Speaking

Whether you represent a high-school association of parents and want to tap his expertise in getting behind the admissions process or understanding financial aid or you’re from a college or corporation and want to explore how the future of work will impact education and the war for talent, Jeff harnesses a bank of knowledge from his years monitoring, reporting, and digging deep within the higher ed industry.

Among the Audiences Jeff Has Appeared Before

Keynote Topics

The Post-Pandemic University: Opportunities in the Decade Ahead

The global pandemic exposed challenges in higher education that had been festering for years, from the technology infrastructure to the student experience to the financial sustainability of many institutions. But in the long term, the staggering disruption to traditional higher education and the broader world of work during COVID-19 offers a once-in-a lifetime opportunity to radically reimagine how colleges and universities serve their students and the workforce they’re preparing them for. Based on findings from dozens of convenings Jeff has hosted over the last year with higher-education and workplace leaders, as well as research projects he led on the future of higher education and work, this talk will help college leaders better understand and prepare for the decade ahead.

Who Gets In and Why:
An Inside Look at College Admissions

It’s the question on the minds of teenagers and their parents everywhere: how do colleges select their freshman class? For an entire admissions cycle, Jeff was embedded in three admissions offices — the University of Washington, Emory University, and Davidson College — and followed a group of high-school seniors through the process as well as players behind-the-scenes, including the marketers, the financial-aid consultants, and the rankers. The result was his book, which was named one of the 100 Notable Books of 2020 by the New York Times. In this talk, Jeff will dispel the entrenched notions of how to compete and win at the admissions game, reveal why families have much to gain by broadening their notion of what qualifies as a “good” college, and explain how the Covid-19 pandemic will impact admissions in the long run.

The Future of Work: Building a Culture of Continual Learning​

The skills needed to keep up in almost any job increasingly churn at a faster rate. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs report shows that 40% of core skills will change in the next five years, and 50% of all employees will need reskilling to support business growth. The need for regular upskilling and reskilling throughout life means that education is no longer something that young people will experience just once in their life. In this talk, Jeff examines the changing landscape of the workforce, the shifting definition of learning and learners, and explain how learning will be streamed in the future in much the same way we constantly stream music, television, and movies nowadays.

The War for Talent: Hiring and Building an Adaptive Workforce

There is a great reassessment going on in the U.S. economy. It’s happening on a lot of different levels. At the most basic level, people are hesitant to return to work. But there is also growing evidence that a lot of people want to do something different with their lives than they did before the pandemic. The coronavirus outbreak has had a dramatic psychological effect on workers, and people are reassessing what they want to do and how they want to work. In this talk, Jeff explains what he learned from the time he spent inside the hiring process at Fortune 500 companies and start-ups for his New York Times bestseller, There Is Life After College. This talk will help corporate leaders and managers understand the demands for upskilling and reskilling, how people analytics is reshaping the recruiting landscape, and the ways the job market is increasingly about skills and less about where talent went to school or their specific degree.

Past Events

Previous Appearances

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