Abstract
The Great Recession and several other factors have heightened concerns among policymakers and the public at large about higher education’s role in employment, leading to a renewed wave of pressures, policies, and incentives to create job-driven strategies at all levels. Policymakers and the public often assume that aligning higher education with the labor market is a simple effort, an act of engineering. However, alignment is a complex endeavor involving numerous stakeholders. And, scant evidence exists to link job-driven strategies to outcomes and to provide concrete guidance on how to effectively approach higher education-labor market alignment (LMA). This paper provides a framework for understanding LMA efforts across postsecondary education, providing a common language and key insights for practitioners, policymakers, and researchers to develop better policies and practices. Further, this paper assesses what is known based on current research and practice on LMA to provide guidance on moving from policy to action, as well as charting out priorities to future research to guide on-going LMA efforts.