We're posting this episode on Juneteenth, and in the three years since it became a federal holiday, more people have come to realize what it stands for. Because for so many black Americans, it isn't just the day the last enslaved Texans were informed of their freedom after the Emancipation Proclamation. It is long been a day to celebrate black excellence, black triumphs, black progress all in the face of. As President Joe Biden recently said, continued racism and roadblocks.

Let's be clear they're all ghosts and no garbage trying to take us back. Well, there are taking away your freedoms, making it harder for black people to vote or have your vote counted. Closing doors of opportunity, attacking the values of diversity, equity and inclusion.

A President Biden mentioned diversity, equity and inclusion, their Dei. That acronym has become super politicized, but I think it's worth looking at exactly what it's trying to accomplish, especially when it comes to the workplace. Who gets to have a seat at the table? And how do those in charge make sure there's a tangible benefit of having that seat? My guest today, CNN's Athena Jones. She's been looking into a growing movement aimed at closing the racial wealth gap by telling young people to forget about that four year college degree from CNN. This is one thing I'm David Rind. So I think that you cover higher education for CNN and for so many years, at least when I was growing up, it was like drilled into me that you have to go to college and get a degree. If you want a good job, set yourself up for success. But as we sit here in June and the class of 2024 is graduating from high school, it seems like that is not the fully accepted conventional wisdom, at least anecdotally. It seems to me that college is not the golden ticket it once was. Does the reporting you've done back that up?

I mean, it absolutely does. I think it's part of a it's a combination of factors. I think that obviously you have the rising cost of college and the tuition has skyrocketed. Students who are increasingly concerned about being in debt. But then there's also, I think I don't know if it's about speed so much as anything else, but there's certainly data that's showing that when it comes to recent high school graduates, 18 year olds, people just graduated high school. You might expect in the past to be looking to enroll in a four year college, and also what the Gates Foundation calls non enrollees. So people between the ages of 18 and 30 who maybe they age enrolled in a two year program or a four year program but didn't finish it, have gone on to do something else. They're thinking about the value of a higher education has changed in the last several years. This is something that they've been tracking from year to year, and we're seeing a rising confidence in things like job training programs for specific job skills you may need for a specific position, a professional licensing programs and other routes to get a job faster. And maybe, maybe they'll save money and consider college later. But there's a lot more younger students rethinking whether or not they want to take that sort of traditional four year college.

Right. So what does that look like?

Okay. Well, this area right here is our man, a lab. This robot in particular is for welding...

Well, for instance, the story that we just reported out, we spoke in Detroit with a young woman named Amari Morgan. She's 24 years old, and she's been working at GM, for about two and a half years as an associate controls engineer.

If I ever were to be inside a factory and I see the robot moving in a certain angle, that's weird. Or looking at the software, and there's a part that doesn't necessarily need to be there. That's where I come in to sort of find a solution, to cut down on the time needed for that robot to do its function.

She helps, essentially, with the hardware and software and the various tools that the robots, and they use dozens of different types of robots in making cars these days. She sort of test the software on these tools to make sure that they're functioning correctly before they are added to the assembly line. What do you like best about your job?

Walking into this every day, being able to see these machines do their job, it's very interesting. It's an environment that I've never been in before, so getting hands on experience.

Talk to me about what you did right after high school. So it's 2018. You graduated high school. What was your plan then?

Not much of a plan. I feel like it was pretty on course for most 18 year olds fresh out of high school.

She. When she graduated from high school, I thought, you know, I'm not I'm not ready for a four year education. I'm not ready to take on that debt. I want to kind of explore a little. A year after graduating from high school in 2018, she enrolled in community college. But she only did a semester. And then the pandemic struck.

Had a very long stint at Kroger, just working in stocks, stocking shelves and things like that, interacting with customers.

So it changed her course, and she ended up going back home, from Texas to Detroit and getting a job in retail. But it was, you know, paycheck to paycheck.

So computer science was always something that interests me. But I was kind of exploring around just to see if there was another avenue that would draw my attention a bit more. And that's kind of how I fell into finding 110. And preschool is.

Now through this program, where she got several months of technical training, free technical training, and then was linked up with General Motors. They're part of a coalition of companies that are all aimed at hiring more young workers who do not have four year degrees and give them, good paying, family sustaining jobs, and sort of help address the racial wealth gap.

So she's working with robots and technology, and it seems like that you would need some kind of training, like you need some education about. You don't need a full four years of college to do this highly specialized job.

You don't. And in fact, it really depends on what kind of school you go to. But, you know, some colleges, you can go and you can take, say, accounting. And so you graduate and you know how to be an accountant. But in other situations, like my major in school was government. And it didn't necessarily it taught me about government. It didn't teach me in the simplest terms, for instance, how to govern.

How to be a politician.

And a lot of these younger people these days are saying, wait, you know, let me let me kind of skip the especially the four year liberal arts education and, you know, where are you going? You go to a college campus and you talk about the humanities. Let me learn very specific skills. And so in this case, Amari Morgan, she went through this, a program offered by her scholars, which is a nonprofit technology training program where they offer free or tuition free, trainings that may last, three months, four months, five months, six months. And then the students can graduate with a specific certification for a job that preschool, as already knows, a certain company needs. And so this coalition, 110 that put together this, this, this pledge, they say to these companies, whether it's Cisco or IBM or Delta, they say, we're going to help you rewrite job descriptions, because not all the job descriptions require a four year degree. And so for some of these technical jobs that the one of is in, you're going to require a different kind of very specific training. And why not? Some of these folks are saying, why not do this in a much more abbreviated time frame with no debt?

