With great power comes great responsibility. And as the paper of record, the New York Times has great power. But on the issues of greatest concern to those of us in the education and workforce arena, the Times doesn’t always get it right, from romanticized coverage of failing colleges, to blithely assuming college degrees produce a strong ROI because they once did, to articles on skills-based hiring that fail to explore whether it’s actually happening, to naming a trend from anecdotal evidence, like last week’s Student Debt Burdened Them, So They Moved Abroad and Stopped Paying which attempted to draw a line from two data points (#3 was a foreign student who moved back home).Wrong on workforcegettyBut on the most fundamental issue, the paper of record has it wrong. I’m talking about workforce. Specifically, how the Times refuses to reference workforce as a single word. In article after article, op-ed after op-ed, even letters to the editor, workforce is always “work force.” No matter that workforce is in the dictionary and a valid Scrabble word. No matter that the Times reports on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce (one word). Outside the Committee name, in the paper of record, workforce is invariably two words: work force.Although this may sound like nitpicking, it’s clearly a choice – one that reveals a worldview. Workforce is a system. It’s our labor supply, our skills base, and our career infrastructure. Workforce is our capacity to match companies to talent and individuals to opportunity. It is, at once, our most fundamental economic resource, a social compact, and for millions of Americans, the difference between getting ahead and barely hanging on. It’s one very big thing. But to write it as two words is to treat it as something looser, smaller, less coherent: not a system under strain, but just another topic for the labor beat. Somewhere between work stoppages and work rules.By splitting the word, the Times splits the issue, separating symptoms from system. “Work force” is a collection of problems. Underemployment becomes a human-interest story, broken career pathways an education story, talent shortages a business story, AI’s threat to entry-level work a tech story, and our failure to build earn-and-learn infrastructure becomes a policy story nobody cares about. We fail to see the forest for the trees. Which explains the paper of record’s spotty coverage of these symptoms and failure to cover the system causing them.The truth is that workforce connects all these stories. It is not one issue among many. It is THE issue underlying so many of America’s problems. It’s one word because it’s one system. And because decision-makers aren’t seeing it, they’re not governing it. Which explains fragmented policies: student debt here, higher education accountability there, Department of Education here, Department of Labor there, immigration changes somewhere else – none of which fix the real problem. Ironic, isn’t it, that the inequality-obsessed New York Times is failing to cover the system that produces it?MORE FOR YOUWhy is the Times so wrong on workforce? The star journalists and editors there fall into two categories. If they graduated from college in the past decade, they probably attended elite colleges where workforce was an afterthought; the aforementioned problems unlikely to affect them. If they’re more advanced in age, they graduated into a different economy – one where a college degree meant career launch wasn’t a question of if, but rather when and what – literally a sign of the Times. As far as I can tell, most of the good people there check both boxes: older graduates of Ivy + schools. A recent study found that of the eight colleges most common among Times staffers, six are Ivy League colleges; the other two are Northwestern and Berkeley.The Times effect extends to higher education. Because higher education’s paper of record, The Chronicle of Higher Education, also gets it wrong. While not as egregious as the Times, the Chronicle’s treatment is more annoying: “work-force.” The hyphenated treatment of workforce – reflected in headlines here, here, and here, in countless articles, and in last week’s webinar where attendees were repeatedly bludgeoned with a hyphen – reveals the same malady as the Times’ bifurcation and reflects the ivory tower attitude that workforce isn’t something colleges and universities should lose sleep over.In the higher education media landscape, the Chronicle is the outlier outlet. Every other publication – Inside Higher Ed, Higher Ed Dive, Times Higher Education, The Hechinger Report, The74, and Community College Daily – all less ivory-tower-minded than the Chronicle, emphatically employs workforce: no space or hyphen. And at this week’s ASU-GSV conference, all workforce sessions were on the 4th floor of the San Diego Grand Hyatt in an area labeled “The Force.” (There is only one Force, and that’s workforce.) Of course, most Chronicle journalists attended Ivy + schools, like the moderator of last week’s “work-force” forum (Johns Hopkins then Columbia). And most would give their eye teeth (actually two words) to work at the New York Times.