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Post-Secondary Education: The Cornerstone of the High-Skill, High-Wage Economy

Sunday, September 30th, 2012

Employment prospects and salary levels improve dramatically as education levels increase. These combine to result in big gains in lifetime earnings at each progressive level of the education ladder. College grads (and especially advanced degree holders) have much higher earnings and suffer far less unemployment than do high-school graduates (not to speak of those without a high school degree. Lifetime earnings of high school graduates average about $973,000 in 2009 dollars, compared with about $1.7 million for those with associate degrees, $2.3 million for those with bachelors and $3.6 million for those with professional degrees.

Moreover, these differences are getting wider. Pay for college graduates has risen by 15.7% (adjusted for inflation) over the past 32 years, compared with an average decline of 25.7% for those workers without college degrees. And this does not even begin to account for non-economic advantages held by college graduates, including lower divorce rates, fewer single-parent families and longer life expectancies.

Higher-Education: High-Skill Holy Grail?

At first glance, given the employment, income and other disparities, it may appear that any student, with a real choice in the matter, should get at least a baccalaureate degree, and ideally, a Masters, PhD or Professional degree. In addition to the benefits discussed above, the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS’) Employment Projections—2010-20 project projects that occupations in which a master’s degree or higher is typically required, are expected to grow at the fastest rate of any other education category (21.7% for masters and 19.9% for doctoral or professional degrees—especially in healthcare-related professions).

On the other hand, however, the report projects that only 3 of the 30 occupations that BLS expects to produce the largest number of job openings by 2020 are expected to require a bachelor’s degree or higher—teachers, college professors and accountants. But even these careers will face big challenges. Teacher and college hiring are both suffering from big government funding cuts that threaten to greatly reduce both the pay and the fabled job security these jobs offer. Accountants, meanwhile, are subject to the same type of offshoring pressures as a number of other high-skill jobs. And then there is the increasingly critical issue of the costs (both explicit and implicit opportunity costs) of attending college, the burden of college debt and the increasingly asked question as to whether the “return” from a college education is worth the “investment.”

This incredibly complex question entails much more than an ROI analysis. It is also highly situational, depending on factors including the student’s grades, motivation, objectives and family situation. Even if you focus exclusively on employability and salary, the answer varies greatly by factors including:

  • Which school on is talking about, Harvard or the proverbial Podunk State?
  • Cost of tuition—is it a private or public school, what type of financial aid is available, can you ameliorate expenses such as by living at home or working part time?
  • The breadth and depth of one’s personal network, which is still one of the most important determinants as to whether and what type of job one can get.

Most important, however, is the field of study. As shown in the BLS Employment Projections report, philosophy, anthropology, zoology, art history and humanities graduates are the least likely to find jobs. Those majoring in engineering, math, biology, computer science, accounting and economics are not only far more likely to find jobs, they are also more likely to get jobs in their field and earn higher salaries.

A more dated BLS report looked specifically at starting salaries for a range of liberal arts majors. Overall, liberal arts graduates of highly selective Ivy League and other Tier One schools often have reasonable success in finding jobs, almost regardless of their major—even among hedge funds and management consulting firms. Often, 80% or more of such graduates either go on to graduate school or get jobs at, or soon after, graduation.

The same is sometimes true of particularly attractive graduates of less selective programs. Morgan Stanley, for example, may obtain 25-30% of its undergraduate hires out of liberal arts programs, and then provide them with more functional training through online courses and training programs.

Community Colleges: The Other Higher Education

Higher education does not necessarily mean a four-year degree. Community colleges, often viewed as something of a poor stepchild of the university, play critical roles in educating many first-generation students who would not otherwise have a chance for a college education and play a key role as a low-cost “feeder system” for four-year schools. Just as importantly, they are often far-more attuned to the skills requirements of local businesses. Some of these schools design classes, certification programs and even associate degree programs in conjunction with, and serve as training arms for these businesses.

