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The world faces many challenges—from climate change to political instability to widening inequality—that transcend borders and impact us all. If today’s young people are to be equipped with the imagination and skillsets to tackle these growing threats, educational excellence is key. How do we build successful education systems at scale and in every community? And what expe...
What are the factors that will affect economic growth? A distinguished panel of investors and business leaders are joined by a top observer of economic issues to share perspectives. What kinds of policies — planned or hoped for — will boost our economy and keep it steady?
US higher education is challenged by several dynamic forces: Americans are less likely than in the past to attend college, but those who do are more diverse. Costs and debt are rising — as is mistrust of higher education. And the skills needed to succeed in the workforce are evolving rapidly as technology advances. Can the nation’s 4,000 colleges and universities succeed b...
Hear first-hand from four extraordinary social entrepreneurs who are working in communities around the world to solve some of society’s most complex issues from education to healthcare and human rights.
If young adults need a college education so badly, why are recent college grads so disproportionately unemployed? Experts tell us that two-thirds of jobs in the US by 2020 will require post-secondary credentials of some sort. Ironically, the pace of change is such that identifying the jobs that will come available in five years is hard to predict, creating questions ab...
Two-thirds of American workers do not have a four-year college degree. In an increasingly tech-driven economy, how can we ensure that a lack of higher education isn’t a roadblock for this huge part of the population and, likewise, that talent shortages aren’t barriers to business and economic growth? What are the most innovative ways to upskill, reskill, or next-skill work...
One of the most effective ways to break the cycle of poverty is to invest in children and families in the earliest years. How do we apply groundbreaking research on children's and parents’ health and educational attainment to ensure that the next generation is poised to transform and maintain America's role in the world? Nobel Prize winner James Heckman and early childhood...
Digital skills open doors to jobs in tech, media, and across all industries. Connecting diverse students and workers with the education and training needed for the 92% of today’s jobs that require digital skills creates a pipeline of talent, critical to driving economic opportunity and mobility.
How can we prepare needed talent to fuel economic growth and social mobility? With the workplace rapidly changing with advances in artificial intelligence, do we even know enough about future jobs to prepare young people with the right skills and capacities? Are our education systems prepared in light of rapid demographic shifts? Leaders in industry and academia have some...
As income inequality grows, leaders have the power to unite and divide us. The Aspen Institute Ascend Fellowship invests in diverse, entrepreneurial leaders from a range of sectors who have breakthrough ideas to build economic security, educational success, and health and well-being for families in the US. Hear from several dynamic leaders from the Ascend Fellowship on the...
How do we develop scalable policy solutions that will empower families throughout the United States to rise out of poverty and achieve better life outcomes? How we can improve children’s opportunities in communities that currently offer limited prospects for upward income mobility? Award-winning Harvard scholar Raj Chetty, whose research focuses on equality of opportunity...
A healthy America requires a broad prosperity that goes beyond GDP statistics and stock-market valuations. More Americans need to hold jobs with growth in wages and the opportunity to build wealth; and more Americans need confidence that opportunity exists. But some argue that capitalism is broken for the vast majority of American workers. What are the facts? Why are we in...
More than 6 million youth are out of school and out of work, a situation that will have dire consequences for the nation’s economy and the fate of a generation. Meanwhile, the rise of the so-called “gig economy” has fundamentally altered the landscape of modern work, giving rise to a broad new sector of part-time, self-employed, and temporary workers and with them, a new s...
Featured Ideas Festival Scholars include Lashon Amado, María Teresa Kumar, Michael McAfee, and Eshauna Smith. Fueling today’s highly charged political environment is the growing sense that opportunity is elusive and inequality is rising because our national economic policies unfairly disadvantage the middle class. Millions of Americans believe they’re pawns in a game they...
In the innovation process, ideation is the creation of a great idea. But that’s not enough. Scaling is required to create value for great ideas, and this stage requires skills the entrepreneur often does not natively possess. Braddock Scholars is a response to this need. This Aspen Institute program chooses promising business ventures, profit or not-for-profit, from the wi...
It’s the American dream: get a good education, work hard, buy a house, and achieve prosperity and success. This is the America we believe in — a nation of opportunity, constrained only by ability and effort. But during the last 25 years we have seen a disturbing “opportunity gap” emerge. Americans have always believed in equality of opportunity, the idea that all kids, reg...
Much has been written about the elections this year – about the candidates, their policies, their personalities. But there is another story of equal importance: about us. America rests on a structure of interlocking systems – an education system that would ideally produce a citizenry knowledgeable about civics and skilled at thinking critically about what they’re seeing...
“Only by letting millions of entrepreneurs try new ideas, to innovate, to create businesses that put those ideas to work in a competitive and open way… are we going to be able to tackle the world’s big problems.” Angel Cabrera made this statement to World Economic Forum colleagues, calling for more action to support entrepreneurs around the world. However, in emerging mar...
As technology drives economic change, the discussion of the future of work seems to be binary: either dystopian or rose colored. The public policy debate has congealed around a set of silver bullet solutions — from universal basic income to coding for all — that reflect Silicon Valley’s strategy for addressing economic inequality. But what if the best strategy isn’t a sing...