Rachel Lipson | Team Profile
- Project on Workforce Team
- Jun 8
- 6 min read
Updated: Nov 13
Rachel Lipson is a co-founder and Scholar in Residence at the Project on Workforce, and a Research Fellow at the Mossavar-Rahmani Center for Business and Government. She is also a Resident Scholar at the Aspen Institute's Economic Strategy Group and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at Brookings Metro. Rachel's current research focuses on a new generation of technical jobs—many fueled by AI and other emerging technologies—that do not require a four-year degree. She is studying the labor market experience of U.S. “frontier regions” at the forefront of producing critical technologies such as AI data centers, chips, quantum technologies, nuclear energy, biomanufacturing, and batteries.
From 2023 to 2025, Rachel served in the Biden-Harris Administration as a Senior Policy Advisor at the U.S. Department of Commerce’s CHIPS Program Office, where she helped launch the workforce strategy for the $50 billion federal investment to revitalize domestic semiconductor manufacturing. Prior to joining the federal government, Rachel served as the inaugural director of the Project on Workforce at Harvard. Over the course of her four-year tenure, she grew the Project from a brand-new startup to a thriving community at the university and a leading source of practitioner-facing research in the field.
Rachel is the co-editor of America’s Hidden Economic Engines (Harvard Education Press 2023), a well-regarded volume that has helped catalyze community college reform efforts nationwide. Her writing has appeared in The Boston Globe, Washington Post, Newsweek, and The Hill, and her research has been featured by C-SPAN, NPR, Bloomberg, The Economist, and MIT Technology Review. She previously co-led the Workforce Futures Initiative in partnership with the Brookings Institution and the American Enterprise Institute and served on a National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine task force on the STEM workforce. She has also held economic policy roles across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors, including at the World Bank, JPMorgan Chase, Obama for America, Year Up, and Mexico’s Ministry of Communications. She is currently an Expert Advisor to Goodman Philanthropies, a new philanthropy dedicated to improving economic mobility in the United States.
Rachel graduated magna cum laude in Government from Harvard College and holds an MBA and MPP from Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School. She is a recipient of the Frederick Fischer Prize for outstanding research on social policy, the Harvard Certificate of Distinction and Excellence in Teaching, a Harvard Business School Leadership Fellowship, and the Thomas T. Hoopes Prize for outstanding scholarly work. In 2024–25, she is also serving as a Futures Fellow at Stanford University’s Center on Longevity as part of a year-long cohort of leaders developing a vision for human capital development that supports longer lives and multiple career transitions. Rachel started her career in public service as the student representative to the Clarkstown Central School District Board of Education.
CONTENTS
Selected Research & Projects
At a time of rising geopolitical competition and massive investment in emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), boosting U.S. productivity has reemerged as an urgent priority. Yet federally-funded workforce development—one of the key levers for long-run productivity growth—remains mostly relegated to reactive anti-poverty policy rather than a forward-looking economic strategy. As the U.S. charts a long-term path towards technological leadership and supply chain resilience, the country faces a generational opportunity to build a national talent investment strategy that meets the potential of the AI economy. Drawing on the workforce needs for emerging technology jobs, this paper proposes an alternative model for public investment in workforce development: treating human capital like research and development (R&D). Such a model would prioritize critical sectors with good-paying jobs that do not require a four-year degree and that are essential to deploying new technologies. Applying an R&D lens would also help close the “valley of death” between promising pilots and scaled solutions, while striking a better balance between experimentation and evidence. If embraced, this vision could not only enhance national competitiveness, but also expand opportunity for Americans historically left out of the innovation economy.
The Options Multiplier: Decoding the CareerWise Youth Apprentice Journey | Research Report
This research uses a novel dataset from CareerWise Colorado, one of the U.S.'s most widely cited youth apprenticeship models. During the program, CareerWise students split their time between a traditional classroom and the workplace, allowing apprentices to earn a wage, while accessing meaningful work experience and debt-free college credits. Our research analyzes the outcomes from CareerWise Colorado's first two cohorts (2017-2018). We find that nearly two-thirds (64 percent) of CareerWise apprentices achieve the program’s stated goal of serving as an “Options Multiplier”- they transition on to postsecondary education, employment, or both. Supportive supervisors, job match, industry type, and Registered Apprenticeship status all have a significant impact on retention and completion. Better understanding these factors means that employers can structure programs that lead to apprentice success, teaching students the skills they need for a good job and generating a high return on investment for employers.
In America’s Hidden Economic Engines, editors Robert B. Schwartz and Rachel Lipson spotlight community colleges as institutions uniquely equipped to foster more equitable economic growth across America’s regions. As Schwartz and Lipson show, these colleges are the best-placed institutions to reverse the decades-long rise in US economic inequality by race, class, and geography.
Navigating Public Job Training | Research Report
This report describes and analyzes the more than 75,000 “Eligible Training Provider” (ETP) programs in the United States. ETP programs are job training programs deemed eligible for funding under America’s primary federal workforce development law, the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA). Among other functions, WIOA funds vouchers for unemployed or underemployed workers to enroll in job training services. The vouchers are typically used to support enrollment in short-term, non-four-year-degree programs that connect to "in-demand employment” opportunities in a regional economy. Under the law, each state and territory must maintain a list of pre-approved programs that eligible individuals may select from. The programs on these lists (commonly known as “eligible training provider lists” – ETPLs) comprise our primary unit of analysis.
Selected Media
President Trump’s threat to strip $3 billion in grant money from “antisemitic Harvard” and give it to “trade schools” is a cynical attempt to pit parts of the education system against each other. Trump’s actual policies undermine both trade schools and community colleges: his allies’ proposal to raise the credit-hour threshold for Pell Grants could cut aid for 400,000 mostly low-income community college students, and his administration has already canceled grants to several Tech Hubs involving community colleges.
In recent years, confidence in higher education has plummeted. This decline has prompted a vigorous debate on the role of all types of post-secondary education. In their recent book America’s Hidden Economic Engines: How Community Colleges Can Drive Shared Prosperity, Robert B. Schwartz and Rachel Lipson make the case for the value of community colleges. Surveying five case studies across the US–in Ohio, Virginia, Arizona, Texas, and Mississippi–they argue that community colleges serve as “engines” of social mobility for individuals and communities. Their research shows that community colleges have proven remarkably effective at mitigating economic inequality and promoting social engagement and economic development.
Over the past two years, the Workforce Futures Initiative—a bipartisan collaboration among the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution, and Harvard Kennedy School’s Project on Workforce—has evaluated the U.S. federal-state workforce education and training system. Their findings indicate that while programs like the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) modestly improve outcomes for disadvantaged workers, the overall impact remains limited due to insufficient funding and systemic constraints. The group advocates for increased public investment in proven, scalable programs, particularly sectoral employment initiatives that align training with high-demand industries such as healthcare, IT, and advanced manufacturing. Additionally, they emphasize the necessity of supportive services like counseling and childcare, as well as enhanced data infrastructure to better track program performance and adapt to evolving labor market needs.
Workers who lost jobs amid the pandemic see the tides of economic change quite clearly. Will we be able to deliver better vessels to ride out the waves? Director of the Project on Workforce, Rachel Lipson, writes for the Boston Globe on the US job training system: how we got here and how we move forward.