The single fastest projected employment growth (in terms of numbers) is for Registered Nurses. In fact, these jobs, plus those of 5 of the 30 fastest growing (in percentage terms) jobs in the country—all of which are also in healthcare—all require Associate Degrees (rather than Bachelors or advanced degrees) as their minimum educational requirements. Community colleges are also instrumental in preparing the next lower skill (and often wage) workers—those that must take certification courses and pass exams as either a formal or informal qualification for jobs.

Even many above-average paying jobs that don’t require a formal post-secondary degree of certificate often require a less formal education program, such as an apprenticeship program. In fact, occupations that require apprenticeships are expected to be the fastest growing of all jobs that require some form of on-the-job training. Some of these—especially those that require demonstrated technical competence—are among the highest paid and most difficult to fill positions in today’s job market. They are likely to occupy the same position in tomorrow’s job market..

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Convergence of the U.S.’s Mid-Market and Low-Skill Work Forces

Sunday, August 26th, 2012

As I discussed in my August 2 blog, The Great Recession, especially when combined with the rapid growth in the automation and globalization of jobs, has exacerbated the bifurcation of the U.S. labor force. Those who have traditionally performed mid-skill jobs face the biggest dislocations. Low-skill workers, however, face the most pain.

The Disappearance of Mid-Market Jobs

The vast mid-market, in which millions of moderately skilled high-school and college graduates had made rewarding, life-time careers, is under siege. True, the number of such mid-market jobs will certainly grow when a cyclical recovery really begins to take hold. The problem is that the four big structural trends—automation, globalization, flexible hiring and unpredictable volatility—promise to keep a tight lid on both the pace and the extent of the mid-tier jobs recovery. They will also keep a lid on both the compensation and the security of these jobs.

What will happen to those mid-skill/mid-income blue- and white-collar jobs that form the foundation of great American middle class?

That future is already being played out. Even as the economy begins to recover, globalization (offshoring) and technology (i.e., automation) will continue to eliminate and/or significantly change the type of skills required to perform these increasingly routine, relatively low-discretion jobs. Think, for example of how computer numerical control (CNC) machine tools eliminated the need for millions of assembly line workers and created new demands for computer-literate, numerically-proficient operators.

What happens to the people who have been displaced by these jobs? They must either learn these new skills (for which there are orders of magnitude fewer jobs available), re-train for other functions (often with very mixed success) or compete with millions of other less-skilled workers for much lower-paying low-skill/low-pay non-tradeable service jobs (jobs which must be performed locally and are difficult or impossible to automate).

The same forces are affecting mid-skill/mid-pay office workers. Secretaries and switchboard operators have lost their jobs to automation and accountants, and financial and marketing analysts have had to learn entirely new skills and provide new types of value. Meanwhile, millions of mid-level office jobs, such as accounts payable/receivable, account reconciliation and computer programming have long-since been at least partially automated or moved offshore, to be performed by much lower-cost, and in some cases, better educated workers.

Employees who have traditionally performed these functions can, in theory, be reeducated or retained to perform higher-level functions. In practice, the relatively small number of very higher-skill jobs that are being created are being overwhelmed by the losses in huge, well-paying mid-skill segments, such as construction and manufacturing, and among the ranks of mid-level administrative and supervisory and low-level managerial workers. Meanwhile, efforts to retrain/educate these people for higher-value functions often yield very mixed results.

And, as if these job losses weren’t bad enough, these workers are now joined by millions of government employees and educators who are falling victims to big cuts in government funding.

The Plight of Low-Skill Workers

Meanwhile, growth at the low end of the jobs market has been growing (albeit very slowly), even during the recession. Perpetual high-growth segments, such as healthcare, continue to grow while industries such as retail and hospitality have begun to rehire. The problem is two-fold:

  1. Many such jobs typically offer very low-pay and little job security and
  2. Mid-skill workers and recent college graduates, locked out of traditional markets for mid-range jobs, are now competing with high-school graduates and even drop-outs for these low-skill jobs.

