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Is “What’s Good for IBM, Good for America”?

Sunday, August 14th, 2011

In 1953, General Motors’ president Charles Wilson said “what was good for the country was good for General Motors and vice versa.” As often the case, the somewhat misquoted version, “What’s good for General Motors is good for America” is the phrase that became part of corporate (or perhaps anti-corporate) mythology. One could debate then, as it certainly was during the 2008 automotive bail-out hearings, whether or not Wilson was correct.

The night of August 4, however, provided something of a déjà vu moment. That night, I had the privilege of attending IBM CEO Sam Palmisano’s Centennial Lecture, a reflection on some of the primary lessons that IBM has learned over its first 100 years.

The overarching lesson was that corporations are expendable—success in one era does not ensure success in another. IBM’s ability to maintain its success (and right itself during the period in which not only its success, but its future, was imperiled) has taught him three primary lessons:

Lessons for IBM

  1. The importance of the “and” in R and D. First, fundamental research is critical and cannot be cut during tough economic times since, “if you fall behind, it becomes very tough to catch up.” Research, however, is only the starting point. It must be complemented with development and the “conversion of discovery into profits.” Moreover, the formulas for successful “R” and “D” are both continually changing. Today, for example, collaboration is becoming as critical as proprietary research. You must, therefore, continually “innovate how you innovate.”
  2. An organization must survive not only its failures, but its successes. Companies must get beyond an emotional attachment to what made them successful in the past. Business models and organizational models, as well as products, must be continually rethought and adapted to the requirements of a new era.
  3. An organization must learn to outlive a charismatic leader. It must distinguish between charisma and leadership; as well as focus on and heavily invest in both helping its employees learn and on developing its future leaders.

In sum, while an organization must remain committed to a core set of beliefs, it must not confuse business and organizational models with beliefs. To be sustainable, an organization must continually rethink and adapt its objectives, its models and its approaches. In today’s world, this evolution must depend as much on collaboration as on competition:

“The Wild West of competition needs to be complemented with far more collaboration across old boundaries. Across academic disciplines… and industries… and nations…and even between competitors.”

Lessons for the Country?

Palmisano’s lessons were clearly drawn from IBM’s own past, and are intended to guide its own future. Although he and IBM would certainly deny any intent to shape today’s political debate, he did acknowledge that “many enterprises—indeed, many countries”—are struggling with “an inability to get beyond an emotional attachment to the past…to what [really] made you successful.”

It was hard for me and a friend, with whom I continually exchanged glances and smiles as he talked, not to view these lessons in the context of our countries’ current problems:

  • The need to look beyond current problems to invest, not only in R+D, but also in infrastructure and people, for the long-term;
  • The need to look beyond models and practices that created past success, and adapt them to continually changing circumstances;
  • The need to move beyond the personalities of past and current leaders and to invest in educating and developing new leaders; and especially the need to
  • Move beyond fight-to-the-death competition and to cooperate in solving common problems.

Okay, perhaps I am reading WAY too much into what Palmisano actually said. But it doesn’t stop me from fully buying into what I thought I heard.

Posted in Business Trends, Economic and Political Forces, IBM, Innovation/Entrepeneur, IT Industry Trends, Political Forces, Societal Forces | No Responses »
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Partnering Strategies for a Smarter Planet: Developing Win-Win Partnerships with IBM

Sunday, January 9th, 2011

This is a summary of my new January 2011 report “Partnering Strategies for a Smarter Planet: Developing Win-Win Partnerships with IBM”. For more information on this report or to purchase it for $995, click here.

IBM’s Smarter Planet initiative is the foundation of what, if successful, may represent one of the most fundamental corporate transformations of all time—transforming IBM from a provider of IT solutions into an architect of solutions to some of the world’s biggest, most pressing needs.

IBM intends for its application of IT tools to real-world “where digital meets physical” needs to enable it to leverage its strong position in the maturing, “relatively small” IT market into an entirely new role—that of being the primary digital enabler (and, in some cases, the centerpiece) of solutions for dozens of other much bigger markets, from healthcare to energy and transportation to government. The company’s contributions to solutions to some of the world’s most pressing problems could also provide very nice side benefits, including enhancing the company’s already strong brand image.

The benefits of IBM’s Smarter Planet focus, however, are likely to transcend society and the IBM Corporation—they are also likely to benefit a number of IBM’s partners. Maximizing these benefits, however, can require some careful balancing.

Smarter Planet Ecosystem Benefits

IBM bases its entire Smarter Planet vision on an obvious (at least to those of us in the IT industry) proposition—traditional real-world infrastructures and processes can be made much more effective and efficient by making them more:

  • Instrumented, as through the use of sensors;
  • Interconnected, as by the Internet; and
  • Intelligent, through the use of analytics.

Since all these of these capabilities are already available, IBM and its partners have opportunities to begin providing real value around them today. And since all of these capabilities will be ubiquitous in the future, these markets will grow rapidly into huge opportunities. Companies that develop, tune and develop proof points around their current offerings have the potential of establishing themselves as leaders in these markets of the future. And, oh yes, their solutions also have the potential of providing big societal benefits in the normal course of doing business.

But how can companies achieve the market traction required to establish themselves in such new markets? Individual ISVs typically lack the visibility and the scale; large physical market vendors (like Eaton and General Electric) have little experience with sensors, Internet enablement or analytics; and IT system vendors (including IBM) lack the experience, not to speak of the brand permission and customer relationships, required to build smart buildings and power grids.

The solution, of course, is to build an ecosystem that seamlessly integrates the products, expertise and brands of thousands of complementary companies into compelling solutions to pressing needs. And while a number of vendors are building their own ecosystems around specific classes of solutions today, IBM’s Smarter Planet is, by far, the broadest (encompassing 25 different initiatives), the biggest (consisting of thousands of partners) and the most highly visible (with 35-40% customer recognition).

Dancing with Elephants

While IBM is building both standards and go-to-market ecosystems around each of its 25 Smarter Planet initiatives, those for Smarter Buildings and Cities are currently the most developed, followed by those around Energy and Sustainability. But even within these, IBM’s own offerings, much less its brand and customer relationships are limited. This leaves plenty of white space for partners.

Consider, for example, Smarter Buildings. While all partners must, at a minimum, provide products and services that contribute to an end-to-end solution, IBM particularly values partners that can deliver additional capabilities. Partners like Honeywell, Schneider and Eaton, for example, have established relationships with real estate developers and construction companies and can provide IBM (and other ecosystem partners) with the brand permission and deep customer relationships required to play in areas like smart building design and operations. They also have deep expertise in areas such as HVAC and lighting and may often offer performance-based energy contracts (which IBM does not). IBM not only encourages, but depends on such partners to take the lead in many accounts.

