When the director of economic research for Indeed’s North America Hiring Lab keynotes a technical college commencement, talent leaders should hear a pipeline brief, not a local calendar item.
That is the frame around Dr. Laura Ullrich’s address to more than 400 summer graduates at Tri-County Technical College in South Carolina’s Upstate. Ullrich came to Indeed from the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and a long stretch as an economics professor and associate dean at Winthrop. Her beat has always been higher education, community college policy, and how local labor markets actually clear. Putting that lens in front of technical graduates is the point: the macro story and the campus story finally share a stage.
A tale of two economies meets a one-campus pipeline
Ullrich’s public briefings keep returning to the same warning. Headline labor stats smooth over lives that do not feel average.
“People don’t live in the macroeconomy. Their reality is determined by things like where they live, what sector they work in and how much they make. It really is a tale of two economies.” — Laura Ullrich, Director of Economic Research, North America, Indeed Hiring Lab
Indeed’s 2026 U.S. Jobs & Hiring Trends work (and Ullrich’s follow-on commentary) describes a market that is stable enough to plan around and uneven enough to punish lazy sourcing: openings that settle without surging, healthcare still propping job creation, wider regional spreads, and skills mismatches that stretch unemployment for white-collar seekers while other fields stay hungry.
Technical college commencement is where that split becomes actionable. Graduates walk into healthcare tech, industrial maintenance, IT support, logistics, and skilled trades that employers keep calling “impossible to fill,” often while corporate ATS filters still prefer a bachelor’s line item the work does not need.
The middle-skills math TA keeps underfunding
Georgetown CEW’s Bridging the Middle-Skills Gap puts a hard annual number on the miss: nearly 712,000 certificates and associate’s degrees aligned with high-paying middle-skills occupations short of demand each year through at least 2032.
The shortage clusters where shops and labs already train:
