About EQOSAbout EQOSAbout EQOSAbout EQOSAbout EQOSAbout EQOSAbout EQOSAbout EQOS
Education Quality Outcomes Standards (EQOS) is an independent nonprofit that is pioneering a novel way to measure the quality and efficacy of non-degree credentials (NDCs) through workers' outcomes in order to help people navigate the crowded and confusing education and training marketplace.
Our Mission
Despite there being more than a million credentials to choose from in the U.S., there is little guidance on which ones offer the greatest return on investment for workers and employers.
Our mission is to bring clarity to the NDC landscape by creating a first-of-its-kind, universal Signal of Quality that does not rely on data collected by providers, but instead uses real workers' outcomes before and after they attain NDCs.
By providing comprehensive data on NDC quality and deploying tangible tools to activate this information, we can empower millions of U.S. workers to translate skills into better jobs.
Our Vision
Our vision is to deliver ongoing evaluations of non-degree credentials and resources that are user-friendly, empower real-world decisions, and accurately describe the lived experience of U.S. learners. In doing this, we will help:
- Workers and learners choose the best credentials for their careers
- Employers identify highly skilled candidates without relying on traditional degree-based proxies
- Training providers hone programs to align with employers’ needs
- Policymakers and investors ensure ROI and budget allocation
Meet the EQOS Team
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As the Managing Director of EQOS, Suzanne Towns brings 20+ years of expertise across inclusive economic development, workforce transformation, poverty alleviation, and advancing gender equity.
Prior to EQOS, Suzanne’s leadership roles included Deputy Executive Director of the DC Workforce Investment Council and VP of Collective Impact at the United Way of NYC, managing a $50 million investment portfolio.
Among Suzanne’s many accomplishments are her pivotal role in modernizing Seattle's workforce system; initiating sector and social enterprise partnerships; leading a national Aspen Institute initiative to better identify and support opportunity youth; and in her work at the NYC Alliance Against Sexual Assault, she helped develop statewide professional standards and ran a forensic training institute for healthcare professionals.
Additionally, Suzanne played a key role in the economic recovery post-Great Recession in the Bloomberg and Cuomo administrations, where she helped secure $150 million to support affected children and families statewide.
A native of New York, Suzanne now resides in Washington DC. She holds a BA from the City University of NY in Forensic Psychology and an MSSW specializing in Workforce Development from Columbia University.
Michael Horn is a senior strategist at Guild Education and the award-winning author of Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns. Michael brings substantive expertise around education innovation, regulation, and accreditation of K-12 and postsecondary institutions.
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Tameshia Bridges Mansfield is vice president for workforce innovation at JFF. She oversees workforce development and future-of-work initiatives with an eye toward innovation and system transformation.
Before joining JFF, Tameshia was a program officer at the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, where she led the workforce development and job access portfolio, addressing barriers that workers face in securing meaningful employment.
Tameshia is a co-chair of the board of the Clean Slate Initiative and a member of the boards of the Detroit Justice Center and the Chicago Jobs Council.
She previously served as co-chair of Workforce Matters, where she was instrumental in the creation of the Racial Equity Framework for Workforce Funders.
Ted Mitchell is the president of the American Council on Education and brings a wide array of experience and accomplishments from across the higher education sector, as well as a long-standing focus on helping students gain access to postsecondary education and complete their degrees.
Lisette Nieves is the president of the Fund for the City of New York (FCNY), an institution charged with developing and helping to implement innovations in policy, programs, practices, and technologies to improve the functioning of government agencies and nonprofit organizations in New York City and beyond.
Key FCNY programs include the Cash Flow Loan Program, the Partnership Program, and the Sloan Public Service Awards.
Before joining FCNY, Lisette was the director of educational leadership and policy studies and a full clinical professor at NYU Steinhardt, where she co-led the design and implementation of a doctoral program in educational leadership and innovation and taught organizational theory and behavior and educational policy analysis.
Throughout her career of more than 25 years, Lisette has served in a variety of leadership positions in the public and private sectors.
She founded Lingo Ventures, served as the Belle Zeller Distinguished Visiting Professor in Public Policy at the City University of New York at Brooklyn College, and was an Obama appointee on the White House Initiative on Educational Excellence for Hispanics.
Elise Scanlon is the founder and principal of a Washington, D.C. based law and consulting practice focused on advising accrediting organizations and higher education institutions on federal higher education policy, state and federal regulation, and quality assurance and improvement.
Kristina Francis is executive director of JFFLabs. She oversees insights, incubation, and investing initiatives that connect traditional systems with system disruptors to enable equitable economic advancement for all.
Before joining JFF, Francis served in a variety of roles of escalating authority at EsteemLogic, Booz Allen Hamilton, SAIC, General Dynamics, and American Institutes for Research. In those positions, she was charged with driving growth, developing strong delivery teams, implementing innovative and collaborative systems, and activating cross-sector partnerships.
Matt Sigelman is President of the Burning Glass Institute. He has dedicated his career to unlocking new avenues for mobility, opportunity, and equity through skills.
Matt and his team created the field of real-time labor market data, a breakthrough innovation that has transformed the way that policymakers, researchers, employers, education institutions, and workers understand, plan for, and connect with the world of work.
By mining billions of job openings and career histories, Matt led the company that has become Lightcast to become a leading authority on the global market for talent, harnessing advanced AI and natural language processing to render data that provide unprecedented granularity on the changing landscape of opportunity for workers.
Debbie Wasden is the Senior Vice President for Solutions at the Burning Glass Institute. Debbie partners with employers, non-profits, educators, and policymakers leveraging BGI’s unique data-driven insights and tools to develop and deploy solutions that build mobility, opportunity, and equity through skills.
Prior to joining the Burning Glass Institute, Debbie was a director with the Markle Foundation, focused on the implementation of the Rework America Alliance. In her role, Debbie led the Alliance’s employer, job insights, and national partnership workstreams.
Stephen Yadzinski is the vice president for strategy & growth at JFF and the interim executive director for EQOS. In this role, Steve works with JFF leaders and teams to identify new opportunities, establish new partnerships, and transform JFF programs and service lines to meet an evolving and dynamic education and workforce ecosystem, leveraging the fields of technology, innovation, and investment to further our mission.
Previously, Steve founded the Innovate+Educate Employment Tech Division in response to the critical need to improve workforce readiness for high-demand jobs in key U.S. industries.
Under Steve’s leadership, the division grew to include organizational psychologists, data scientists, user interface developers, and others to create leading-edge mobile technologies, assessments, and labor-market insights connecting Americans living at or near poverty with education, training, and quality jobs.
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GitLab Foundation makes its first grant to help job seekers and employers make sense of postseondary credentials
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GitLab Foundation makes its first grant to help job seekers and employers make sense of postseondary credentials
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The Hill: Putting the Pell Grant to work—in the workforce
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The Hill: Putting the Pell Grant to work—in the workforce
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We partner with employers, providers, researchers, intermediaries, policymakers, and investors to help implement quality standards and drive innovation in the non-degree credential marketplace.