IBM, in turn, also provides considerable value to these companies. First, as mentioned, the Smarter Planet brand provides considerable market recognition and an established base of partners. IBM, of course, is also more likely to have IT and C-level contacts among companies looking to build new buildings and retrofit older buildings and can bring partners into Smart Data Center contracts. It has the IT skills required to integrate all building systems into a seamless network, the digital dashboards required to monitor and manage them and the analytics software to optimize performance and anticipate and prevent disruptions. Just as importantly, it has a huge, established ISV program with well defined processes and a library of Industry Frameworks that greatly reduce ISV’s work in building applications.

IBM certainly provides partners with new opportunities to expand into new and vastly larger markets than most could hope to enter alone or with their own smaller ecosystems. Meanwhile, its extensive technical and market development assistance programs can proactively help its partners capitalize on these opportunities.

But while all participants can value from participation in Smarter Planet ecosystems, such relationships are not without friction. There are risks to dancing with IBM, as there are with any giant. Although the company has relatively few products that compete directly with those of its ecosystem partners, IBM has huge technical, consulting and outsourcing services organizations and it values account control at least as much as any other company.

Partners, therefore, must tread carefully. On one hand, in order to gain the greatest value from the relationship, they must understand the types of value they can provide that will make them most valuable to IBM at different stages of the market and of specific customer engagements. On the other hand, they must simultaneously ensure that their brand, their value adds and their customer relationships are not subsumed by or eventually subjugated to those of IBM.

The bad news is that uncertainly and jockeying for position is inherent in all new markets. Maneuvering is always difficult and sometimes imposes great stress in the relationship. The good news is that as markets grow (and those for Smarter Planet solutions inevitably will) relative roles always seem to sort out, go-to-market relationships are solidified and coordination processes are formalized. Partners will increasingly recognize and agree on when and how they can work together, and when they will not. These relationships have become so common in the IT industry that a word has been coined to describe them. The word is “coopetition.”

Posted in Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, IBM, IT Industry Trends, Smart Infrastructure, Societal Forces, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
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Funding the Community College Solution

Sunday, September 19th, 2010

Okay, perhaps use of the term “Solution” is a vast exaggeration. But two things are clear. First, as described in my August 8 blog, The Community College Contribution, community colleges play a vital, probably irreplaceable role in our society and our communities. They give millions of people, particularly lower-income minorities and immigrants, unprecedented opportunities to climb the socio-economic ladder and provide many of the office workers required to man administrative and supervisory ranks, the health-care workers required to ensure broad and economical delivery and the manufacturing workers needed to manage today’s computer-controlled processes.

Second, as I discussed in my August 22 blog, The Community College Crisis, this system is in a state of crisis. Many of these challenges are attributable to the tremendous expectations we have of the system and burdens we place on it to address the limitations of the country’s secondary education system. These pressures are being exacerbated by the Great Recession and especially by the huge cutbacks in government funding of these schools.

The county, as President Obama explained in July 2009, has no choice. The community college has suffered through “decades of federal neglect” where “community colleges are treated like an afterthought—if they’re thought of at all.” We MUST find a way of addressing these challenges—and of paying for them.

Better Colleges Require More Money

The bad news is that nobody really knows how to fix our community college system. The good news is, there is no shortage of ideas. Recommendations as to how to address these challenges and help community colleges deliver on their true potential come from a range of sources and cover virtually every aspect of these institutions’ missions.

Some, such as the American Association of Community Colleges and especially the Community College Research Center, focus exclusively on and provide detailed research on all aspects of the colleges’ missions. Others, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Kaufman Foundation address a broad range of policy-based issues, but each have designated education research focuses.

These, along with a wide range of other research organizations, universities, government bodies and NGOs have published numerous studies with specific recommendations for helping community colleges improve governance and better address one or more of their five core missions:

  1. Transfer Education, to educate students who plan to transfer to a four-year institution to pursue a BS/BA degree;
  2. Career Education, to prepare Associate Degree graduates to directly enter the workforce;
  3. Developmental Education, to provide remedial education for high school graduates who are not academically ready to enroll in college-level courses;
  4. Industry Training, which is contracted for by companies to provide training for specific jobs; and, to a lesser extent
  5. Continuing Education, which typically consists of non-credit courses for personal development and interest.

Although recommendations differ for each of these areas, there tend to be common treads across virtually all. Many recommendations, for example, entail some combination of:

  • Better and more systematically integrating academic and technical curricula in conjunction with apprenticeship programs that provide real world experience (as pioneered by so-called “career academies”;
  • Increasing and improving counseling programs to improve career planning and help students select courses that are most appropriate for their goals. (This, however, assumes that classes are available, which is becoming increasingly rare.)
  • Greatly expanding the use of IT tools to improve pedagogy and learning outcomes, engage students through multimedia and educational games, facilitate distance learning and give students much greater flexibility in when and where they learn;
  • Creating specific goals and success metrics and continually measuring progress toward achieving these goals; and
  • Increasing funding and increasingly allocating these funds on the basis of success in achieving and making progress toward defined, measurable objectives.

Money is becoming increasingly problematic. As discussed in my last blog, The Community College Crisis, state and local governments—which typically account for about 60% of community college funding—are slashing public school funding and contributions (which account for less than 5%) are also generally falling. This leaves three funding sources.

  1. Tuition. While rising, tuition account for only 20% of school budgets. Moreover, increases are constrained by the need to keep community colleges accessible to lower income students;
  2. Business funding of specialized courses. Given that business contracts currently account for less than 10% of community college revenues, it will be difficult to grow contracts fast enough to make a meaningful dent in funding shortfalls. Even so, private sector partnerships can yield an additional, even greater benefit, as by allowing colleges to continually track emerging business needs and adapt their programs to ahead of these needs; and
  3. The federal government. The federal government currently accounts for only 10% of community college funding and provides  less money per student than it gives to public four-year schools and in some cases, even for-profit colleges. Surprisingly, however, the feds are stepping up to the plate.

With a Little Help from Government Friends

There is no question that the federal government has short-changed the nation’s community colleges over the last several decades. For example, it allocates only 10% of its total post-secondary education funding budget to community colleges. This is despite the fact that these schools enroll 35% of all post-secondary students. Moreover, since many of these funds are based primarily on enrollment, without regard to whether their students earn degrees or get good jobs, this funding often skews community colleges’ incentives toward inputs and processes, rather than outcomes, like student success. A February 2009 Brookings study called on the federal government to address these deficiencies by instituting four primary reforms:

  1. Institute a new focus on national goals guided by an accountability system that tracks and reports outcomes, such as completion of a minimum number of credits, earning a degree, and landing a good-paying job;
  2. Double federal funding from $6 billion to $12 billion (from about 20% to 30% of their total budgets) to help community colleges achieve these goals and fund much needed upgrades to their infrastructure, technology, and faculties.
  3. Reformulate the basis on which federal funds are awarded so that, over time, the majority of funds will be based not on the basis of enrollment, but on the colleges’ performance on the above goals; and
  4. Stimulate greater innovation in community college policies and practices to enhance educational quality.