So, while the recession, combined with forces including automation and globalization, are taking a bigger toll on mid-skill jobs than they are on low-skill jobs, it is the least educated workers who are, by far, the biggest losers. If you think the market for new college graduates is grim (and it certainly is), the market for less-educated workers is appalling.

Employment prospects and salary levels fall precipitously as education levels decline. These combine to result in huge disparities in lifetime earnings.

Is higher education the Great American Hope? The answer, as I’ll discuss in my September 30 blog is, yes but………

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Bifurcation of the U.S. Job Market

Thursday, August 2nd, 2012

There can be no certainly in predicting the future. One thing, however, is certain: the jobs of the future will not be the same as those of the past. To understand why, one has to look back to the past.

The composition of the U.S. economy, like those of other countries, is in a continual state of flux. While it began as an almost exclusively agrarian economy, it began migrating to a manufacturing, or product-based economy in the 1800s. By 1950, manufacturing accounted for almost 60% of all U.S. jobs. Since then, the services component of the economy has been on a tear: It now accounts for more than 75% of all U.S. jobs, with manufacturing falling to less than 25% and agriculture a mere 1%. Although the capital-intensive manufacturing continues to grow in dollar revenues, its percentage of GDP, and especially its percentage of jobs, is dwarfed by the highly labor-intensive services sector.

Services, however, come in many different flavors. There are, for example, professional and business services (the largest slice of the services pie), followed by healthcare, leisure and hospitality, retail and wholesale, education and so forth. But while this industry-based view is, as discussed below, certainly important in assessing where the new jobs will be, another form of segmentation tells us much more about the type of jobs that will grow fastest, be most secure, and provide the best salaries and benefits. This division is among:

  1. High-skill/high-pay jobs, the top of the labor pyramid, is occupied largely by university and graduate school-educated professionals with specialized knowledge-based skills, such as business managers and executives, engineers, doctors and lawyers;
  2. Middle-skill/middle-pay jobs, the foundation of the middle-class economy, consist of relatively solid and relatively well-paying and secure blue-collar (such as construction and manufacturing) and white-collar (such to mid-level office managers) professions; and
  3. Low-skill/low-pay “commodity” jobs (such as fast-food clerks, hospital orderlies and security guards), which typically employ lesser-educated workers, generally require little training and provide low pay and limited job security.

In the old days, which was roughly from post-World War II through the 1980s, each of these segments was relatively large and rapidly growing. All was well, or so it seemed.

The U.S. job market, however, was at the beginning of a big transition. The broad, multi-tiered job market, in which people of virtually every type and level of education, skill and talent could find a job, had begun to disappear.

As explained in a July 4th Wall Street Journal article, a 2010 study by MIT economists David Autor and Daron Acemoglu (Skills, Tasks and Technologies: Implications for Employment and Earnings,) divided the U.S. labor force into 318 occupations based on skill and education levels, and examined the change in the number of jobs over almost 50 years. Although growth rates vary greatly year-by-year, the number of low-skill/education/pay and high-skill/education/pay jobs both surged over the 18 years between 1989 and 2007. On the other hand, mid-skill jobs languished: growing a mere 5% over the same period.

Then came the Great Recession. This, combined with the four key structural trends discussed in my June 24th blog (automation, globalization, flexible hiring and unpredictable volatility), changed the face of the U.S. job market. While the number of most low-skill (with the notable exception of home and health care aides) and high-skill jobs essentially stayed the same between 2008 and 2010, increasingly routinized mid-market jobs (both blue-collar and white-collar)—plummeted by 12%.

Pre-recession wage growth, as measured between 1980 and 2005, showed a somewhat different patter. The average, inflation-adjusted hourly wages for high-skill/education/pay workers surged by almost one-third, compared with only 16% for low-skill service workers. Mid-skill categories, however, again pulled up the rear, with machine operators and assemblers earning only 6% more and the wages for production and craft workers actually declining by 4%. The recession, meanwhile, hit the latter three categories particularly hard as consumers cut back on discretionary personal service purchases (haircuts, restaurant meals, etc.) and as many laid-off mid-skill workers went into competition with lesser-skilled workers for personal service jobs.

