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Experts differ widely in their predictions about how technological innovation will change the labor market, but they all see a need for changes in education.
Technological innovation is changing the nature of many jobs and the qualifications employers seek in their workers, convincing more young people to pursue a college education and other postsecondary credentials-at least according to the conventional wisdom among public policy experts. This view of skill-biased technological change has been described as a race between education and technology. The Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz explain rising income inequality in the United States as a result of the education system failing to keep pace with technological innovation and the rising demand for higher-level skills. This analysis resonates well with the idea of a burgeoning knowledge economy and has helped fuel the global expansion of higher education.
Recent media headlines, however, proclaim a new phase of technological innovation, variously described as the fourth industrial revolution, the second machine age, the digital economy, or the platform economy, in which digital innovation will introduce a more pervasive and more fundamental transformation in the nature of work. The ensuing economic disruption raises important issues about the future relationship between education and technology. The prospect of widespread technological unemployment highlights a different relationship between education and technology than that offered by Goldin and Katz. In this scenario, automation and artificial intelligence (AI) advance so quickly that they reduce the need for many types of human labor and make it difficult even for those with advanced education to find a job.
Expectations about how digital innovation will develop will inevitably influence views on what educational and economic policies are needed to prepare for the future. Opinions on the expected future direction of the labor market fall into three broad perspectives: labor scarcity, job scarcity, and the end of work. These theories reflect differences in both theoretical orientation and research design. For example, some people concentrate on the scale of technological unemployment, whereas others focus on changes at the workplace or new ways of working in the gig, platform, or internet economy. Although it is sometimes difficult to draw clear distinctions between these theories because the boundaries are somewhat fuzzy, it is still useful to consider the...