The federal government seems to have gotten the message. In July 2009, President Obama highlighted his commitment to addressing these needs by announcing his Community College Initiative. The $12 billion plan is intended to improve educational facilities, increase and improve the utilization of technology and boost graduation rates—producing 5 million more community college grads by 2020. This is big money, considering that the feds have traditionally provided community colleges with only $2 billion in direct support per year—about one-tenth what it spends on public four-year schools.

Although the plan will eliminate the role (and an estimated $9 billion in costs) of private banks in managing the federal student loan program, it will dramatically increase the role of the private sector in other ways, as by encouraging them to help colleges improve remedial-education and counseling programs, and develop online curricula. The proposal would also increase funding of, reduce barriers to qualifying for and increase student access to Pell grants. Congress, meanwhile, is considering legislation that could pump an additional $500 million into the creation of open, online courses.

Moreover, as I mention in my previous blog, community colleges are also likely to benefit from new Department of Education rules that will free up additional aid dollars by cutting aid to a number of for-profit schools.

The community college crisis is also attracting attention and help from other sources. Although charitable contributions are generally falling along with the economy, a growing number of charitable foundations recognize and are seeking to at least partially address community college shortfalls. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, in particular, has pledged up to $110 million (of its $3 billion overall education fund) to community colleges and has recently earmarked $12.9 million to organizations that that are having success in improving community college graduation rates, developing tools to facilitate Web 2.0-based faculty collaboration and creating new IT-based learning tools. And this is in addition to the Foundation’s participation in a twelve-foundation group that has committed $500 million to improving learning outcomes—largely through the use of IT-based tools—across all types of educational institutions. Hopefully, such investments, combined with foundations’ growing focus on quantifiable results, will impose some of the discipline that community colleges will need to succeed in a world that will be characterized by tighter and tighter budgets.

Posted in Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry's Role, Political Forces, Societal Forces | 1 Response »
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The Community College Crisis

Sunday, August 22nd, 2010

As I discussed in my last blog (“The Community College Contribution”), the community college system plays a number of critical roles in the U.S. higher-education system, not to speak of the roles these colleges play in their communities and the broader U.S. society. The Great Recession has greatly expanded these roles and has prompted phenomenal growth in the number of applications to, and enrollment in these colleges.

The problem is that the rapidly expanding role of the system, combined with the need to accommodate growing numbers of students, has exposed a number of serious systemic cracks. Piling on on the impact and the financial cuts attributable to the recession has now brought the entire system to the brink of crisis.

Systemic Challenges

The community college system is already becoming a victim of its own success. Between 1998 and 2008, the number of students enrolled in the community college system exploded by 225%, far outpacing growth at four-year universities, whose enrollments grew 1.65 times. But while the number of students surged, the number of community colleges expanded by only about 16% (to a total of 1,045), far more slowly than the number of four-year schools and private, for-profit two-year schools (often called junior colleges). The results, most community colleges are terribly overcrowded.

Operating budgets are also growing more slowly. Public community colleges, for example, count on tuitions for only about 20% of total funding and sources including gifts and contracts with local businesses roughly another 10%. Governments account for the vast majority, with states contributing about 40%, localities about 20% and federal another 10%. The problem is that state and local government funding has been growing at less than the rate of inflation and has fallen way behind the growth in the number of students graduating from high schools and the percentage of high school graduates who are going to college.

Community colleges, meanwhile, capture far less than their fair share of federal government funding. While these schools enroll about 35% of all post-secondary students, they capture only about 20% of total federal tertiary education funding including 9% of federal campus-based aid, 14% of academic competitiveness grants and 30% in Pell Grants.

Some of this shortfall, however, is at least attributable to the colleges themselves. Consider Pell grants. Publicly-funded community colleges typically address the same market and recruit from the same applicant pool as private, for-profit two-year schools. But while these for-profit colleges (including those owned by Apollo Group, Career Education Corporation and ITT Technical Institute) enroll only 7.7% of total post-secondary students, they have become much more effective at qualifying for federal education aid— capturing almost 25% of all federal aid, with some counting on this aid for 90% of their total revenues.

These for-profit colleges have been particularly effective in winning Pell Grants, capturing more than $10 billion—more than all community colleges combined. Why? Numerous federal investigators and journalists have been asking the same questions. Suppositions include the ability of these high-priced, typically profitable schools to afford and incent recruiters to sign large numbers of students and train financial aid officers to help students qualify for federal grants and loans. But whatever the reasons, the Department of Education has just issued new rules that will dramatically cut aid to those schools whose graduates do not earn enough to repay their loans.

Limited funding, however, is only part of the explanation for community colleges’ traditionally poor financial position. While community colleges certainly get less funding than other types of higher-education institutions, they also bear disproportionately higher costs. For example, they are forced to spend an estimated $2 billion per year to teach remedial skills (especially in math, English and writing) that were not learned in high school. This remediation burden falls particularly heavily on community colleges. According to the U.S. Department of Education, about one-third of all the nation’s first-year college students require at least one remedial course—a figure that rises to 42% for two-year schools. Some states want them to go even further, taking over all GED education plus the remedial education traditionally offered by public four-year schools.

The results: Community colleges are being forced to pack more students into each class, reduce time in expensive facilities such as labs and cut back on “frills”, such as education and career counselors (see below). This, combined with their state-mandated open admission policies, results in more dropouts than graduates.

True, all American colleges and universities (except for the most competitive), have a dropout problem. An OECD study, for example, shows that while the U.S. sends the highest percentage of high school graduates to college of all member countries, it has the second lowest (next to Italy) completion rate. Publicly-funded community colleges perform worse than any other type of school. A 2009 St. Louis Federal Reserve Bank study, for example, found that only 35% of community college students complete one semester of study and that fewer than 50% end up completing any type of degree. Those who do go on to four-year schools are 36% less likely to complete their degree than are those students who started at a four-year college.

The worst part—this was all before the Great Recession.

Burden of the Recession

While the situation was bad before, it is much worse now. All state college systems face huge budget cuts, but California has become ground zero. Although all forms of public education are being decimated in California, public universities face the brunt of the cuts. The University of California and the California State University systems now face budget shortfalls totaling $940 million. They are being forced to slash salaries, freeze hiring and limit purchases to essential items. Worse still, tuition rates are soaring (up 32%), 200,000 students will lose Cal Grant tuition assistance (before the entire program is eliminated in 2011), and state universities are being forced to stop accepting applications for the 2010 spring term and cut total system-wide enrollment by 40,000 students over the next year. California community colleges alone had to turn away 140,000 prospective students this year.

The situation is even worse for the state’s 100+ public community colleges. Record percentage of high-school graduates, facing bleak employment prospects, have decided to attend college. Meanwhile, laid off employees, fearing that “their jobs are not coming back”, are looking to community colleges to help prepare for new careers. And then there are the hundreds of thousands of students who are being turned away from the state university systems. As if this weren’t bad enough, the state is cutting $630 million in funding for community colleges—about 9% of system’s total budget.