The result: A dramatic bifurcation of the U.S. labor market and, according to some, of our entire society.

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Building a Career That Gives You Control of Your Own Life

Tuesday, June 26th, 2012

The Great Recession marked the end of an era. A college degree, long viewed as the passport to a good career and comfortable lifestyle, will no longer guarantee a job. It certainly won’t ensure a job in the field for which you have prepared, much less a predictable and secure career that allows you to pursue your passions and live a lifestyle of your own choosing.

The Grim Reality

After more than four years of decline and slow growth, unemployment among recent college grads is still almost 15 percent. Another 40%, according to Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies, are underemployed or are unable to find full-time jobs or those that make use of their skills. These patterns are echoed in a 2011 study by Rutgers University’s John J. Heldrich Center for Workforce Development. It found that 44% of 2010 college graduates had not held a single job over the 12 months since graduation (compared with 10% from the classes of 2006 and 2007). Among those 2010 grads lucky enough to find jobs, only half landed jobs that required four-year degrees, 30% claimed that their jobs were below their skill levels and only 22% saw their positions as steps along a long-term career path.

Worse still, a study of previous recessions by Yale School of Management economist Lisa Kahn, found that those graduates unlucky enough to enter the job market during a recession not only begin at lower wages, they also find it difficult to compete with younger, more recent graduates when normal hiring patterns resume and are likely to continue to earn lower wages though much of their careers.

All this bad news is taking a terrible toll on morale. According to the previously mentioned Center for Workforce Development survey, 56% of recent college graduates now believe they will to do less well than their parents—only 17% think they will do better!

A Brighter Future?

Although it may be comforting to think that this situation will return to normal once we pull out of the slump and the recovery begins generating jobs at a more traditional pace, this is worse than wishful thinking—it is self-delusion.

The recession, as severe as it has been, has merely unmasked a number of fundamental job market-altering trends that have been in place for more than a last decade, but were disguised by the financial and homebuilding bubbles. These trends fall into four primary categories:

  1. Automation, in which not only factory and administrative workers, but also knowledge workers (as in routine accounting, programming, legal and even some medical jobs) are being automated;
  2. Globalization, where increasingly educated engineers, financial analysts and lawyers and other professionals, from a growing number of developing countries, perform jobs for as little as one-tenth the cost of a comparably educated domestic white-collar worker;
  3. Flexible hiring, with companies looking to reduce fixed costs by increasingly looking to part-time or contract workers as alternatives to full-time employees; and
  4. Unpredictable volatility, where political, economic, social, technology and market forces change so suddenly and profoundly as to make it all but impossible to anticipate, much less prepare for major dislocations or their often unanticipated consequences.

The bad news is that those who are not prepared for these trends face a lifetime of uncertainly, disrupted career plans and low earnings. Their careers, their financial security and, to an extent, their lifestyles, will be subject to the whims of the market place and the good graces of others.

The good news is that those who understand and are prepared for the job market of the future—and who plan and manage their careers effectively—have the opportunity to not only minimize these risks, but to turn them into opportunities. They will increasingly be able to define their jobs around their own interests and passions and build careers that enable, rather than limit their lifestyles.

Although most college graduates have the potential of taking charge of their own careers, those who are still in high school or those who are about to enter or are still in college, have, by far, the greatest potential. It will, however, take planning, work and commitment.

The sooner you accept these responsibilities, the greater your chance of ensuring that you will be the master, rather than the victim of your own career.

Posted in 21st Century Careers, Job and Career Opportunities, Workforce Trends | 2 Responses »
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Tomorrow’s Jobs Require Tomorrow’s Skills

Monday, November 14th, 2011

 

At the end of September, IBM’s Almaden Research Center sponsored a conference on the future of jobs, the skills required for these jobs and how colleges, private sector companies and governments can individually, and in partnership, prepare people for these jobs.

