll be ordering on my cell phone, without ever talking to a waiter. That’s just one small example of how pandemic-driven efficiency is changing the nature of work.

“The pandemic accelerated an existing trend toward jobs requiring certain skills (especially technical skills),” wrote the economists at UNC’s Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise. “Younger workers will more likely be hired and/or trained for these new jobs, while many middle-aged and older workers will struggle to find opportunities for upskilling to advance their careers.”

I hate the word “upskilling,” mostly because it sounds like something painful you’d inflict on a person. But I strongly believe we need more chances for people to learn new stuff, and to do it without breaking the bank or putting their whole lives on hold. Too much of our higher education system is geared toward 18 year-olds who can enroll full-time and devote years to schooling. We absolutely need those institutions, and we need them to perform well.

But the great challenge of our age is creating good options for the two-thirds of American adults who don’t have a college degree, and who are too often shut out of new opportunities in our fast-changing economy. Higher education has to get better at second chances.

That means more programs designed and marketed to working adults. More night and weekend classes, online programs with flexible start times, and a willingness to give people academic credit for the things they already know. For-profit colleges mastered this pitch during past periods of economic disruption, but they used it to scam people. Public universities can mimic the flexibility and energetic outreach of the for-profit sector while delivering an education of real value.

Community colleges already do a fair amount of this, building relationships with local employers and offering timely, career-focused credentials. As part of last year’s COVID relief funding, NC community colleges received $15 million for scholarships for worker retraining in high-demand fields. They also got permission to use half-a-million of those funds for marketing, which is crucial in reaching people who may not know where to turn when their old line of work dries up. 

But short-term training shouldn’t be the only thing we offer dislocated workers. Turning colleges into true second-chance institutions means designing full degree programs for adults, offering people a reasonable path back into higher education.

The stakes are huge. The longer people stay out of work, the harder it is to get reconnected. And dropping out of the labor force has terrible consequences for health, for social connections, and for family stability.

“Hiring has rebounded quickly for Americans with college degrees,” the Washington Post reported last week. “In recent months, there has been a noticeable surge in people with two-year associate’s degrees getting back into the workforce, but Americans with only a high school diploma or less remain deep in crisis mode, even as employers claim they are having trouble finding workers. Nearly 4 million adult workers without college degrees have not found work again after losing their jobs in the pandemic. Only 199,000 adult workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher are in the same situation.”

Americans have always tolerated more churn, more creative destruction, than most other rich nations. Over the last year, many European countries enacted aggressive furlough programs to keep workers in their existing jobs even as companies went idle. In the US, we let employers lay off millions of people while the federal government provided enhanced unemployment benefits. That creates more dynamism in the long run, economists argue, a faster adjustment to a changing world. 

In the meantime, we have a lot of people struggling to figure out what’s next. Higher education needs a better answer for them.

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Eric Johnson is a writer and education policy wonk in Chapel Hill. He works for the College Board and the UNC System, and he serves as a community columnist for the News & Observer.