The Challenge of Workforce Development

Despite the sour national and global economies, things will turn around, hopefully sooner rather than later. When the economic clouds part, the American worker had better be ready for an even more competitive world.

Chancellor Glenn DuBois, the chief of the Virginia Community College System, was in Lynchburg last week with a stark message the public needs to hear: Education levels determine success or failure on the global stage, and right now, America is perilously close to failure.

And that’s not just the chancellor’s “gut feeling”; he’s got the facts to back it up.

According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), an international group based in Paris, the United States holds dubious distinction among its 30 member-states, the leading economies of the developed world. OECD statistics show that the U.S. is the only nation where older citizens, ages 45 to 54, are more educated than citizens of ages 25 to 34. (The OECD, for purposes of this 2007 study, examined the differences in college attainment of associate’s degrees and higher between younger and older workers.)

Why is that fact significant, and why is it an ominous portent for the nation’s future? Because the most educated workers are fast approaching retirement age, when they’ll leave the work force, and the younger workers set to replace them are less educated and less prepared to compete globally.

Right now, the American worker, age 45 to 54, is among the most highly educated in the world; only Canadians in that same age group are more educated.

Take a look at the worker, age 25 to 34, and the picture suddenly turns grim.

While Americans have essentially held steady at the educational levels of their parents, countries such as Canada, Korea, Japan, France, Spain and Poland have experienced huge percentage jumps. That gives those nations a tremendous competitive advantage over the United States for future economic growth. Technologies driving economic expansion will become more sophisticated, more complex … not less so … as the years pass. And the U.S. simply is not where it needs to be competitively.

Closer to home, neither is Virginia.

As DuBois explains, Virginia has been skating for years, relying on “come-here” workers with higher degrees, basically imported from other parts of the country. Of the citizens of Virginia with a bachelor’s degree or higher, only 24 percent were born in the commonwealth; that compares with a national 50-state average of 41.7 percent.

Statewide, approximately 42.6 percent of Virginians have an associate’s degree or higher. But along the border with North Carolina, from Southampton County in the east to Lee County in the far southwest, is the smallest concentration of citizens with higher degrees. Not coincidentally those regions are also among the poorest in the commonwealth.

The Virginia demographic picture grows even more challenging when race and ethnicity are thrown into the mix.

The chancellor points to data from the U.S. Census Bureau that shows the black American and Hispanic communities growing the most in the next two decades. Those are the two ethnic communities that currently have among the lowest educational achievement rates.

The commonwealth, in the short run, is facing a budget shortfall of enormous proportions; long term, though, the shortfall in education and competitiveness are of mammoth proportions. Working with private industry, the community college system, in the last decade, has implemented a number of programs and partnerships designed to address the educational challenges the state faces.

The start of the 2009 session of the General Assembly is only weeks away, and the specter of a $3.2 billion shortfall looms over the state Capitol. Now is not the time, though, for Virginia’s leaders to shortshrift the future.