Although all California community colleges are in similar straits, City College of San Francisco has become something of a poster child for the crisis. The school which lost $13.6 million in state financing this academic year, has slashed spending and is trying to raise money in any way it can. It has held garage sales and flea markets, installed donation boxes in bookstores and cafeterias. It is now soliciting contributions from individuals—promising to name a class for any individual or company that pledges $6,000.

This creativity, however, has not been enough to stave off reality. It was forced to cancel its summer session and cut more than 900 classes over the year. Those students who can afford higher tuitions and lower subsidies must now struggle to get the courses required to meet major requirements, graduate or transfer to a university. One thousand six hundred and fifty-five of those students who tried to register in fall 2009 did not get into any classes at all, up from 635 in fall 2005. And when they try to ask a counselor for help, they learn that more than 10,000 counseling hours have been cut.

As explained by Michael Kirst, professor emeritus of education at Stanford and past president of the California State Board of Education, “The longer students cannot take the classes they want or need, the less likely it is that they will complete the program they want. They run out of money. They run out of time. They just give up at some point.”

How bad is this situation? Search Google for the term “community college crisis” and the first five articles focus on California. But, that’s California. What about the rest of the country. First, in terms of community colleges, one can almost say that California IS the country. More than one-quarter of all U.S. community college students are in California.

Facetiousness aside, the California case may be the highest profile and the most extreme. It is, however, far from unique. Virtually all states are facing huge financial shortfalls and most are making particularly large cuts in public education—especially higher education. And many experts expect the state fiscal crisis to worsen in 2011. Moreover, the current fiscal crisis only served to make a dreadful situation even worse. As discussed , the nation’s community college problems run much deeper than budgets.

Although the U.S. consistently dominates the ranks of the world’s best universities, its overall higher education accomplishments are far less impressive. For example, according to the OECD, although the U.S. already spends more than twice the share of GDP on higher education than does the European Union, it is typically in the middle of the pack (or lower) in areas such as International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) qualifications, science and math education and graduation rates.

So, what’s the answer? The solutions are even more complex than the problem. Although nobody knows all the answers, I will discuss some of the proposed solutions—and the ways of paying for them—in my next blog.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces | No Responses »
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Occupational Opportunities for the Next Decade

Sunday, July 25th, 2010

In my June 27 blog, Payoffs of a College Education, I discussed that the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) 2010 Occupational Outlook Handbook portrays particularly strong growth in jobs for college graduates. These jobs will grow at a faster rate (15% versus 10%) than those that typically require less education and yield higher weekly and lifetime earnings and greater job security. In fact, every step up the educational ladder, from high school diploma, through some college, bachelor degree and professional degree (with a small exception for PhDs), tends to improve virtually every aspect of a person’s career path.

But the level of educational obtainment is a pretty high-level view of the job market. Although it does emphasize the value of graduating from college, it does not, in and of itself, provide much guidance as to which occupations offer the best employment opportunities, the highest earnings potential and the best opportunities for advancement.

Tomorrow’s Largest Growth Occupations

In 2006 (the study’s benchmark year), about half of all jobs (see Chart 3 of the handbook) in college-level occupations were concentrated in three broad categories—education (21%), healthcare (14%) and computers (13%). Adding two others, management (12%) and business and financial operations (11%) covers more than 70% of all college-level jobs.

A nice start, but still too macro a view to provide meaningful help in career planning. Medical jobs, for example, run the gamut from physician assistants to surgeons. Management jobs run from education administrators to CEOs. Jobs within each category have very different educational requirements (from bachelor or below through post-graduate) and are likely to produce vastly differing numbers of total job openings through 2018 (from 66,000 physician assistants to 1 million registered nurses) and growth rates (2% for CEOs to 50% or more for some IT jobs).

The tables supporting the Bureau’s conclusions provide details for multiple occupations in each of these categories. As one would expect, the greatest number of projected openings are concentrated in the three largest college-level job categories: education, healthcare and computers. The first two categories share a few similarities.

Both, for example, are:

  • Being driven largely by population growth and demographic trends;
  • Characterized by especially strong growth in one very big class of occupations;
  • Consist of a large number of moderate and relatively low-paying jobs, and more modest numbers of higher-paying (especially in healthcare) jobs that typically require a minimum of four years of graduate school.

Health care growth, for example, is driven overwhelmingly by the growth in need for RNs, which is projected to grow at a 24% rate and account for almost two-thirds of all listed healthcare openings. Although there will be big needs for teachers at all levels, the demand for K-2 teachers is growing at only a 10.8% rate, while that for post-secondary teachers (and some small specialty teachers) is tracking at 23%.

IT Professions

IT-related job trends are very different. First, although the handbook profiles only five distinct occupations (out of ten that BLS specifically tracks), all four of the specialized, high-skill occupations (network systems and data communications analysts, computer software engineers, systems analysts, and network and systems administrators) are slated for hyper-growth through 2018, at rates ranging from 28% to 53%.

These jobs, most of which require “only” bachelor’s degrees, also provide some of the highest salaries—more than twice the median for all occupations. Many, even during the depths of the recession, are already characterized by strong levels of college hiring, rising salaries and shortages of qualified applicants at all levels of experience.

Moreover, the need for IT skills is being driven not by demographics, but by the rapid, increasingly critical need to incorporate IT into virtually every business, every process and every “machine” (from PDAs and televisions through office buildings and jumbo jets). And this is just the start. Business decisions increasingly require real-time analytics and seamless, real-time collaboration tools. The Internet, meanwhile, is creating new businesses and new job requirements every minute of every day.

This being said, not all IT jobs are created equal. As I mentioned, four of the five listed categories are growing at hyper-rates. The number of openings for the fifth—computer programmers—is actually declining. This is not at all surprising. The demand for the lowest skill IT occupation, data entry clerks, has been plummeting for years. BLS now anticipates similar (albeit slower) declines in the number of openings for computer programmers. These positions, as I’ve discussed in a number of previous blogs, will be increasingly replaced—and compensation reduced—by a combination of:

  • Technology, including more automated development and test processes, software reuse and tools that can be used by non-IT professionals; and by the
  • Rapid growth in the availability and use of lower-priced, offshore IT professionals.

Moreover, while these forces are initially felt in relatively low-skill IT professions, they are already beginning to be felt in ever more demanding occupations. Increasingly sophisticated, policy-based IT management software, remote diagnostic tools and a growing trend toward the delivery of IT as an outsourced service will slash the number of people required to maintain an application, manage a given number of servers or support a given number of users. Moreover, as I have discussed in previous blogs, the number of offshore IT professionals is exploding, their education and training is getting much better and they are moving rapidly up the IT value chain, providing increasingly sophisticated services—including services that integrate IT skills into other college-level occupations.