The conference, titled Regional Upward Spirals: The Co-Elevation of Future Technologies, Skills, Jobs and Quality-of-Life, attracted participants from each of these sectors and from a number of think tanks. All focused on themes surrounding:

  • The growing shortage of educated workers;
  • How technology is transforming jobs;
  • Skills required for the jobs of today and tomorrow;
  • The role and challenges of colleges and universities in preparing a new generation of knowledge workers;
  • The role of the private sector in educating, training and helping employees refresh existing and develop new skills;
  • The need for partnerships among private and public sectors, academia and non-profits in closing the nation’s “skills gap;” and
  • The need to equip policymakers with better tools to model quality-of-life improvements generation over generation in regions, as infrastructure, skills, jobs change together.

The U.S.’s Growing Skills Gap

IBM’s Chief Economist, Martin Flemming, kicked off the conference by putting the current recession into historical perspective and aligning it with economist Carlotta Perez’s Waves of Technology Change, postulating that the economy is now in the transition between the installation and deployment phases of telecommunications and IT—between the initial implementation of these technologies, toward their use in fundamentally transforming business processes and societal institutions. Although such transitions typically result in slower investment and growth, this effect is now being compounded by our attempt to emerge from the financial recession.

A representative from McKinsey Global Institute then honed into our current employment problems by outlining some of the key findings of the group’s recently published report, An Economy that Works, explaining, for example, the unprecedented toll this recession has taken on jobs. This toll is particularly steep among those in low-skill/low-pay and mid-skill/mid-pay jobs. However, the unemployment rate among college graduates is still relatively low (4.2% according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics report) and the number of college graduates with jobs has actually grown by more than 1 million over the last two years.

In fact, many companies are unable to find all the educated workers they need—at least those with the skills they require. Forty percent of companies have had job openings for six months that they have been unable to fill due to lack of the proper skills. This is particularly true for specialized technical skills in science, engineering, computer programming and other areas of IT.

This skills mismatch, is likely to get worse before it gets better. McKinsey estimates that if the economy does improve, employers will face a shortage of about 1.5 million workers with college degrees (especially STEM degrees) by 2020. At the other end of the education spectrum, there will be a surplus of almost 6 million workers without high school degrees.

Skills Requirements

Just what skills are employers looking for? Clearly, as has been discussed endlessly over the last decade, employers have a deep, apparently endless need for STEM skills. Silicon Valley, as we always hear, has been continually ratcheting up the salaries (not to speak of the benefits) it provides the most promising computer science graduates.

Companies including Dow Chemical and IBM are spending hundreds of millions of dollars developing curricula, funding courses and sponsoring research projects and fellowships in areas including chemical engineering and business analysis, respectively. At the conference, McKinsey highlighted the need for math and analysis skills by projecting a need for almost 3 million people (including more than 150,000 highly-trained “data scientists”) to extract business insight from “big data”.

In its An Economy that Works report, McKinsey groups these and hundreds of other job opportunities into six primary segments of the U.S. economy that it claims, will account for 70-85 percent of the up to 22.5 million new jobs (assuming strong growth) the country will create over the rest of the decade: healthcare (by far the largest), business services, leisure and hospitality, construction, manufacturing and retail.

There is, however, a caveat to even these projections. As Irving Wladawsky-Berger discuses in his blog on the conference, University of California Berkeley professor John Zysman discussed the ways in which “the algorithmic revolution” (the ability to codify activities underlying services and embed them into software) is fundamentally transforming the nature of mid-skill services jobs. The componentization of continually higher-level services functions, for example, is already making it easier to automate and offshore these functions.

Meanwhile, new innovations, such as IBM’s “Watson” has the potential of bringing this algorithmic revolution up into specialized realms of qualitative research and even expert knowledge. One of its first uses, for example, is likely to be in medical diagnostics, such as where a doctor can input lists of symptoms, medical histories, and a broad range of other relevant information to identify possible illnesses and recommended treatments. This, as I discussed in a previous blog on Watson, is only the first step in transforming medicine and the nature of knowledge jobs across all domains, and in changing and upgrading the types of skills tomorrow’s knowledge workers will require to ensure long, engaging and rewarding careers.

