While businesses in every sector have been working toward a digital transformation for several years, Covid-19 accelerated this shift across industries. New technologies are advancing at a pace that requires employers to continuously retrain their workforce to stay current. Organizations must become places of learning if they are to prepare workers for jobs of the future. Our workers must adapt quickly as the economy and in-demand jobs evolve. A shift in the division of labor between humans and machines may displace 85 million jobs by 2025, according to the World Economic Forum, while 97 million new roles may emerge that are more adapted to the new division of labor among humans, machines, and algorithms. As many as 120 million workers in the world’s 12 largest economies may also need retraining in the next three years as a result of an increasing shift toward artificial intelligence, according to IBM’s Institute for Business Value. This scale of retraining and workforce preparation requires a paradigm shift. For employers to thrive in this new digital area and to stay one step ahead of competitors, they need to invest in the ongoing education of their employees and reinforce the importance of higher education when pursuing economic mobility. In turn, employees need to continue to learn in order to advance at work....

November 20 marked World Children’s Day. The fundamental right of children to an education is reflected in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. Unfortunately education is often not a reality for many children living in Western and Central Africa, where almost 80 percent 10-year-olds are learning poor, unable to read and understand a simple text - the highest percentage in the world. High rates of learning poverty indicate that too many children are either not attending school or are in school but not learning. Our recent blog highlighted the stories of Leah, Hauwa, and Hussaini, three children from the region, whose education has been disrupted primarily due to conflicts. Their stories illustrate challenges millions of children face in accessing and completing education and demonstrate that learning and children’s rights in the region are under pressure. The region has the potential to create equal and inclusive opportunities for all girls and boys arrive at school ready to learn, attain quality learning, and enter the job market with the right set of skills to become productive and fulfilled citizens. This is the vision for the World Bank’s forthcoming Regional Education Strategy for Western and Central Africa (2022-2025)....

Driven largely by the global pandemic, the number of international students enrolled at U.S. colleges and universities fell by 15% – or 161,401 students – from 2019 to 2020. However, early data for 2021 indicate the number might bounce back soon. This is according to new data from the Institute of International Education and the U.S. State Department. While a drop was expected due to the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic, which included international travel restrictions and suspension of U.S. visa services, the number of international students in the U.S. has actually been declining since 2016. Enrollments are down across all fields of study at both the undergraduate and graduate levels, which fell by 14.2% and 12.1%, respectively. Meanwhile, more than half of all international students come from just two countries: China and India. About 1 in 3 international students in the U.S. are from China, and about 1 in 5 are from India. For context, the third-most represented nation is South Korea, which accounts for about 1 out of every 25 international students in the U.S....

Large shares of grants that donor-advised funds distributed from 2014 to 2018 supported educational and religious nonprofits. That’s what we found in one of the first studies of its kind regarding the financial accounts often called DAFs. People with donor-advised funds use them to give money to the charities of their choice when they are ready to do so. This pattern contrasts sharply with overall U.S. charitable giving. About 31% of all charitable donations supported religious causes and 14% funded colleges, universities and other educational organizations in this same time frame. Grants from DAFs also supported giving to arts and culture organizations and public-society benefit organizations, such as the United Way and civil rights groups, at higher levels compared with the overall picture. Giving to arts and culture represented roughly 9% of the total grant dollars from DAFs from 2014 to 2018, and giving to public-society benefit organizations claimed 13% of the total. This data is part of a Giving USA Special Report on donor-advised funds. We conducted our analysis in partnership with the Giving USA Foundation, classifying 3 million grants from 87 different DAF-sponsoring organizations. As two of the lead researchers, we obtained the data from the Internal Revenue Service and the organizations and charitable arms of financial institutions that manage DAFs....