So, while highly demanding technical specialties may offer promising opportunities for the next decade, IT professionals, like sharks, must continually move forward—or they will die. They must continually evolve their skills to address the most promising career opportunities. Most importantly, they must learn to apply these skills in ways that deliver not just “IT value”, but true “business value” to their company’s line-of-business constituents and especially their customers.

But as the number of opportunities for dedicated IT professionals is large and rapidly growing, this does not even scratch the surface of the need for IT skills in tomorrow’s job market. Virtually every college-level job in America is becoming, to one extent or another, an IT job.

This is not to say they must develop, manage and maintain their company’s IT infrastructure or applications. They must, however, be able to integrate a broad range of increasingly sophisticated IT tools into every aspect of their work. And I don’t mean that people must use word processing and email. Those are yesterday’s skills. Today’s professionals must also be fluent in Internet search, in computer-based collaboration and in social networking. Tomorrow’s professionals must seamlessly incorporate sophisticated information access and analytics tools into their day-to-day tasks and learn dozens of new tools and techniques that most of us can barely identify.

Over the next decade, virtually every professional will have to be an IT professional, as well as a professional in his or her own specific field.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Community/Other Colleges, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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Is College Still the Best Road to the American Dream?

Sunday, July 11th, 2010

My June 27 blog examined some of the high-level findings of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) recently released Occupational Outlook Handbook. Among the primary findings—university graduates have much better employment prospects, earn significantly higher weekly and lifetime earnings and suffer much lower unemployment rates than those with without these degrees.

The blog ended with the question: Given the economic advantages of higher education, why would anyone not get a college, or even graduate degree? This blog briefly reviews some of the reasons.

It is sad do say, but some people are simply not up to higher education. A good portion of those that are, are either too turned off by their experiences in primary and secondary schools, or have not received the type of education that will allow them to continue. This is prompting many educators and foundations, including the Gates Foundation, to look to community colleges as the lynchpin to improving higher education.

Although I will specifically discuss community colleges in future blogs, let’s focus on some of the reasons people do not, cannot or should not go to four-year universities.

The Cost Equation

One of the first and most frequently cited arguments against universities is the cost. According to BLS, college tuition and fees have soared 92% since 2000—almost double the pace of healthcare. And the rate of increase has accelerated thanks to the Great Recession, as the value of university endowments and government funding has plummeted. Tuition at some private universities now exceed $40,000 annually and even some state universities now charge more than $10,000. By the time you add in room and board, costs can exceed $50,000 per year for private universities and $20,000 for public universities. And this does not even begin to account for the opportunity costs associated with going to college—much less graduate school—of 4-10 years of earnings that students forgo while in school.

These costs are making it all but impossible for lower-income families to foot the bill, unless their children qualify for very generous scholarships or find particularly remunerative part-time and summer jobs.

Without even getting into the ways in which escalating education costs are likely to exacerbate already high levels of income inequality, these costs are throwing many students into debt, before they even get a chance to begin their careers. Statistics compiled by Credit.com show that students graduate from college with an average of $20,000 in student loan debt, plus an additional $4,100 in credit card debt. And then there’s graduate school. According to the AMA, 87% of medical students graduate carrying educational loans and graduate with an average of $156,456 of debt.

Starting out with high levels of debt is bad enough. But if these students have the misfortune of graduating into a deep recession, they may not be able to find a job that will allow them to pay off the debt. Or if they do find a job, it is likely to be a minimum wage position that has little to do with their chosen field, and may make it difficult to ever get onto a true career ladder. Even the lucky graduates, who do get jobs in their field, often must settle for lower-level positions and lower salaries. A study by Yale of Management economist Lisa Kahn, for example, found that new graduates who join a company during a recession (1981 for her study) not only start at lower wages, but generally continue to earn lower wages and find it difficult to compete with younger, more recent graduates when normal hiring patterns resume.

Education Quality Compromises

That is for those who graduate. The sad fact, according to Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, is that while the U.S. sends a higher percentage of high school graduates to college than any other OECD country, it is second to last—ahead of only Italy—in graduating these students. About half of all students who enroll in four-year universities—and two-thirds of those in two-year colleges—do not graduate at all. They forego income, pay tuition and room and board for 1, 2 or 3 years and never earn a degree. And, according to the William Bowen and Michael MacPhearson book, Crossing the Finish Line, this drop-out rate is even higher for lower-income students. And since college drop-outs typically earn 30% less ($33,000 compared with $47,000) than do grads, they are unlikely to recover much of their investment.

And this does not even consider one of the central premises of the Bowen/MacPhearson book, that many colleges—and especially many of those attended by highly-qualified lower-income students—do a better job in “producing dropouts” than in educating and graduating students. Education quality—not to speak of availability—is likely to further decline as a result of the state funding cuts, college endowment losses and alumni contribution shortfalls engendered by the recession.

University of California budget cuts, for example, are forcing schools to increase tuition by 32%, lay off and cut salary of faculty and staff, cut programs and classes, increase class sizes. California State University, meanwhile, is being forced to stop accepting applications for the 2010 spring term and cut total system-wide enrollment by 40,000 students over the next year. Students who are already enrolled are finding it increasingly difficult to get into oversubscribed classes that are required to meet graduation and major requirements.

Some prospective students, especially those from lower-income families, are being foreclosed from higher education altogether. Those can afford the cost will find it more difficult to get required classes and may have to postpone graduation. Meanwhile, the limited availability of jobs is prompting many who would not otherwise seek higher education to go back to school. Dropout rates can be expected to increase over the next few years and more students will graduate with more debt.

The Education-Job Market Disconnect

What is a new high-school or college graduate to do? With jobs scarce—especially for young adults—graduates are increasingly choosing to go back to school. Schools, however, are cutting back on the number of students they can accept, increasing tuitions and reducing course offerings.

A relative handful of students will get into (and be able to pay for) the best schools, major in the fields most likely to qualify them for attractive, well-paying jobs and graduate into a robust economy that will value and pay for their skills. The vast majority, however, face less attractive options. They can:

  • Skip higher education and possibly relegate themselves to a life of less desirable, low-paying, low-security jobs; or
  • Go to school (if they can afford it), accumulate more debt and risk graduating into a still slow economy.

Luckily there are more attractive alternatives to each of these fates:

  • A number rapidly growing fields, in industries including health care and higher education, still offer attractive, relatively well-paying jobs that do not require bachelor degrees (some registered nurse positions, insurance agents, police, medical assistants, etc.) or to a lesser extent, even associate degrees (cooks, welders, truck drivers, carpenters, etc.). In fact, of the 30 jobs projected to grow at the fastest rate, only 7 typically require a four-year degree;
  • Those who do go to college or graduate school can pursue fields of study, especially in finance, accounting and STEM-related disciplines (science, technology, engineering, math) that lead to jobs which companies currently have trouble filling and are expected to produce large numbers of well-paying jobs in the future (physicians, pharmacists, post-secondary teachers, software engineers, accountants, etc.).

