The Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act, administered by the U.S. Department of Labor, for example, houses information on workforce grants and training programs with several partner websites, including workforcegps.org and careeronestop.org. The National Registered Apprentice System stores data on available apprenticeship opportunities at apprenticeships.gov, and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) stores information on institutions providing workforce training. For IPEDS alone, the average administrative burden is more than three weeks of working hours for two- and four-year institutions.
“The problem is that this ‘I’ [for ‘integrated’] has never become a reality,” Christopher Mullin said Monday in a session called “America’s Trusted Talent Data System: An Action Plan” at the annual ASU+GSV Summit in San Diego. Mullin is a leader for data and management at the education nonprofit Lumina Foundation, and previously served as executive vice chancellor of the University of Florida system.
Speaking to the siloed nature of education data systems in the U.S., Mullin said they often ask for the same points of information, like institution name and address, and use unique IDs for institutions that don’t communicate. When Mullin worked at the University of Florida system, he said, he did not have a readily available list of all the programs and offerings across the state, as neither internal data systems nor state and federal ones stored the information centrally.
Panelists suggested that simplifying the process of collecting and storing data would ease a burden on educational institutions responsible for reporting repetitive information, and would make it easier for prospective students to find educational opportunities that meet their needs. Panelists proposed three steps to accomplish this, starting with auditing survey forms to remove duplicative information, with the understanding that all the channels of information will feed into a central hub.
Mullin said slight differences in terminology complicate the process, so the next step would be to standardize terms across required forms. For example, the format of a ZIP code would always be either the five-digit version or the “ZIP plus four” format. He said a federal agency like the Department of Labor or Department of Education could make these adjustments through guidance to staff and changes to existing forms, rather than creating a new agency or data collection process through law.
The final step would be creating a program that pulls information from existing forms and stores it in a central hub. The hub would house basic info like school name, address, programs offered, type of credential and field of study. Once that is established, the hub could expand to include additional streams of information, like state workforce data systems.
Kristin Hultquist, a trustee for Metropolitan State University of Denver who has decades of experience advising on federal education policy, said a searchable database would benefit governments, institutions and credential seekers, especially for financial aid reform.
“When we implemented FAFSA simplification, remember the horror of how bad that launch was? It’s because we got in and we saw, ‘Oh my gosh, we’ve duct-taped that data system together for years,’” she said. “We began to see the problems that were there.”
Similarly, unifying the data collection process for workforce training programs could illuminate which data points are no longer necessary to collect at all, she said.
Mullin said it could also serve as a helpful tool for finding programs in a geographic area or topic. Even as students increasingly turn to AI to find their institution and path of study, he said, the data AI is pulling from may be incomplete.
“This project is necessary to enable AI, because it does the data hygiene on the back end,” Mullin said. “Because you might get an answer about an institution and it doesn’t exist anymore, especially short-term credentials.”
Moving forward, such a system could be a proof of concept for broader investments in unified data systems.
“We want a national data system,” Hultquist said. “We want to get monthly reports about the state of our talent, like we get the state of our unemployment or inflation. We can’t get there without some demonstrable down payments.”
