In a rapidly changing economic landscape, educational assistance programs through tax policy changes can offer employers a competitive advantage, write W/A's Erica Price Burns and Liz Simon of General Assembly. Employers today are grappling with two connected human capital challenges: identifying and cultivating a workforce with the skills to compete, and finding ways to retain those workers to limit the costly cycle of recruiting and retraining their replacements.

At the same time, a confluence of factors — including a tightening labor market and pernicious skills gaps — has led to a seemingly paradoxical narrative. Six-in-10 manufacturing jobs are currently going unfilled. Seven-in-10 employers report that a shortage of workers with the necessary skills limits their ability to compete. Yet droves of Americans struggle to find jobs that put them on a path toward economic mobility. And in some high-growth fields, diversity gaps risk exacerbating wage inequality.

Increasingly, we’re worried that a generation of entrepreneurs is facing a “new innovators dilemma” — where innovation is stymied by regulatory and political environments focused on outdated needs and the wrong set of “customers.” The truth is, Silicon Valley investors and techies will get by just fine without addressing our big, societal problems. But if we encourage our nation’s top entrepreneurs to join search engines and social networks, we will miss the opportunity to apply their genius to solving society’s most pressing problems.

The Obama Administration’s “gainful employment” regulations are among the most contentious federal education regulations. Ever. For the last nine (!) years, the U.S. Department of Education (ED) has been trying to define the term, and definition may determine whether a school is eligible to receive federal student aid for its programs under the Higher Education Act (HEA).