My next blog post will drill down into findings for some of these bachelor-and-above-level jobs, examining categories and specific jobs which offer the best employment opportunities, the highest earnings potential and ideally, good opportunities for intellectual and psychic fulfillment.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, Societal Forces, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 2 Responses »
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Payoffs of a College Education

Sunday, June 27th, 2010

Last month, the Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released the 2010 version of its bi-annual Occupational Outlook Handbook. This information-packed compendium outlines the state of the U.S. labor market and draws on reams of data and expert opinion to project long-term (through 2018) growth prospects for about 300 distinct occupations. It examines likely growth and declines in the job prospects, how each job is likely to change, the types of education that will best prepare people for these jobs, how much these jobs typically pay, the degree of competition one may face in seeking a specific job and even how best to find and win these positions.

Not to oversell the value of this data, BLS issues all the necessary caveats. The most important are that it is examining long-term trends and that findings are subject to uncertainties inherent in any effort to anticipate, much less quantify the future. Most importantly, it recognizes that unanticipated shocks, such as a global Great Recession, the collapse in the value of a world currency, a major terrorist attack or the implications of an unprecedented environmental disaster could delay or totally derail any such projections. Who, for example could have predicted that when a freshman entered college during the boom years of the mid 2000’s, the world would be mired in the worst recession since the great depression and that newly minted graduates would face the highest unemployment rates since the Depression?

Despite the caveats and uncertainties, the Handbook contains reams of fascinating information which is necessary reading for anybody that is even thinking about working over the next decade. Not just students who are now entering school or graduates attempting to enter the workforce, but virtually anybody who might consider the prospect of changing jobs, or who might be laid off any time over the next decade.

The Lifetime Advantages of Education

Given the value of this information, my next few blogs will examine some of what I consider the most important trends for occupations that typically require a four-year college degree or higher. I am not even going to touch upon the voluminous sections that focus on jobs that typically require only high-school, or what the BLS considers “mixed” educations (those that require some education beyond high school, but less than a bachelor degree).

Why focus exclusively on occupations that typically require bachelor’s, and increasingly, graduate degrees? Chart 2 of the report explains this far more succinctly and poignantly than I ever could. As it shows, every additional level of educational attainment, from less than a high school diploma through professional degree, yields progressively higher, stair-step-like increases in average weekly earnings (from $419 per week to $1,441 in 2006 dollars), lifetime earnings and progressively lower prospects for unemployment. (One interesting anomaly is that those with doctoral degrees tend to earn slightly less money and have slightly higher unemployment rates than do those with professional degrees, albeit still significantly better than those with master’s degrees.)

Although the 2006 year benchmark for the BLS data portrays unemployment rates that appear almost ludicrously low in the current environment (6.8% for less than high school through about 1.5% for bachelor’s and above), the pattern holds—although the differences are just as dramatic, and much more depressing—in 2010. As shown in the BLS’s May 2010 unemployment ratings, these figures are now 15% and 4.7%).

Just as important as the job security and earnings potential attributable to higher levels of education, occupations that require a bachelor’s degree or higher have in the past— and will continue to enjoy—higher growth rates (15% compared with an average of 10%) than occupations with lower educational requirements. And most importantly to many, higher education levels are more likely to give one more flexibility in selecting (at least in normal economic times) the type of work they would like to do and result in more intellectually stimulating and psychically rewarding careers. This does not even begin to account for the non-job-related benefits of college, such as improved health, civic involvement and aesthetic appreciation.

So far, it sounds like a slam dunk. The more education, the better, more lucrative and secure the career. A number of people have gotten the message. According to a Census Bureau survey, the percentage of U.S. workers (defined for this purpose as employed people between 16 and 44 years of age) with college degrees has doubled over the last three decades and the percentage of high-school graduates who are enrolling in colleges and universities has reached an all time high of 70 percent.

The bad news is that this still represents less than 30% of workers (although another 22% has completed at least some level of college, including Associate degrees). In other words, half of all these working adults still have only 12 or fewer years of education at a time when many employment experts agree that all employees should have at least two years of post-high-school education.

Given the economic advantages of higher education, why would anyone not get a college, or even graduate degree?

I will briefly discuss this issue in my next blog (July11). I’ll then shift back to the college-level job data, drilling down into those bachelor-and-above-level occupations that offer the best employment opportunities, the highest earnings potential and the greatest opportunities for intellectual, and ideally psychic fulfillment.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Economic Forces, Job and Career Opportunities, Societal Forces, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | 2 Responses »
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Intel’s K-12 Education Programs

Sunday, April 18th, 2010

Although microprocessors are certainly Intel’s most important product, education is, by far, its most important charitable endeavor. Intel directly contributes approximately $70 million per year to funding a broad range of educational endeavors—and this number does not even include the roughly $30 million of grants provided by the Intel Foundation.

These educational programs, all of which are managed primarily through Intel’s Corporate Affairs Department, are divided into three broad buckets:

  • The Intel World Ahead Program is Intel’s comprehensive program for supporting global education markets with it’s products, services and philanthropic programs. This program dedicates resources to connecting the next billion people, in all corners of the world, to technology tools. Although it entails a broad range of efforts, including providing access to IT and communications tools and the providing of localized content and services, education is a primary component. The educational objectives of this program include—and leverage—the same resources as the company’s Higher Education and K-12 programs.
  • The Intel Higher Education Program focuses primarily on developing and promoting specialized technical curricula, research, and competitions in areas including microelectronic, multi-core and mobile technology design, and parallel computing architectures. It also partners with the University of California Berkeley’s Haas School of Business to encourage and prepare today’s students to become technology entrepreneurs. Both efforts are intended to encourage and develop the type of talent pipeline required by Intel, its partners and its customers.
  • The K-12 Education Program focuses on helping schools and teachers to use IT to transform education, to encourage students to study and excel in math and science and, more generally, to facilitate the type of critical thinking and the analytical and collaborative skills required in a knowledge economy. These efforts include a range of project-based learning approaches, online education tools, and the Intel Teach professional development program. They are supported by a number of complementary community-based programs, such as the Intel Computer Clubhouse Network, the Intel Learn Program and the Intel Science Talent Search that allows children to access IT-based schools and develop new skills and interests outside classroom settings.

The Foundations of Intel Teach

Intel Teach is the centerpiece of Intel’s K-12 educational efforts. Teach is a professional development program that provides educators with the type of online tools and training that will allow them to effectively employ technology to transform their lesson plans and grading methodologies, develop professional learning communities and expose their learnings to their peers. The program is intended to facilitate the use of project-based approaches to help students learn high-order,  21st-century skills in areas including problem solving, critical thinking and communications.

Although Intel, like many other IT companies, began its educational program by donating hardware and software to schools, it soon recognized that transforming established educational paradigms and teaching models requires much more than products. It requires a comprehensive enablement program though which teachers learn to effectively use technology to improve their own productivity and to integrate it through their teaching and assessment processes.

