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 has long been a day to celebrate Black excellence, Black triumph, Black progress, all in the face of of, as President Joe Biden recently said, continued racism and roadblocks.

Let's be clear. They're all ghosts and new garments 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.

Now, President Biden mentioned diversity, equity, and inclusion there, 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 is 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 Reind. So, Athena, you cover higher education for CNN. And for so many years, at least when I was growing up, it was 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 It sounds 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?

It absolutely does. I think it's a combination of factors. I think that, obviously, you have the rising cost of college. The tuition has skyrocketed. Students who are increasingly concerned about being in debt. But then there's also, I don't know if it's about speed so much as anything else, but there's There's certainly data that's showing that when it comes to recent high school graduates, 18-year-olds, people who just graduated high school who 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 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. 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 traditional four-year college route.

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 find a solution to cut down on the time needed for that robot to do its function.

She helps essentially with the hardware and the software and the various tools that the robots, and they use dozens of different types of robots in making cars these days, she tests 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.

When she graduated from high school, thought, I'm not ready for a four-year education. I'm not ready to take on that debt. I want to 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.

I had a very long stent at Kroger, just working the 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 paycheck to paycheck.

So computer science was always something that interests me, but I was exploring around just to see if there was another avenue that would draw my attention a bit more. And that's how I fell into finding 110 and Chris Golis.

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 to give them good paying, family-sustaining jobs and help address the racial wealth She's working with robots and technology, and it seems like that you would need some training.

You need some education, but you don't need a full four years of college to do this highly specialized job.

You don't. In fact, it really depends on what school you go to, but 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, my major in school was government. It didn't necessarily... It taught me about government, but 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, let me skip, especially the four-year liberal arts education where you go and you go to a college campus and you talk about the humanities, let me learn very specific skills. In this case, Maureen Morgan, she went through this program offered by Perscolas, which is a nonprofit technology training program where they offer tuition-free trainings that may last three months, four months, five months, six months. Then the students can graduate with a specific certification for a job that Perscolas already knows a certain company needs. This coalition, 110, that put together 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. For some of these technical jobs that the one Amari is in, you're going to require a different very specific training. 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 added stability to just buy everyday life.

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

Anything. Everything.

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

At just 24 years old.

At just 24. And she told me, she said, Look, I always wanted to get a four-year degree.

I pushed myself 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 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 or 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 education in the future.

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

You mentioned the racial wealth gap. How do these companies plan to address that? Because there's been trade schools. Trade schools have existed for a long time, and yet that wealth gap still has existed. 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 are historical. The GI Bill, not all Black families, depending on the state you were in, were to benefit from that. Things like red-lining. There's all kinds of Black codes that kept Black people from being able to own or pass down property. There's lots of historical and structural reasons for the racial wealth gap, but it is also growing. We're talking specifically about the typical Black household or family, the typical White household or a family. Federal Reserve data shows that that gap grew in terms of household wealth, grew to over $240,000 by 2022. About 62% of US 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 family-sustaining job that they can really build wealth with.

It's one thing, though, to 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 and make that money that would narrow the gap. Do we get a sense that that's actually happening?

Well, I think that's the idea. You're taking existing jobs. When 110 sits down with a company, 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 those listings. Certainly not all of them. Some are going to require a four-year degree. But the idea is that they're not reducing the salary because someone doesn't have that credential. They're changing the job description itself so that more people can get access to not living paycheck to paycheck, not a minimum wage job. We have wonderful community development leaders that are in prime cities like Atlanta and Chicago and New York, and we indicate, Hey, there are some great jobs with these great companies. Can you help us? The CEO of 110, they have about 70 companies now. These are Fortune 500 companies. She said, Look, this has to be not just a movement, but a network. Our opportunity here is once they are ride it in and they're ready to take this jump with us, is how do we make sure that they're prepared? Per Scola, which offered the training to Amari, is part of one of 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 without four-year degrees.

They are actually being matched up with the programs who are going to funnel those very workers to them.

What does this mean for the colleges? Because 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 Are these universities worried that a movement like this could impact their bottom line in their enrollment?

Well, they certainly should be. I mean, they were already even setting aside skills first. Colleges have been struggling in recent years, especially smaller colleges. I just did a story on colleges closing, a 2000-something person college, a Catholic university that graduated its last class because of this enrollment cliff and the fact that students have so many other choices. I do think that going to be part of the challenge that colleges have to figure out how to grapple with. I think they're struggling. The National Center for Education Statistics, which is the statistics arm of the US Education Department, 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 10 years or so. But if you look at freshman enrollment, those But those numbers aren't going in the right direction either. Any growth we've seen in enrollment has been in community colleges. There's clearly a shift, and I think that that's all of the disruption of the pandemic. Kids who didn't graduate high school, couldn't graduate, have a high school graduation, and then 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 shorter, more specific, and more direct route.

Tina, thank you.

Thank you.

One Thing is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Paulo Ortiz and me, David Reind. Our senior producer is Fez Jamil. Our supervising producer is Greg Peppers. Matt Dempsey is our production manager. Dan Dizula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We get support from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mathers, John Dianora, Laining Steinhart, James Andres, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarau. 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 podcast. 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.