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Nov 6, 2026
Fraternities are in the business of throwing alcohol-fueled parties. Why can’t universities push them into less risky, more productive lines of business?
Oct 24, 2026
Rather than countermanding everything the Trump administration has done in education and workforce, Democrats have an opportunity to pinpoint areas of common ground and put an end to 20 years of harmful yo-yoing.
Oct 10, 2026
The growth of administrative spending in higher education is out of control and must be reversed for financial, reputational, and moral reasons.
Sep 25, 2026
Healthcare is higher education’s least worst option. But first, higher ed needs to help free healthcare from its guilds.
Sep 10, 2026
While classrooms and workplaces produce genuinely different kinds of human capital, it turns out that one is a much better predictor of whether a young person will launch successfully.
Aug 28, 2026
The fact that we haven’t figured out what works for workforce development has alienated a generation having a horrific time finding its way into and around work.
Ryan is a Managing Director at Achieve Partners and was formerly an MD at University Ventures. Ryan’s commentary on where the puck is going in education and workforce regularly appears in the biweekly Gap Letter, Forbes, and Inside Higher Education. He is the author of the book Apprentice Nation: How the "Earn and Learn" Alternative to Higher Education Will Create a Stronger and Fairer America (2023). He is also author of A New U: Faster + Cheaper Alternatives to College (2018), which describes the critical importance of last-mile training and the emergence of bootcamps, income share programs, staffing and apprenticeship models as preferred pathways to good first digital jobs and was named in the Wall Street Journal as one the Books of the Year for 2018. Ryan’s first book was College Disrupted: The Great Unbundling of Higher Education (2015), which profiles the coming shift toward competency-based education and hiring. Ryan is a co-founder of Apprenticeships for America, a national nonprofit dedicated to scaling apprenticeships across the U.S. economy, a member of the Los Angeles County Workforce Development Board, and a senior fellow at the Progressive Policy Institute.
Previously, Ryan led the Education & Training sector at Warburg Pincus. His prior experience in higher education was at Columbia University. Ryan also founded and built Wellspring, a national network of boarding schools and summer camps for overweight and obese children, adolescents, and young adults. He began his career at McKinsey & Co.
Ryan received bachelor's degrees summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa from Yale University, and his law degree from the Yale Law School.
With millions of unfilled jobs, technology skill requirements advancing at a breakneck pace, tens of millions of workers out of position relative to what employers are seeking, and postsecondary education and workforce development systems that have largely refused to budge, we need unprecedented innovation in order to rekindle the American Dream of continued growth and shared opportunity. While traditional colleges and universities must play a leading role, the socioeconomic solutions we need won’t only come from higher education, but from a range of public, not-for-profit, and private actors, and via new pathways that may not be immediately recognizable as education or training.
The biweekly Gap Letter, successor to the UV Letter (2011-18), aspires to keep readers apprised of the latest ideas and developments in higher education and at the intersection of education and employment with a perspective that aims for candid and never boring. Thanks for your consideration.
- Ryan Craig