Stubborn Skills Gap in America’s Work Force – NYTimes.com

• Stubborn Skills Gap in America’s Work Force – NYTimes.com

  Only a massive investment in our pre-k to higher education infrasrtucture with business at the table will turn around the skills deficit our country faces. Our competitor countries are making the necessary human capital investment to forge new industries and technology with that come better jobs.

  tags: education learning skills knowledge training certificates degrees universities colleges

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  • To believe an exhaustive new report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the skill level of the American labor force is not merely slipping in comparison to that of its peers around the world, it has fallen dangerously behind.

  • Though we possess average literacy skills, we are far below the top performers.

  • our biggest deficits are in math, the most highly valued skill in the work force. Only Italians and Spaniards performed worse.

  • Over the last couple of years, employers have been saying that they can’t find enough skilled workers. Economists and other commentators have pointed out that employers would probably find them if they offered higher wages.

  • “Before the recession, inadequate education was a major problem. It continues to be.”

  • Mr. Rothwell says that the problem is getting bigger: while just under a third of the existing jobs in the nation’s 100 largest metropolitan areas require a bachelor’s degree or more, about 43 percent of newly available jobs demand this degree. And only 32 percent of adults over the age of 25 have one.

  • Yet while other countries seem to have gotten the message, racing ahead to build skills, the American skills set is standing still.

  • While younger cohorts in other countries are consistently better educated than older ones, in the United States that is not always the case: 30-year-olds in 2012 scored lower, on average, in literacy tests than 30-year-olds in 1994.

  • The mediocre skills exhibited by Americans in their early 20s today map precisely onto the mediocre scores recorded by American teenagers in 2000.

  • The highly skilled in the United States earn a much larger wage premium over unskilled workers than in most, if not all, other advanced nations, where regulations, unions and taxes tend to temper inequality

  • “The human capital base in the United States is quite thin,”

  • United States was the first country to provide for universal high school education.

  • The math and reading scores of American teenagers in O.E.C.D. tests have not improved over the last 10 years. And our college graduation rates have slipped substantially below those of other rich nations.

  • But as the O.E.C.D. notes, two-thirds of low-skilled Americans were born in the United States. And the United States has a poor track record in improving immigrants’ skills.

  • Not only is inequality particularly steep, little is done to redress the opportunity deficit of poorer students. Public investment in the early education of disadvantaged children is meager. Teachers are not paid very well, compared with other countries. And the best teachers tend to end up teaching in affluent schools.

  • American college graduates, notes Mr. Schleicher, perform worse than their peers elsewhere: “looking at certificates, the United States looks much better than looking at skills.”

  • In other words, even if the American skill set is poor compared with that of its peers, who cares?

  • the American labor market is good at attracting talented foreigners, offering them more money than they could make elsewhere.

  • What would happen if America’s influx of talent stalled?

  • Consider Japan, which has some of the most skilled workers in the O.E.C.D but uses them poorly.

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    • A massive investment in pre-k to higher education investment where everyone is at the table; accountable and affordable education with metrics and business at the table.
  • “Japan has fantastic human capital but uses it quite poorly,”

  • It has mediocre assets but is good at extracting value from them.”

  • Here, human capital has to be painstakingly built, one cohort at a time. That work cannot begin soon enough.

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