The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted life across the globe, changing how people work, live, and learn. It has also highlighted the disparities in equity across education and work. Higher education was already on a course for significant transformation in how learners access instruction and how academia connects to the working world. In response, there were already some shifts within higher education to advance new models for how learning is defined, valued, delivered, credentialed, and supported. The focus was on connecting and integrating work and learning, bringing workplace experiences into the classroom, and ensuring that students can apply their academic learning to real world contexts. More institutions were identifying strategies to expand access to working learners and underrepresented populations, while ensuring that all students can succeed. There were new forms of credentials emerging: short-term, competency-based, and stackable. And recognition of learning acquired outside of the institution--through prior learning assessment, competency-based education, or other strategies--began to be more widely accepted. The massive disruptions to higher education in Spring 2020 caught everyone by surprise, and nearly every institution with face-to-face instruction quickly moved to some form of learning at a distance. To be sure, the rapid move to distance-friendly formats likely did not follow accepted quality standards for online instruction, but one lesson from this experience is clear: postsecondary institutions now know that crises like these are possible, and postsecondary institutions will need to be better prepared to be flexible, agile, and mobile in the future. This will be even more important as the country works to rebuild the economy, including preparing massive numbers of unemployed Americans for new jobs. This brief builds on the work of other authors in this series, drawing on conversations with several leaders of change within the higher education landscape to capture what some of those contours are.