An interview with the Lumina Foundation’s Jamie Merisotis

Last week, MDLF Executive Director Mike Young spoke with Jamie Merisotis, President and CEO of Lumina Foundation, about the future of work. They talked about higher education, preparing people for human work, and some of the challenges and opportunities Indiana will face as one of the most manufacturing-intensive economies in the United States.

You can listen to the recording above, or read the transcript below.

Mike Young: Everybody, welcome to the first in what I hope is a series of Mitch Daniels Leadership Foundation podcast, where we talk about experts in all kinds of important subjects so that we can learn more about Indiana and the rest of the country.

With us today is Jamie Merisotis. Jamie is a globally recognized leader in philanthropy, education, public policy, and is the President and CEO of the Lumina Foundation and has been since 2008.

Lumina is an independent foundation in Indianapolis, and is committed to an education system that's easy to navigate, fair, and effective at meeting America's talent needs.

Prior to that, Jamie was a co-founder and president of the Institute for Higher Education Policy in Washington, D.C., and was also the executive director of a bipartisan commission on college affordability. He is a current member of the Council on Foreign Relations and a board member at CICP. He lives here in Indy, and his new book just came out. It's called Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines and is now available.

So, Jamie, welcome to the program. We're happy to have you here.

Jamie Merisotis: Delighted to be with you, Mike. Thanks so much.

MY: Thank you. So before we talk more broadly, can you just tell us a little bit about the book and what made you decide to write it?

JM: Well, as you mentioned in introducing me and my background, I've spent my life at this intersection of learning and work, and my goal has always been to try to make it more inclusive, to help it serve more people, more diverse people, and generally make it better both for individuals and society. But one of the things in education and particularly in education policy that's increasingly being asked is this question, what's education for? And, you know, I try in this book to at least provide a partial answer to that.

To say, look, at the end of the day, we need to prepare people for human work, which is the work that only humans can do. And we've all read these stories and articles about how work is changing, how technology and AI are taking over more and more of the tasks that people used to do. And I'm not a big fan of the robot zombie apocalypse view of the world, I'm much more interested in what we can do as humans in this age of smart machines.

We know that machines are better at things like repetition and speed and patterns. But machines can't understand things like subtlety and nuance, and they don't really understand human interaction. So, you know, in the way that human work works, work is not going to go away. I am not convinced that we are not going to have enough things to do. It's going to be transformed. It's going to be transformed into the work that only we can do as people. And that is "human work."

MY: That's a really interesting point, and one which I think reveals some vision of the future which is maybe not as dystopian as some people might actually have! Was there anything in the process of writing this book that stuck out to you as a new thing that you learned?

JM: You know, this is my second commercially published book, and my first book was sort of two decades of a policy wonk dumping all these ideas about education and immigration and urban policy into one book. This book was really about trying to make the case for people to change a mindset. And in order to do that, I found that doing so through storytelling, by telling the story of human work through the stories of individual people, was really interesting.

So just strictly as an author, I found that - even though my background is large scale change, systemic change, trying to create a difference through public policy, through this platform of a large national foundation - telling human stories was really interesting because I think that's where we come to recognize that human work is really about these things that make us human.

It's about our compassion and our empathy and our ability to be ethical. It's about our creativity, our ability to collaborate and communicate. And so I really enjoyed that as I tried to work on writing this book.

MY: That's a theme that's really prevalent throughout the book. I'm curious, is that the number one thing you want readers to take away from the book, or is there something else that, if they could only learn one thing from reading, it would be the thing you'd want them to walk away with?

JM: You know, I think it is that, and probably more fundamentally that we're different than machines and a lot of ways. At the end of the day, for us as humans, work matters. In other words, people work not only because it helps them economically, but also because it provides a much wider array of outcomes: social mobility, and personal satisfaction, and dignity.

Humans work because they're seeking meaning. They need to make money. Of course, they need to, to have a life. But what they want is to have meaning and purpose. And I think that is the future of work, the future of human work.

MY: That's an excellent question, and a segue to our next question. So, thinking more broadly (of course, referring back to the book, but also just what's going on in the country), sort of a two-part question here. The first part is "how has the economy been changing before covid?" And, "how well is the education system, this pipeline that prepares people for work, doing in adapting to those changes?"

JM: Well, it's interesting. You make the point about "before covid." Of course, we've faced this cataclysmic event that has changed things very quickly. We're in the middle a of pandemic-induced recession. But we knew before covid, and I think this is a long term trend here, that there's a global shortage of talent. Employers were struggling to find workers with the skills that they needed, and workers were struggling with finding opportunities that actually fit what they knew and could do.

And so we saw in December of 2018, that it was the first time in US history that there were more job openings than there were unemployed workers in American society. And so that represents a huge loss of GDP and economic capacity. And we knew that was happening. At the same time, we saw this pattern repeating in recessions that go back to the 80s, where people would lose jobs, and then the economy would improve and some of those jobs would never come back. But what we really understood was that in the 2008-2010 Great Recession, the jobs that weren't coming back. The jobs that were, in other words, the jobs that that people were getting post-recession, were jobs that required college degrees or some college experience.

In other words, it's a very talent-driven economy, and you must actually develop your talent if you want to be successful. So I think that's an undercurrent in what we're facing here in Covid, because we know that with these talent shortages, work really is changing in fundamental ways. And AI, automation, all of those things are going to be accelerating the change that covid is causing. And I think that this talent shortage will be worse in the post covid environment than what we saw before.

