The Collective’s
Racial Equity in Workforce Development Series
Racial Equity in Workforce Development
Institutions of higher education and their workforce development efforts play a powerful role in connecting students to careers, economic mobility, and opportunities to build meaningful lives for themselves and their families.
But these connections do not operate in a vacuum. They take place within a society where longstanding racial inequities in education, housing, wealth accumulation, hiring, professional networks, and more have shaped who has historically been able to access occupations and economic opportunities. These inequities can be carried into and reproduced through the very ways workforce development programs are organized and designed.
For example, structural racism can operate through seemingly race-neutral institutional practices that assume students have equal access to resources and forms of social capital that remain inequitably distributed by race. This includes expectations that students can:
afford to participate in unpaid internships (NACE, 2023),
draw upon informal professional networks (Pedulla & Pager, 2019),
secure faculty or staff recommendations (Deshpande et al., 2024),
expect to be equally perceived as “professional” (Suriel, 2026), and
accommodate flexible work schedules (Wladis et. al., 2024).*
Pursuing racial equity in workforce development therefore requires us to ask bigger questions:
Are we simply trying to help students navigate an unequal labor market?
Or are we examining and (re)designing our institutional systems in equity-minded ways that work to counter rather than reproduce structural racism?
*To learn more about the effects of structural racism and occupational segregation on workforce opportunities, read Solomon, Maxwell, and Castro’s (2019) Systemic Inequality and Economic Opportunity.
Are we simply trying
to help students
navigate
an unequal
Or are we examining
labor market?
and (re)designing
equity-minded ways
our institutional systems in
that work to counter
structural racism?
The Collective’s Racial Equity in Workforce Development Series
The Collective’s Racial Equity in Workforce Development series is designed to help you look closely at workforce development at your institution and offers practical ways to identify where racial inequities may be created, reproduced, or exacerbated—and then intervene in meaningful ways.
Where can I begin?
Explore the components below, clicking on the headline to access series materials, in whatever order is most meaningful to you. As you do, consider how what you uncover in one area might lead you to ask new questions about another. The goal is not to move through these components in a prescribed sequence, but to make visible and critically examine the institutional conditions on your campus that may be producing or sustaining racial inequities—and then identifying opportunities and making plans to change them.
Series components will be published and made available over the following timeline:
November 2026: Priorities & Structures
December 2026: Policies & Processes
January 2027: Practices & Practitioners
February 2027: Professional Development
Available Nov. 2026
Priorities
Structures
Available Nov. 2026
Available Dec. 2026
Policies
Processes
Available Dec. 2026
Practices
Available Jan. 2027
Practitioners
Available Jan. 2027
Professional Development
What is emphasized, invested in, and pursued when time, staffing, and resources are limited.
How and where programs, curricula, personnel, services, and learning opportunities are organized.
What we say must or must not happen.
How how institutional goals are officially designed to be carried out.
How practitioners actually implement policies and processes in their day-to-day work.
Who carries out the work, including the racialized knowledge, beliefs, assumptions, and discretion they bring to it.
The ongoing learning, reflection, and support that can be (or can fail to be) a leverage point for building the human capacity required to enact equity-mindedness in priorities, policies, processes, and practices.
Who Is This Series For?
This series is for higher education leaders and practitioners who have some role in shaping the policies, structures, processes, practices, priorities, or decisions that influence students’ access to workforce opportunities and their pathways into careers. Workforce development may be the primary focus of their role or just one part of the work they do.
This includes workforce and career services professionals; student affairs and student services practitioners; faculty; program directors and coordinators; institutional research and effectiveness professionals; deans; and other campus leaders who make decisions about workforce programs, resources, requirements, and opportunities.
Throughout the series, we make an intentional effort to incorporate examples and case studies that speak to the range of these practitioners' capacity to support racial equity in workforce development.
What to Expect from This Series
Each installment in the Racial Equity in Workforce Development Series will take a closer look at one component of workforce development at a time and explore how it can shape (or undermine) racial equity. For each component, we’ll:
Make racial equity implications visible. We’ll identify what the given component (e.g., policies, structures, processes, etc.) can look like in workforce development and where seemingly race-neutral decisions can create, reproduce, or exacerbate racial inequities.
List racial equity indicators that we can use to help reveal racialized patterns in students’ access, experiences, opportunities, and outcomes. When relevant, we’ll also provide examples of these data and equity-minded sense-making.
Offer scenarios to help illustrate how racial inequities operate in the day-to-day lives of our students.
Name and reframe common equity detours, or the assumptions, explanations, and ways of thinking that can make it difficult to recognize inequity or take institutional responsibility for addressing it.
Envision equity-minded alternatives. We’ll explore concrete examples of how workforce development components can be designed and enacted differently to better advance racial equity.