Just what skills will be required? Although each industry, and each job within it will certainly require specific combinations of functional skills, another presenter, from the Institute for the Future, cited its report, Future Work Skills 2020 to posit ten more generalized, foundational skills that will be required of most knowledge workers:

  1. Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed;
  2. Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions;
  3. Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based;
  4. Cross-cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings;
  5. Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning;
  6. New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication;
  7. Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines.
  8. Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes;
  9. Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques; and
  10. Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence.

Meanwhile, in another IBM conference on Leadership being held the same week in New York, Tom Friedman set the skills bar even higher, claiming that “Everyone has to bring something extra, being average is no longer enough. . . Everyone is looking for employees that can do critical thinking and problem solving . . . just to get an interview.  What they are really looking for are people who can invent, re-invent and re-engineer their jobs while doing them.”

This leads to yet another change in the job market that will require even more skills of tomorrow’s knowledge workers—companies’ growing reliance on part-time, contract and freelance employees as an alternative to hiring full-time employees. This means that more and more of tomorrow’s knowledge workers will, whether they want to or not, have to run their own companies or partner with others to create small business services companies. Not only will they need the skills required to manage a business, they must also have the skills required to work independently. Most importantly, they will need the sills to continually market and sell themselves, their ideas and their unique skill sets.

This is a very tall order. What must schools do to help students develop these skills—both functional and foundational? Are today’s schools really capable of doing so? How can other institutions, including companies, foundations, non-profits and governments help? These and a number of related issues will be discussed in my November 27th blog.

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Core Skills for Knowledge Workers in a Global Economy

Sunday, October 30th, 2011

The U.S. education system was created primarily to teach analytical, and to a lesser extent, communication skills. The vast majority of this education, especially at the university level, is segmented into specific domains. Although these domain-specific content and skills are certainly critical, many additional broad, foundational skills are required of a generation of knowledge workers that are capable of delivering high-value in a global economy.

Exactly what are these skills and why are they so important? I discussed some of these skills at a high level in my November 2009 article, Right-Brain Skills for 21st Century Jobs and discussed some of these and others in a number of articles over the last couple years.

Although nobody of whom I am aware has published a comprehensive list of such skills (as if there ever could be such a thing), I would include capabilities such as:

  • IT fluency, where familiarity and comfort with tomorrow’s tools is so deep that technology becomes the de facto, go-to tool to address virtually any business need;
  • Quantitative analytics, especially higher-level math, statistical analysis and analytics;
  • “Integrative imagination,” the ability to integrate information and ideally methodologies from disparate realms to create original new insights;
  • High-level thinking skills including focused research, information filtering and prioritization, critical and adaptive thinking, creative problem-solving and analytical systems thinking; and
  • Soft skills, such as written and oral communications, teamwork, social intelligence, leadership and cross-cultural awareness and sensitivity.

But what are the precise skills that will be required? How do the combinations of skills vary among occupations, industries and positions? Nobody really knows. Nor do they really know how these requirements will evolve in the future. There is, however, one thing we do know. Far too few people entering the workforce, or even that are currently in it, have a sufficient base of such skills.

These broad skills, although necessary, are not sufficient to prepare an individual for an interesting and fulfilling career. They must be complemented with deep domain knowledge in a particular field AND sufficient knowledge of a broad range of other disciplines and fields to provide an inter-disciplinary perspective enable cross-domain collaboration. This domain knowledge, however, must be built atop the core skills that are applicable to virtually any field.

But, to address the current “core skills gap” we must first answer some fundamental questions:

  • Which of these core foundational skills are most critical and most universal?
  • What are the best stages in one’s education and career to learn these skills?
  • How can they most effectively be taught and learned?
  • What responsibility for identifying and learning these skills should be assumed by the individual —and what by primary, secondary and post-secondary schools, by businesses or by other types of organizations?

Much of my ongoing research and writing will focus on these and related questions.

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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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