Education and the Workforce Crisis

In these days of high unemployment, it’s hard to imagine a worker shortage. The shortage, however, is real. The book Workforce Crisis states that, “the United States will need 18 million new college degree holders by 2012 to cover job growth and replace retirees, but, at current graduate rates, will be 6 million short.”

But is more public financing of education the answer to alleviating the crisis?

The facts generally don’t support this conclusion. Nearly two trillion dollars is spent on education worldwide each year. The U.S. is currently the world’s single greatest investor in education. Its public education budget is close to that of all the governments in six regions combined: the Arab States, Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean, South and West Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. To put it another way, the U.S., which is home to just four percent of the world’s children and young people, spends 28 percent of the global education budget.

Despite this massive outlay of funds to support the educational system, huge problems persist, and U.S. students often perform at or below the level of those in other advanced economies. But test scores reveal only part of the problem.

A report produced for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006, The Silent Epidemic, identified a stark issue: dropouts. “There is a high school dropout epidemic in America. Each year, almost one third of all public high school students—and nearly one half of all blacks, Hispanics and Native Americans—fail to graduate from public high school with their class. Many of these students abandon school with less than two years to complete their high school education. This tragic cycle has not substantially improved during the past few decades when education reform has been high on the public agenda. During this time, the public has been almost entirely unaware of the severity of the dropout problem due to inaccurate data. The consequences remain tragic.”

Clearly, government spending has not been getting the job done, and isn’t the sole answer. Some competition needs to be introduced to the system. The private sector needs to introduce new models and methods of learning. Changes need to occur.

Cyberschools can provide a needed answer. Consider the cost to go to a Harvard graduate school versus the cost of getting a degree online. Then consider the added cost of taking the necessary time off work to complete a degree at a university when a person can get the same degree online, at a lesser cost, from the convenience of one’s home, and with excellent results. Cyberschools can play a critically important role in alleviating the shortage of educated workers.

Find out more about Workforce Crisis: How to Beat the Coming Shortage of Skills and Talent at Harvard Business Publishing.

Read the report, The Silent Epidemic: Perspectives of High School Dropouts (pdf), at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation site.