I have a savings now. I can actually go places and do things, it's adding stability to just my everyday life.

And in terms of savings, what is your goal? What do you want and what are you saving for?

Anything. Everything.

And so now this, this young woman who was working in retail, living paycheck to paycheck is now, you know, at the point where she can consider buying a house where she can feel like she's, you know, on the path towards towards living you.

At 24 years old.

At just 24. And, you know, she told me, she said, look, I always wanted to get a four year degree.

You know, I pushed myself to, to a level that I didn't think I would be able to push myself to, a level that I thought that I would have to go to college in order to experience.

When I spoke to her at General Motors, when she's demonstrating these robots and how she makes sure the software is working properly and all that, she said, I never, I never imagined I could be here without having that four year degree. And so while she still would like to pursue a four year degree and get a get a bachelor's degree eventually, she also feels now that she has a better financial stability and would be better able to potentially fund that, that that education in the future.

It, strengthens. I feel like the stronger I feel, stronger. It builds on confidence. It builds. It has built my confidence. I feel a lot being here.

So you mentioned the racial wealth gap. How do these companies plan to address that? Because like there's been trade schools, trade schools have existed for a long time. And yet that wealth gap still has existed. So how is this movement trying to approach that differently?

Well, there's so much going there's so many reasons for the racial wealth gap that our historical, you know, that the GI Bill, not not all black families, and depending on the state you were in, would be able to benefit from that. And, you know, things like redlining and there's all kinds of, you know, black codes that kept black people from being able to own or pass down property. So there's lots of sort of historical and structural reasons for the racial wealth gap, but it is also growing. And we're talking specifically about, the typical black household or family, the typical white household or a family. Federal reserve data shows that that that gap grew in terms of household wealth, grew to over $240,000 by 2022. And so about 62% of U.S. workers over the age of 25 don't have a college degree. That number rises when it comes to black workers, 72%. They also know that by doing this, they're going to help everyone, but they're going to end up helping more people of color who are less likely to have these college degrees and hopefully give them a sustainable, sort of family sustaining job that they can really build wealth with.

Right. It's one thing, though, to, you know, hire a more diverse work set and bring these people in that don't have college degrees, but then they still need to be paid more, right? And make that kind of money. That would narrow the gap. Do we get a sense that that's actually happening?

Well, I think that's that's that's the idea you're taking existing jobs. And when one sits down with a company, they're they're looking at, existing job descriptions. They have a library of all kinds of job descriptions, and they are figuring out ways that you can remove the degree requirement for some of those listings. Certainly not all of them. Some are going to require, a four year degree. But the idea is that those are they're not reducing the salary because someone, doesn't have that credential. They're they're changing the job description itself so that more people can get access to, you know, not not living paycheck to paycheck, not living not not not a minimum wage job.

We have wonderful community development leaders that are in prime cities, you know, like Atlanta and Chicago and New York. And we indicate, hey, there are some great jobs with these great companies. Can you help us? And they have.

The CEO of 110. Do they have that 70 companies now these are fortune 500 companies. And she said, look, you know, this has to be a not just a movement but a network.

Our opportunity here is once they are invited in and they're ready to take this, you know, sort of jump with us is how do we make sure that they're prepared?

Preschool us, which gave that offered the training to Amari is part of one of, you know, 35 or so talent developer organizations they work with to make sure that the companies aren't just saying, yes, we want to hire more workers with that for your degrees. They are actually being matched up with the programs who are going to who are going to funnel those very workers to them.

What does this mean for the colleges? Because like I went to a four year school, I got a degree in business. But candidly, it was the skills I acquired at the college radio station that put me here in this podcast chair and not the business degree. I guess in theory, I could have gotten those skills somewhere else without the student debt. So, like, are these universities worried that a movement like this could impact their bottom line and their enrollment?

Well, they certainly should be. I mean, they were already even setting up setting aside skills first. Colleges have been struggling in recent years, especially smaller colleges. I just did a story on colleges closing, 2000. Something personal college, a Catholic university that graduated its last class because of this, this enrollment, cliff. And the fact that that that that that students have so many other choices. So I do think that that's going to be part of the challenge that colleges have to figure out how to grapple with. And I think they're struggling. The National Center for Education Statistics, which is sort of the statistics arm of the US Education Department, you know, they talk about how between the fall of 2010 and the fall of 2021, total undergraduate enrollment, in higher education, it decreased by 15%. Now they are projecting there will be an increase over the next ten years or so. But if you look at freshman enrollment, those numbers don't aren't going in the right direction either. Any growth we've seen in enrollment has been in community colleges. So there's clearly a shift. And I think that that's all of the disruption of the pandemic. You know, kids who didn't graduate high school couldn't graduate, have a high school graduation, and then, you know, beginning to feel like maybe they didn't need to spend that, $40,000 a year, let's say, on average at a private institution or $10,000 a year at a public institution. And maybe they'll be just fine by taking this sort of shorter, more specific and more direct route.

Athena, thank you.

Thank you.

One thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paola Ortiz and me, David Rind. Our senior producer is Faiz Jamil. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dzula is our technical director. And Steve Lickteig is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasseri, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Leni Steinhardt, Jamus Andrest, Nichole Pesaru, and Lisa Namerow. Special thanks to Katie Hinman. We'll be back on Sunday. In the meantime, if you like the show, leave a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts. Make sure you follow the show. So when we post a new episode, it'll pop right in your feed. I'll talk to you later.