Make your favourite hot drink, find a quiet corner, and read through these materials ahead of the session. 

Andy Smarick (he/him) is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, where his work focuses on education, civil society, and the principles of American conservatism. He is a member of the University of Maryland System’s Board of Regents. Previously, he served as the chair of the Maryland Higher Education Commission and as president of the Maryland State Board of Education. His other government experience includes serving as an aide in the White House Domestic Policy Counsel of President George W. Bush, legislative assistant at the U.S. House of Representatives, deputy assistant secretary at the U.S. Department of Education, New Jersey deputy commissioner of education, and legislative aide at the Maryland state legislature. Previously, Smarick was a Morgridge Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. He helped found a college-prep charter school for disadvantaged students and the National Alliance for Public Charter schools, and he was a founding board member of 50CAN. Smarick has authored or edited four books, including The Urban School System of the Future. His work has also been published in outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Education Week, among others. Smarick received a B.A. in government and politics, summa cum laude and with honors, from the University of Maryland and a Master of Public Management from the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy.

Andy's Contact Details: 

Email: asmarick@manhattan.institute

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andy-smarick-423ba21/

Jake Hirsch-Allen builds public private partnerships between North America’s governments, workforce development organizations, colleges and universities, and LinkedIn Talent Solutions. Jake advises an impact investing firm, a large US foundation, Avalanche VC, the US CCSSO and several startups. He speaks regularly on the changing nature of work and learning and is passionate about immigration, interoperability, open and user-owned data, skills-based-hiring and -learning, human technology and AI governance. 

Jake is a Director on the Boards of the Ontario Tech Talent and the Canadian Club. He founded Lighthouse Labs, Canada’s foremost software bootcamp and Hacking Health. A former intellectual property and international criminal lawyer, Jake was also Chair of the Technology Committee of the Global Education Platform, taught Global Health at McMaster University and clerked at the Supreme Court of Israel.

Jake' s Contact Details: 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jakehirschallen/

Rashné Jehangir, PhD. (she/her), is Professor of Higher Education and the Beck Chair of Ideas in the College of Education and Human Development at the University of Minnesota- Twin Cities. A Professor of Higher Education, she is also the founding Director of the First Gen Institute and was recently named the Inaugural Dean of Education Opportunity Programs at her college  She is a scholar practitioner who spent the first decade of her career in student affairs in higher education and has strong roots in the federally funded TRIO SSS and McNair Scholars Program. She is also inaugural co-editor of the Journal of First-generation Student Success.  Her research focuses on equity and access with specific attention to the confluence of structural constraints in the academy that impact the experience of poor and working class, refugee and immigrant students, and students of color many of whom are first in their family to go to college and graduate school. Her scholarship is featured in several journals including Journal of College Student Development, Innovative Higher Education, Urban Education and the Journal of the First-Year Experience and Students in Transition.  Her book Higher Education and First-Generation College Students: Cultivating Community, Voice and Place for the New Majority was published by Palgrave Macmillan.

Rashné's Contact Details: 

Email: jehan001@umn.edu

Stephanie M. Breen (she/ella), Ph.D., is a Research Associate at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education at the Council for Opportunity in Education. Her research focuses on post-secondary access and success for first-generation, low-income, and historically marginalized students in higher education, as well as equity-minded practices for organizational change in higher education. Dr. Breen is a proud alumna of the McNair Scholars Program at Suffolk University in Boston, where she earned her BS in History. Subsequently, she completed her master’s in Sociology and Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. Dr. Breen completed her Ph.D. in Student Affairs in Higher Education from the University of Maryland, College Park, where she remains a consultant with the College Admissions Futures Co-Laborative at the university.

Stephanie's Contact Details:

Email: stephanie.breen@pellinstitute.org

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/doctora/

Here are a list of resources that were mentioned during this session!

Book: Decolonizing Methodologies, Linda Tuhiwai Smith 

Report: Talent Disrupted: College Graduates, Underemployment, and the Way Forward, Strada Education