Economic Solution: Hit The Books
With the recent financial market turmoil, many businesses are getting more tactical and shortening their outlook to the next few months or the next couple business quarters as caution seems to be the business word of the day.
That is why two events held in Central Massachusetts last week looking at the long view of our regional economic engine — our ability to provide skilled workers for the jobs of the future — seemed strangely out of place.
Back To Childhood
And yet the two sessions painted a picture of what our workforce challenges are today, and how important it is that we solve them over the next several years with the kind of collaboration that does not exist today.
The first session — “Working Together, A Massachusetts Regional Workforce Strategic Initiative” — was produced by the region’s two employment boards and featured State Secretary of Labor and Workforce Development Suzanne Bump and Northeastern University Economist Paul Harrington. Here are a few highlights:
• Our regional population is growing faster than the state. The region’s population has grown by more than 5 percent between 2000 and 2006 while the state’s population has grown by only 1.4 percent.
• When it comes to earning power, education counts. Yet there is an alarming trend in the region’s education levels, especially in the critical associate’s degree programs. Between 1996 and 2006, associate’s degrees awarded in the region dropped by close to 10 percent. Additionally, career and technical high school graduates are up by 9 percent statewide the last three years versus only a 4 percent rise in our region.
The bottom line is that without substantially changing these education trends, our region’s workforce will be less and less capable of filling the jobs of the future — where there will be fewer and fewer opportunities for those without degrees or highly developed career and technical training.
The second seminar was entitled, “Early Childhood Education: An Economic Development Strategy with High Public Return,” and focused on the critical developmental period for children between the ages 2 and 5.
The argument was made, with strong conviction and the evidence to back it up, that the most leveraged time to provide structured learning was in pre-school when the brain does more than 90 percent of its growth and development.
Surprisingly, the main presenter of this evidence was not a social service executive, but an economist from the Federal Reserve Bank out of Minneapolis. Rob Grunewald presented the kind of data that would make most business executives’ heads spin — an ROI on funding early childhood education that returned $16 for every one dollar spent on programs.
Kids who get into structured education programs early show far superior levels of academic achievement, earnings and an overall higher success rate.
Who wouldn’t want to invest in that kind of return on the dollar? But marshalling the resources to fund this kind of commitment to early education remains daunting.
Larger employers, like Genzyme, have been early and articulate leaders on this critical issue. But unless there is an increased understanding of what is gained by an investment in early childhood education by our business and civic leaders, we’re likely to continue to under-invest in this critical area.
The bottom line is that without investing in our employees of tomorrow, and assuring that the education attainment levels in our region of the state rise, we risk our population being unready for the job opportunities of tomorrow.
We’re in a fast growing region of the state, and have time to catch up, but need to make sure that the education programs that we do develop are in alignment with where the jobs are going to be.
Employers choose locations based on many factors, yet the most essential remains access to a trained and able workforce.
Despite the short-term challenges of today’s economic slowdown, business leaders must get more involved in the development of tomorrow’s workforce.
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