Kathleen deLaski

Kathleen deLaski is an education and workforce designer, as well as a futurist. After eight years on the Board of Virginia’s largest public college, George Mason University, Kathleen founded the Education Design Lab, a national nonprofit that co-designs, prototypes, and tests education-to-workforce models through a human-centered design process focused on understanding learners’ experiences, addressing equity gaps in higher education, and connecting learners to economic mobility. A social entrepreneur, Kathleen has launched or co-launched four non-profits in the past two decades, all related to improving the quality of education for non-elite students. With the Lab, she saw the need for a non-profit to help learning institutions and other players design education toward the future of a fast changing world. The Lab has supported some 125 colleges, as well as employers and high school districts and regions, in their move toward a skills based economy. Kathleen has been asked to share learnings and ideas about the learner-driven skills revolution around the world. Today, Kathleen is the chair of the Lab’s Board.

In addition, Kathleen serves as the president of the deLaski Family Foundation, a leading grantmaker in education reform and new pathways to the middle class. She founded and served as board chair for EdFuel, a national non-profit working to build a diverse talent leadership pipeline for K-12 education. Previously, Kathleen created Sallie Mae’s award-winning college access foundation, co-founded Building Hope, a charter school facilities financing non-profit and helped Michelle Rhee create StudentsFirst, a national advocacy movement to improve school options and quality.

Spending five years at America Online, she developed the first interactive tools to engage the public online in elections and the political process and helped the biggest news organizations create digital brands. She and her boss, Steve Case, were named by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics among “25 People Changing the World.” Kathleen was named by President Bill Clinton as Chief Spokesman for the Pentagon, where she oversaw the military’s worldwide public information team. She also spent 13 years as a TV journalist, including 5 years as an ABC News Washington correspondent.

Kathleen in the author of Who Needs College Anymore?: Imagining a Future Where Degrees Won’t Matter, released in February 2025 by Harvard Education Press. It’s an optimistic yet practical assessment of how postsecondary education can evolve to meet the needs of next-generation learners.

With keen insight, Kathleen reimagines what higher education might offer and whom it should serve in Who Needs College Anymore? In the wake of declining US university enrollment and widespread crises of confidence in the value of a college degree, she urges a mindset shift regarding the learning routes and credentials that best prepare students for success after high school.

The work draws on a decade of design-thinking research from the nonprofit Education Design Lab as well as 150 interviews of educational experts, college and career counselors, teachers, employers, and learners. Kathleen applies human-centered design to higher education reform, engaging the perspective of end users to search for better solutions. She highlights ten top principles based on user feedback and considers how well they are currently being enacted by colleges.

In particular, she urges institutions to better attend to the needs of new-majority learners, often described as nontraditional students, including people from low- or moderate-income backgrounds, people of color, first-generation students, veterans, single mothers, rural students, part-time attendees, and neurodivergent students. She finds ample opportunity for colleges to support learners via alternative pathways to marketable knowledge, including bootcamps, skills-based learning, and apprenticeships, career training, and other types of workplace learning. This work suggests innovation as a means of evolution.

One of the interesting things Kathleen discovered (as a Catholic) in her research is how the enrollment declines besetting secular schools (15% over the last decade), are not occurring for strongly Catholic or other religious schools. In fact, strong religious colleges are experiencing a renaissance, much as historically black colleges and universities are.

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