STEMCONNECTOR’s recent webinar addressed one of the most urgent challenges facing the U.S. workforce and economy: the mathematics preparedness gap and its impact on the nation’s STEM talent shortage. The discussion featured guests Dr. Katey Arrington, Director of Systemic Transformation, Charles A. Dana Center at the University of Texas at Austin and Dr. Sean Pepin, Chief of Staff, American Airlines. You can watch or download the full recording below.
A key issue rose to the surface during this conversation: insufficient math preparation has become one of the biggest barriers to workforce readiness and access to good jobs across technical and professional career paths. The gaps show up early, in middle and high school preparedness, and compound through developmental math and, for those pursuing a degree, calculus completion in college, narrowing the pipeline at the point where it matters most. With a critical workforce inflection point approaching by 2031, the panelists spoke to the need for education and industry to start working together before that gap widens further.
Rethinking the Purpose of Math Education
Dr. Arrington is actively addressing this urgent need through her work leading the Dana Center's Launch Years Initiative, which works across nearly 30 states to modernize math education from high school through post-secondary levels. At the core of her approach is the knowledge that the math curriculum most students encounter today traces back to a framework set in 1892 when the world was a very different place.
"It feels like the math that we're teaching really has to serve a different purpose than it ever has before, and we have to be talking about math in different ways than we ever have before" - Dr. Katey Arrington
Today’s world increasing equips workers with AI-driven tools that obviate the need for certain high level technical skills but the need is greater than ever for strong quantitative reasoning, statistical literacy, and probabilistic thinking capabilities. To help address this disconnect, the Dana Center created Launch Years, an initiative centered on a taxonomy developed with Dr. Pepin that separates skills into three areas: technical, functional, and durable, within a framework that provides educators and employers a shared understanding and vocabulary for what’s missing.
“Often people say students don't have the technical skills. But when we dig into it, it's really the application of those technical skills in particular areas. It's really not the technical skill, it's the functional skill” - Dr. Katey Arrington
Dr. Arrington also offered a useful way to think about how this matters beyond STEM majors. Only about 2% of students will become mathematicians, and a modest share more will go into science and engineering. The vast majority will end up doing work that looks more like what is reflected in the employee survey example Dr. Pepin describes below: work that requires solid quantitative reasoning even if it isn’t a professional career requiring a four-year degree.
Talent as a Supply Chain
Dr. Sean Pepin speaks powerfully from an industry perspective. After nearly two decades in higher education, he moved into workforce strategy roles first at Southwest Airlines and now at American Airlines. His work focuses on skills, ecosystems, and workforce development. He explained that employers now have access to advanced data analytics through HR platforms that scrape job postings to identify trending and waning skills in the workforce. This granular skills analysis allows companies to match talent based on specific skills rather than just job titles, raising questions about how higher education could better align its curriculum with emerging workforce demands. He and Dr. Arrington have been collaborating on a taxonomy that separates technical skills (can you run a regression?), functional skills (can you apply that regression to a real business problem?), and durable skills (can you explain the result to an executive who doesn't want to hear the word "collinearity")? Most of the friction, Dr. Pepin argued, isn't a lack of technical ability. It's the functional and durable layers that go unnoticed until someone without them is handed a task, and the gaps suddenly become very visible.
"We have supply chain mentality in everything else. We know exactly where all of our stuff is coming from..., but we don't do that with talent" - Dr. Sean Pepin.
Dr. Pepin described how quickly talent pipelines can collapse. American Airlines historically relied on military-trained pilots but when the military recently increased pilot pay, that talent source largely dried up overnight. He also discussed the need for industry to more effectively partner with higher education institutions to address talent bottlenecks, particularly in technology roles. Companies that traditionally relied on H-1B visas now face challenges due to political and financial constraints, leading to a need for a more sustainable domestic talent supply chain approach.
“All of a sudden, we lost our entire pipeline. Like, overnight, pipeline gone. And we had no ability to look at that as a risk” - Dr. Sean Pepin
Dr. Pepin walked through an example that illustrates the technical, functional, and durable distinction in action. He was reviewing a five-year-old employee survey and ran a collinearity test on two questions that turned out to be nearly redundant. The data scientists who built the survey had the technical skill to run the test themselves, but survey design wasn’t their functional wheelhouse. When the findings got handed off to someone preparing an executive presentation, the challenge shifted again, to translating “collinearity” into something a room of executives would actually want to hear and understand.
“It’s like using a blunt force instrument when you really need something that’s much more precise,” - Dr. Sean Pepin, on why a single “skills gap” framing misses what’s actually going wrong.
Key takeaways from Dr. Pepin’s perspective:
Companies have real-time labor market data that higher ed can’t access on its own, and sharing it could be the fastest path to helping build relevant talent pipelines
Most “skills gap” complaints are actually functional skill gaps, meaning people can perform a technical task but can’t yet apply it to the specific business problem in front of them
Durable skills, like translating a technical finding for a room of executives, are the hardest to assess and often the difference between a hire who contributes immediately and one who needs months of ramp-up
AI: A Tool for Thinking, Not a Substitute for It
The discussion also touched on AI, and both panelists pushed back on the idea that AI is either a shortcut or a threat to be feared. Dr. Arrington framed it as a tool that should deepen student thinking rather than replace it, the difference between an “AI-enriched” classroom and an “AI-deprived” one where students are denied the thinking entirely.
Dr. Pepin’s perspective from the corporate side was similar: AI is effective and useful for brainstorming and polishing, but the middle work, the relationship-building and the judgment calls still requires people who understand both the math and the human context around it.
“AI is really helpful for brainstorming and getting idea generation, and it's really good for maybe polishing your end result, your PowerPoint, or your talking points, or whatever, but it can't do the middle work” - Dr. Sean Pepin
The Language Challenge
A key point from the webinar is that companies often can’t articulate what they actually mean when they say they need someone who’s “good at math” or “AI proficient.” Those are umbrella terms covering dozens of specific, learnable skills. Dr. Arrington and Dr. Pepin both see breaking them down into their component parts as the next frontier for connecting what’s taught in classrooms to what’s needed on the job, a compelling starting point for the kind of industry-education partnerships that STEMCONNECTOR strives to help build.
Dr. Arrington and Dr. Pepin have a paper coming out in the next couple of months building on these ideas that we’ll share when it’s available. If you’re an employer with workforce data within your talent acquisition team, or an educator looking for a partner with industry to help improve employability outcomes, it is very worthwhile to begin this conversation locally.