As the Department of Education faces rounds of layoffs and threats of dissolution, prompted by the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), it is urgent to rethink and rededicate efforts to strengthen, broaden, and enhance STEM education from early childhood through post-secondary programs.
In order to realize the promise of an AI-driven future, technology and education leaders must address the persistent gaps between supply and demand for all highly skilled technical workers in the U.S.
This follows the recent activity of Elon Musk announcing the launch of the latest version of his company xAI's Grok model, South Korea banning downloads of Deep Seek, and President Donald Trump's promise of the $500 billion Stargate Project to create thousands of U.S. jobs. The urgent importance of OpenAI for this country is undeniable.
While some experts focus on the potential human job losses associated with the overall integration of AI tools, it is rewarding to see that the promise of Stargate and more recognizes that people will be the engine of the new economy. To do so, however, it is urgent to build the human infrastructure necessary to support this future work.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports a projected job growth in the U.S. for information security analysts of 33 percent from 2023 to 2033, with nearly 181,000 jobs in this field in 2023. In 2024, there were reportedly 457,433 openings “requesting cybersecurity-related skills,” CyberSeek reports, with 83 qualified workers for every 100 jobs. These job numbers are indicative of the larger tech workforce.
During his first term, Trump established the Presidential Cybersecurity Education Award in 2019 under his Executive Order on America’s Cybersecurity Workforce. The U.S. Department of Education administers this award that honors the work of primary and secondary educators who are preparing students to effectively navigate a cyber-enabled world.
Even as the administration talks of dismantling and distributing federal education dollars under the Department of Education to state houses, it is necessary to maintain a unified standard for STEM education. American competitiveness requires that all students who will comprise the workforce and will lead the nation forward have the strategic skills and competency to innovate in the future. It is not sufficient to simply leave the future to chance.
Rather, the DOE needs to remain to establish the framework for the national priority of digital sciences and tech advancement by implementing a unified message and guidance on AI to make cybersecurity and all technology a national priority.
Federal and state policymakers, educators, advocates, and tech leaders must guard against the propensity for individual states to set different standards that may unduly disadvantage some students. STEM education from primary through higher education must have national policies to make sure there is a level of consistency across states.
In 2023, The White House came out with the National Cyber Workforce & Education Strategy, outlining objectives, steps, and outcomes for resources, training, recruiting, retention, and advancement of the U.S. cyber economy. Updated last year, the strategy outlines the need for lifelong investment in cyber skills, leading to a citizenry equipped with digital literacy and computational skills. This is the ideal approach and needs to be enforced.
Workforce developers must also take full advantage of programs to upskill and reskill existing employees as they leverage internal labor markets to fulfill workforce needs.
Recent workforce studies point to a lack of supply. However, some experts question the nature of the need. There is an oversupply for some roles, an undersupply of others, and a disconnect between the expectations of employers and candidates. Employers question if the talent pool is weak or if they are seeking over-credentialed candidates. This may be unrealistic so that new employees can’t easily fulfill their roles.
The barriers to a robust talent pool for a competent cybersecurity workforce include insufficient resources in education from primary to secondary to higher education, potential restrictions on H-1B visas, and new policies on diverse candidate hiring.
Cybersecurity is a rapidly blooming field with the global market valued at $190.4 billion and expected to grow to $248.5 billion in 2028, research shows. Despite decades of work to produce a workforce of sufficient quality and quantity, our own research shows that positions continue to be unfilled.
To be successful in the evolving cybersecurity workforce—and the entire evolving tech workforce—individuals need to be able to create arguments, do research, analyze data, experiment, think critically, and employ scientific reasoning so that they will adapt successfully with the skills they need.
An innovative and creative future tech workforce depends on a community of critical thinkers with varying points of view, experiences, backgrounds, and voices. When there is an assault on sources of expertise and intellectual knowledge due to certain identities of race, gender, or ability, the value assigned to individuals becomes less about what they know and more about who they represent.
Serving as executive director of the Shahal M. Khan Cyber and Economic Security Institute at American University, I directly see the need for the responsibility of training the future tech workforce with a fair and just path of entry, growth, and advancement. This mission goes beyond politics and transcends the term limits of any administration.
The U.S. is certainly among the top global leaders in the practice of cybersecurity and digital innovation in terms of education, policy development, and implementation. America is expected to generate the most revenue globally in cybersecurity by the end of 2025, with a sum of $88.25 billion.
The projected tech job growth in the U.S. is from six million jobs in 2024 to 7.1 million jobs in 2034, according to the Computing Technology Industry Association's 2024 State of the Tech Workforce.
With new projects emerging, the possibilities seem limitless. The time to educate for the future is now.
Diana l. Burley, PhD, is Vice Provost for Research and Innovation, Professor of Public Administration and Executive Director, Khan Institute for Cyber and Economic Security at American University.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.