Employment and America’s Future: Facing the Educational Facts
By: Susan Raymond, Ph.D., 01/07/05

This is the fifth in a six-part series examining how changes in the economic and social environment of America in the coming two decades will impact philanthropy and the non-profit sector.

For decades, the gold standard in measuring the American workforce’s educational level has been the high school diploma.  That treasure whether won in school or earned through the GED process has separated the winners from the losers, those who have a shot at grasping the American brass ring from those who will be, at most, societal onlookers.

But the future will not emulate the past.  Indeed, a high school diploma will increasingly become a meaningless measure of the health of the American workforce, and hence of the upward trajectory of its progress.

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics has embarked on an illuminating exercise.  In the last several years it has begun projecting U.S. occupational patterns not only by occupational category and industrial category, but by educational attainment clusters.  The most recent projections are to 2012.

Between 2002 and 2012, jobs in 75 categories require only a high school education.  These categories will experience an increase of 2.7 million jobs. Of that number, an unsettling one third are in food preparation and janitorial services.  High school diploma opportunities are industrially concentrated.  Moreover, 23% of those categories will actually have net job loss.  The median income of those jobs is about $25,000 per year.

In contrast, 98 job categories require at least some college or college education, gaining 4 million jobs, with no categories in decline and with a median income of $50,000.  Farther up the educational ladder, 117 categories require at least a college education, and will generate 3.9 million jobs.

The payroll implications are significant.  At the median wage, the new high-school-only jobs will generate some $70 million in income.  More jobs at a higher median means that the “some college/college” category will generate about $200 million in income, and the “college or better” category will generate some $250 million.  So, the path to social prosperity is not paved with secondary school success.

Geography matters little.  In New Mexico, of the projected occupations with the largest growth over the next decade, only one (food service preparation) requires only a high school diploma.  The most critical level of education is the AB/community college level.  Nearly a continent away, the story is the same in New York.  Moreover, in New York State, the story of New York City and the story of Elmira are the same.  Jobs requiring more than a high school education have median pay three to four times those requiring only a high school education.  And the projected number of jobs at the higher end is greater than the projected number of jobs at the lower end.

What does this have to do with philanthropy and the nonprofit sector?

Data are poor, so we really do not know how much of philanthropy targeted at education finds its way out of the K-12 process.  We do know that virtually all of the concern with “educational reform” is focused on K-12 issues, on getting that high school diploma.  To the extent that public and policy debate creates a context for philanthropic resource flows, one would suspect that much of educational philanthropy (except that which is driven by college alumni booster relations, of course!) finds its way to K-12 issues.

An experiment is in order.  An examination of the foundations and grants in the electronic database of the Foundation Center indicates that there are 52 foundations with an explicit interest in community colleges.  The equivalent number with interest in elementary/secondary education is 2,794.

Of course, expressed interest does not equal expressed grant making.  Indeed, not.  There are 3,340 grants related to community colleges in the database.  Grants for elementary and secondary education total nearly 38,000.

So, what are we to conclude?  Certainly not that K-12 education is undeserving.  But, in fact, even now, 84% of Americans over the age of 25 have completed a high school education, compared to 24% in 1940.  If the rate of increase in that population portion is no better in the next decade than the median of the half century of experience, that portion could rise to 94% by 2015.  A feat unprecedented in human history, to be sure.

But, for philanthropy interested in education, education is not all that is changing.  Progress in education through grade 12, even major progress on the educational reform issues that consume public debate today, is myopic if it does not recognize that the needs indeed the opportunities of the national economy have completely changed the prospects of those individuals that past strategies might count as successes.  A high school diploma gets you to the janitor’s room and a shift on the deep fryer. 

It is long past time to turn attention to formal educational life after grade 12.

Sources

Raw data from Bureau of Labor Statistics and National Center for Education Statistics
New Mexico data from the University of New Mexico.

About The Author:

Dr. Susan Raymond, Chief Analyst for onPhilanthropy, is Managing Director, Research, Evaluation, and Strategic Planning for Changing Our World Inc., a leading consulting firm helping nonprofits and corporate philanthropists achieve their goals.

You may contact the author at: sraymond@changingourworld.com