This led creation of Intel’s ACE (Applying Computers in Education) program, under which Intel trains teachers on the effective use of computers and on computer-enabled learning methods. Although the program ramped from training 300 teachers in 1997 to training 2,500 in 1998, then-CEO Craig Barrett was not impressed. He set a goal of training a minimum of 100,000 teachers and backed that commitment with a big investment.

In response to this challenge, the Corporate Affairs Department transformed ACE into its new Intel Teach program. This program, which was launched in the U.S. and rapidly spread it to other (initially English-speaking) countries, consisted of a number of modules (Essentials, Elements, Thinking with Technology, and so forth) among which educators could choose one or many.

Between 1998 and 2002 Intel trained a total of 1 million teachers in 25 countries. Although the tech industry crash slowed momentum, Intel Teach is now offered in more than 50 countries and has trained over 7 million teachers.

Although the Intel Teach program is created and managed centrally, Intel recognizes that one size does not fit all. The program is, therefore, managed locally and implementations are tailored to the very different needs and requirements of individual states and countries, Intel conducts conferences for state education policy leaders and helps them understand how technology can help them address their specific objectives. It can then assist these government organizations identify the types of efforts best suited to their needs and help them select districts and schools in with which these efforts can most effectively be developed.

Intel does not work directly with schools or train individual teachers. Instead, it recruits and trains NGOs and professional educational content developers, who then apply Intel Teach methodologies and tools to the training of individual teachers. It also works to assure that its objectives and approaches are aligned with groups such as the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE), that promote the role of technology in education.

Intel also coordinates some of its Teach efforts with the education programs of some of its IT vendor partners—especially Microsoft and Cisco—to develop best-in-class models for deploying technology in education. Although the partners’ objectives and approaches sometimes diverge (such as in Intel’s covering of MacOS and Linux, in addition to Windows), their efforts, technology focuses and capabilities are still quite complementary. (See, for example, my March 28 and April 4 blogs of Microsoft’s Partners in Learning program.) Intel, for example, provides basic Word and Excel training and positions Microsoft’s peer mentoring courses as follow-ons to its own Essentials and Elements courses.

I’ll discuss the objectives and results of Intel’s Teach program in next week’s blog.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Education System and Institutions, Intel, IT Company Strategies, IT Industry and Companies, IT Industry Role in Education, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, Technology's Impact on Job Skills | No Responses »
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The Great U.S. Tech Education Debate

Sunday, March 21st, 2010

On March 15, TechCrunch produced a very informative debate between Craig Barrett, former CEO of Intel and huge proponent of technology education, and Vivek Wadhwa, a Duke/UC-Berkeley professor who writes extensively on innovation, entrepreneurship and cross-border movement of technology talent. 

The debate was spawned by a Wadhwa comments in a Scientific American article that claimed there is no shortage of tech talent in the U.S. To summarize a debate, which must be read in its entirety to be fully understood, Wadhwa claims there is plenty of talent in the form of STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) talent in this country. The problem is that much of this talent is in the form of postdocs (post-doctoral fellows) that are bottled up in a broken university technology education system, and in foreign-born PhDs who, once they receive degrees from U.S. universities, find it increasingly difficult or unattractive to remain in the U.S. If the artificial economic and political restraints were removed, and STEM PhDs were actually paid what they were worth, this talent would be unleashed and produce the type of innovation and jobs that the U.S. so desperately needs.

Barrett views things differently. Although he acknowledges that some postdoc PhD’s do not achieve their commercial market potential, he claims that this is due to their decisions to dedicate their efforts to the long, uncertain process of becoming tenured professors at research universities, rather than working at corporations. In his view, the real problem lies in our K-12 education system, which, due largely to the lack of qualified science and mathematics teachers, fails to ignite children’s’ imaginations around the opportunities in these disciplines and fails to provide a foundational knowledge for university study.

Wadhwa certainly acknowledges the limitations in the U.S. K-12 education system and the need to create “excitement about science and engineering at the national level and motivate our best and brightest to become engineers and scientists.” He, however, clams that the biggest problem is pay. The scientific community in general and the educational system in particular, simply do not pay enough to retain the best talent. These people are lured by the huge the huge rewards promised by the financial industry (such as becoming venture capitalists or investment bank “quants “), rather than become research scientists who drive U.S. innovation.

My Interpretation

While the debate is fascinating, it appears to me that Wadhwa over-generalizes the admittedly disturbing dilemma of postdocs. Just because some STEM PhDs remain in poorly paid fellowships (with hopes of earning valued professorships) rather than going to industry, it does not necessarily mean either that:

  • There are not enough jobs for STEM graduates; or that
  • STEM professions do not pay competitively.

True, not all STEM PhDs can become professors at prestigious research universities. On other hand, not all law school graduates can win U.S. Supreme Court clerkships or highly paid posts at premier white shoe law firms. That, however, does not stop students from overwhelming law school admissions offices. Nor do the short odds of becoming professional athletes, actors or musicians prevent millions of young adults from aspiring to these careers.

Even if there are not enough tenured professorships, PhDs who do need jobs can always “stoop” to work in the private sector. Nor should we confine the analysis of STEM jobs to PhDs. There are, after all, far more Bachelor and Master-level STEM graduates than there are PhDs. Most statistics show that newly minted STEM graduates have higher employment rates than other job categories (even during the recession) and that by far, the largest percentage of unfilled jobs utilize STEM-related skills. Moreover, starting salaries for these graduates remain among the highest of those for all degrees. As shown in a March 2010 Association of Colleges and Employers study, for example, engineering and IT jobs account for all ten of the top ten earning degrees. 

Although some segments of the financial services industry certainly pay more for a handful of the best graduates from the best schools, this cannot be viewed as the standard for all STEM jobs—just as Wall Street law firm salaries cannot be viewed as the standards for all JDs from all law schools. These numbers are too small, and their selection criteria too limited to apply to all graduates.

In sum, I generally agree with Craig Barrett that most people—especially young people—are driven as much by their passions as by the immediate opportunities for monetary rewards. There are, however, limits to this idealism. Pay must yield reasonably comfortable lifestyles and must at least be in the same ballpark as reasonably competitive fields. Although most STEM careers probably meet these criteria (except when compared with financial services, professional sports or entertainment), the big exception is in K-12 STEM education.

Unfortunately, it will take much more than competitive salaries to fix this country’s K-12 education system. Its problems are far too complex and ingrained to be solved by the education community alone. As I have discussed in many of my articles, solving these problems will require a huge amount of assistance from the private sector.

A number of private sector companies—especially IT companies, like Intel, Microsoft and IBM—are already doing great work in helping to improve education at all levels, from K through graduate schools. They are giving schools some of the tools and the training required to improve teaching and learning and helping them improve STEM curricula.

Some are even attempting to address the intense social and peer pressures against becoming “geeks” and “nerds” by demonstrating that STEM skills can be instrumental in achieving the goals of many young adults—to make a real difference in the world. As discussed in my report on IBM’s Academic Initiative, IBM is doing particularly interesting work in engaging student’s desire to make a difference in the world by showing how STEM skills are so critical to addressing some of society’s most pressing problems, as around smarter healthcare, energy and food supplies.

