edu-ca-tion

by Ilse Genovese

According to a 2008 report on education, “The Condition of Education 2000-2008,” released by the National Center on Education Statistics (NCES), enrollment in America’s public schools has risen to an all-time high, and the Nation’s student body is becoming more diverse. There are improvements in higher math and reading scores for 4th to 8th graders, and increases in college enrollment. But, the report cautions, persistent challenges remain in educating a growing and increasingly diverse population.
In a 2007 Nightly Business Report series on “Changing Demographics,” Robert Morison, director of research at the Concours Group and co-author of Workforce Crisis, reminds us that one variable isn’t changing fast enough: the educational attainment of the American workforce.
Yes, we are among the most educated nations. But we also have a very high tech, information-based economy, and education and training aren’t keeping pace with the requirements of today’s jobs. Aggregate demand for less skilled labor is almost flat.
The net additions to the job mix are almost all on the skilled side. About two-thirds of these new jobs call for a college degree, the rest for extensive, often technical, training. But only about 35 percent of Americans earn college degrees and only 30 percent earn them by age 30.
In five years, the workforce is projected to be over six million degree holders short, with the biggest gaps in engineering disciplines. Meanwhile, many of these jobs are portable, and there are plenty of educated people around the world happy to fill them. The shortfall isn’t just in higher education. Virtually all jobs these days call for increasing analytical, technical, and communication skills, at levels that too many high school graduates lack. What to do?
Invest seriously in public education, but that does employers little good in the short term. Employers who are unable or disinclined to outsource work elsewhere have to be in the education business themselves as never before, all the way from remedial skills training to big incentives for employees to pursue undergraduate and graduate education.
Students, educators, and employers who want to learn how surveying and mapping, cartography and GIS, and geodesy are classified in the U.S. by the Census Bureau (Occupational Statistics), the National Skill Standards Board (Industry Cluster), and the Department of Education (Career Cluster) will find this and other useful information at NCES’s website http://nces.ed.gov.