MY: And that's a function of just, the education system hasn't adapted to the sort of this new reality? Or is there something else at play?

JM: Yeah, I think that's it. You know, at the end of the day, I think that we've spent a lot of time trying to say, well, you know, education is one thing, but training is another. I think they are, and have been for a long while, much the same thing. I think that what prepares you for work prepares you for life. And you can get that in a workforce program. You can get that in a college or university. But you must develop your human talent in order to be successful in the modern world. And colleges and universities, whether it's Ivy Tech or Indiana State or Notre Dame, they all have a role to play. But so do workforce training programs. So does work-based learning, work that you actually do on the job. All of those things I think are really, really important.

MY: In your book, you mention that the "typical college student" isn't what most people picture and actually doesn't really look much like what I looked like when I was graduating high school and going to college. Could you tell our audience a little bit more about that?

JM: Yeah, this is a surprise to a lot of people who have been to college, as you point out. But, you know, it's been actually quite a while since the "typical college student" was 18 years old and coming fresh out of high school, headed straight to a four-year campus, living in a dorm.

I wrote an article a few years ago for The New York Times, and the headline was "College Kids with Kids," because one in four college students today are actually parents. So they're trying to get their degree, but they also have children. More than 40% of students today, in higher education, are students of color. More than a third are over the age of 25. And a lot of students today, and I think this started in your era, are working full time. So many, many students are finding that their work intersects with their learning. And that creates both opportunities and challenges. Too much work can actually lead to problems for these individuals.

MY: Yeah, that's true. I did know some friends in school who were working full time. And I think that's just become more and more common as there are also factors like the rising cost of school that are at play there.

Focusing more on Indiana now: What are some areas in which we have a leg up on the rest of the country, regarding higher education?

JM: Well, you know, first we have a very diverse system of higher education in Indiana, which is really important. We've got one of the largest statewide community college systems in the country. And Ivy Tech. We've got a very good public university system, which is unique. Having both IU and Purdue, both nationally regarded research universities, serving different roles is, I think, very important. And then we've got this broad array of private, not-for-profit colleges and universities, whether it's Franklin or Notre Dame or Anderson. All of these really add up to a very, very diverse system.

One of the things that I also appreciate about Indiana (and I've been here since 2008, I'm very proud to be a Hoosier! I really, really like living here.) is that people value higher education. They value the learning that's taking place here in ways that maybe we don't see in other states and in other ways. So I think it's really important for us, as a state, to capitalize on this concentration of people and institutions interested in higher learning and actually build our talent base to a new level in Indiana.

MY: We often ask our Foundation's Fellows (and people in our membership) to think about ways that we can actually drive real and positive and concrete change. What's a challenge or opportunity that exists in Indiana that they could look at as an area for improvement?

JM: Yeah, I think one of the big things for us when it comes to this issue of human work as a state is that we face a fairly unique set of challenges in Indiana, in that we are a very manufacturing intensive state. In fact, one of the biggest things that we've seen from research, both from MIT as well as from the Brookings Institution, is that we are the most vulnerable state in the country to automation and AI.

So if you're looking for a big, hairy, audacious problem to solve, figure out how we get from this economy we have now to this new "human work" economy.

And again, we have a lot of assets. We've got a strong culture of learning, and lots of other things, but we've actually got to make that transition. I was very impressed with and continue to be impressed with the leadership that Governor Holcomb has shown in his 2008 State of the State address. You may remember that he said that developing a 21st-century workforce is the defining issue of the decade. I think he's absolutely right about that. But I think that we've got to "get at it" as individuals and on a statewide basis, when it comes to changing the workforce of Indiana.

So I think about the Fellows. I think about the broader community of people who are influenced by what the Fellows do. I think we've got to work together on building this new human work workforce for Indiana.

MY: What advice would you have for someone who's interested in pursuing that as an area to make change?

JM: You know, at the end of the day, I think we all have a responsibility, so it doesn't matter whether you're an educator or a policymaker or just someone who's doing the work. I think we all need to focus on making this transformation a reality. So if there's one thing you might want to start thinking about doing tomorrow, I think it's: develop a cohesive, integrated plan for yourself, or for your employer, or for your community to retool training and education. So that workers (or adults looking for work) can actually better capture what human workers want - that learning part of human work. One of my colleagues at Lumina Foundation told me recently that he has a personal strategic plan and he read my book. My book sort of has this running theme about the idea that learning, earning, and serving are a shorthand way of explaining what human work is all about. So he said, I redid my personal strategic plan by saying, "How am I learning? What am I doing to earn? How am I serving? And how am I going to continue to rebuild all three of those parts of my human work lifecycle over the course of my entire adult life?" So I think that's what individuals can do. They can actually work to develop those plans, individually, at the community level, and at a statewide level, to build this new human workforce for Indiana.

MY: Wow. That's really solid and super actionable advice. Thanks for saying that, and for pointing that out. For any Fellows or members who are listening in on this call, it's something that you should consider doing and something we'll definitely talk more about. Jamie, thank you so much for making time to be on this call. Congratulations on the book. That's very exciting. And good luck with it and with all the work you're doing at Lumina Foundation. It's great to get to talk to you.

JM: Thank you, Mike. And thank you for the leadership that you've been showing. It's really important to the state.