With all due respect to Intel’s wonderful commercials, it may be too much to hope to persuade kids to view scientists, engineers and mathematicians with the same admiration and awe as rock stars or professional athletes. It may, however, be possible to engage at least some part of their minds, psyches and self esteem around the idea of helping the world solve real problems. Perhaps someday, children focused on such missions may even earn the respect, if not necessarily the admiration, of their peers.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Education System and Institutions, Global Forces-General, Globalization, Immigration and Offshoring, IT Industry Role in Education, IT Industry Trends, IT Industry's Role, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Universities and Grad Schools, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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The Government’s Efforts to Bridge Schools’ STEM Gap

Sunday, February 7th, 2010

I have written extensively about the U.S.’s urgent need to retool its workforce to compete in the Global Knowledge Economy of the 21st century, and of the particularly critical need for a whole new level of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) literacy. Although this need must be addressed at all education levels, from primary school through universities and continually through one’s career, the biggest and most pressing gap lies in the formative years, from elementary school through high school.

Just how big is this gap? U.S. 15-year olds now rank a dismal 21st in the world in science and 25th in math. It is similarly drawing up the bottom in high school completion, where the 2006 PISA study ranks it 21st out of 27 OECD countries. Meanwhile, at a time when virtually every knowledge-based career requires strong IT skills, most U.S. middle and high school computer classes focus on teaching rudimentary Windows, word processing and spreadsheet usage, rather than the value of IT in all disciplines and occupations. But our educational prowess relative to OECD countries is one thing. We are now even getting our STEM educational clocks cleaned by China, where:

  • Math, science (not to speak of foreign language) skills are the primary focus of the educational system, from elementary school, all the way through universities;
  • IT is integrated into math and other high school curricula, rather than taught as a standalone set of skills;
  • College STEM graduation rates far exceed those in the U.S.; and even where
  • Adult literacy rates (over 90%) are higher than in the U.S. (86%).

In reality, how could we hope for much more when most teachers graduate in the bottom quartile of their college classes, only 39% of 8th grade math teachers and 7% of science teachers even majored in the subjects they are teaching and children devote so little time to homework. Compare this again with China, where, all math and science teachers must have degrees in these subjects, school years are longer and students devote twice as many hours to homework as their U.S. counterparts.

Government Progress

Although this is all pretty grim, we are seeing progress. And it is coming from the most unlikely of places—the U.S. government. While every U.S. president since Dwight Eisenhower has tried to create a national education program, virtually every effort has failed in Congress. Sure, George W. Bush managed to get No Child Left Behind through Congress, the law allows every state to set their own standards. And, 15 states that fell short of the law’s performance requirements found a creative way of staying in compliance—they simply lowered the scores required to demonstrate proficiency.

Although a couple of multistate organizations, the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officials, are making some progress in creating a voluntary set of common standards for Math and English education, Barack Obama shares his predecessor’s view of the need for national action. However, he understands (all too well) the perils of relying on Congress. He, therefore, gave Arne Duncan, his Education Secretary, unprecedented power and an unprecedented pool of money ($4.35 billion) to incent states to pursue innovative strategies for recruiting, credentialing, rewarding, and retaining teachers. Although this Race to the Top initiative will cover all subjects, it is particularly skewed to STEM education.

Obama would like to do much more to address many of the fundamental deficiencies of the current educational system. Yet he recognizes the formidable political, fiscal and practical constraints to enacting true educational reform. Therefore, he is attempting to enlist the private sector to fund and drive additional programs.

Enlisting Private Sector Help

In November, OBama announced a new campaign to encourage businesses and not-for-profit organizations to help enhance science, technology, engineering and math education in middle and high schools. This Educate to Innovate program is focused on encouraging companies and non-profits to contribute $250 million worth of time, money and volunteers to create extracurricular education programs to expand children’s interest in and knowledge of STEM. As reported in the New York Times, some of the first of what are expected to grow into a larger number of commitments include:

  • Discovery Communications is sponsoring two hours of commercial-free, after-school Science Channel programming to be targeted at middle school students;
  • Science and engineering societies’ commitments to provide volunteers to work with children;
  • PBS will incorporate a science focus into two years of Sesame Street programming;
  • Time Warner Cable, which has committed to devoting 80% of all its philanthropic efforts to science and math education, will also create and promote a web site that will provide a searchable directory of local science activities;
  • Sony will donate 1,000 PlayStation 3 game consoles and LittleBigPlanet educational games to libraries and community organizations and fund a $300,000 contest to incent game designers to develop science- and math-based games that Sony will distribute free; and
  • The Jack D. Hidary and MacArthur Foundations are working with the National Science Teachers Association and American Chemical Society to launch a website (http://www.nationallabday.org/) to create a Web site that will match volunteer scientists with teachers looking for assistance in teaching specific areas.

Intel, which already has one of the largest and most active STEM education initiatives in the world (which I’ll discuss in some future blogs), is playing a particularly central role in this imitative. It is launching a ten-year, $200 million cash and in-kind campaign to help train more than 100,000 U.S. math and science teachers and is committing its own employees to volunteer 100,000 hours to improving STEM education. Its former chairman, Craig Barrett, will also work with prominent technology CEOs and former astronaut Sally Ride, to encourage other corporations and foundations to fund and participate in efforts to improve STEM education.

Promising First Steps

The bad news is that U.S. educational system (especially elementary, middle and high school) has dug itself into a huge hole. It is not vaguely prepared to teach the types of skills that tomorrow’s workers will need to compete in an increasingly global economy that is being redefined by information and communications technology.

The good news is that virtually everybody—private sector and public sector and Democrat and Republican—recognizes these deficiencies and the urgency of addressing them. George W. Bush—with solid bipartisan support—took an important first step (No Child Left Behind) in addressing these needs. Barack Obama, without waiting for Congress, has taken two more. Race to the Top provides schools with compelling incentives to reinvent policies and processes. Educate to Innovate enlists the private sector to help identify, enable and fund some of these changes. Both focus on those areas that are in greatest need of change—how middle and high school students are exposed to and taught math and science.

Ideally, politicians of both parties will again come together to acknowledge this critical need and address it in a comprehensive and enlightened manner. But even if not, Educate to Innovate, in particular, sets an important precedent as:

  • An effort to encourage and focus the efforts of the private sector (especially information companies and foundations) around a common goal.

This will hopefully be the first of many initiatives in which government attempts to mobilize the private sector to address critical societal issues.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Business Trends, Corporate Social Responsibility, Creating the 21st Century Workforce, Economic and Political Forces, Education System and Institutions, Job and Career Opportunities, K-12, Political Forces, Skills Requirements, Societal Forces, STEM Careers, Technology's Impact on Job Skills, Workforce Trends | No Responses »
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