Adult Education English As a First Language: U.S. Workers Not Prepared for Jobs of the Future

Got Skills?
U.S. workers are not prepared for the jobs of the future.
by Carol D'Amico

Keeping older workers in the workforce is not the whole solution to the challenge of having enough workers during the next century. As Alan Reynolds notes elsewhere in this issue, businesses and policymakers can help alleviate the forthcoming worker dearth by encouraging older people to remain in the workforce rather than retiring early. But that alone will not suffice. We need to have enough of the right kinds of worker. Therein lies a whole host of other challenges. We will not only experience a quantity shortage of workers early in the next century but a quality shortage as well. Evidence suggests that we very likely will have a mismatch between workers’ skills and the skill requirements of the available jobs.

When the Baby Boomers become eligible to end their careers at the traditional retirement age of sixty-five, around 2010, we will see a shift in the types of job available. For the first time, the number of higher-skilled jobs will outnumber low-skilled ones. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has quantified the ever-increasing reading, mathematics, and reasoning skills that will be required to take advantage of the jobs that will be growing in the economy during the next ten to fifteen years. So when the Baby Boomers start to leave the workforce in droves, more will be expected of those workers who enter and remain in the labor force. In a country full of workers who are unemployable or capable of working only on the lower rungs of the skill and wage ladder, economic growth will slow to a crawl.

The process has already begun. Last fall, the Boeing Company’s inability to find qualified workers caused a growing late-order backlog that was at least partially responsible for the Seattle jet manufacturer’s operating loss of $696 million. Across the country, hundreds of firms of varying sizes have been forced to turn down work worth millions of dollars.

Today an estimated 200,000-400,000 high-technology-related jobs are vacant in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that during the next ten years 1.3 million new high-tech jobs will become available and we are preparing only a fraction of the workers needed to fill those jobs. Unless we make major changes in our education and job training system, American workers will not be able to take them.

The high-paying jobs of the future will be financially rewarding, intellectually stimulating, and physically undemanding, but only those with the appropriate skills will be able to take advantage of them. These jobs will not go unfilled. Globally, there is a vast supply of skilled labor. Already American companies are turning to workers in India, Europe, and South America to fill high-tech jobs because they cannot find qualified American workers. The challenge is to prepare American workers to compete for these positions. The single most important goal for this country ought to be improving the quality of our education system substantially—at all levels.

Pitifully Unprepared

According to a recent survey commissioned by the National Association of Manufacturers, more than six of every ten U.S. companies believe that their current workforce has serious deficiencies in basic job attitudes (such as timeliness, absenteeism, and staying at work all day). More than half find that their workers have serious shortcomings in basic math, written language, and reading comprehension skills. Almost half the companies surveyed believe that their current workforce lacks the ability to read and translate drawings, diagrams, and flow charts.

Companies are spending more to educate and train workers. A recent survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that nearly 93 percent of establishments with fifty or more employees provide or finance formal training for their workforce. Nearly 70 percent of employees in these establishments have received some formal on-the-job training. These companies spent $7.7 billion on in-house trainers and another $5.5 billion on outside trainers. Several surveys suggest that approximately one-third of all such training is in basic skills such as reading, writing, and mathematics and that most recipients are high-school graduates.

It appears that employers will need to upgrade skills of existing workers for the foreseeable future. A 1992 U.S. Department of Education study of adult literacy in the U.S. found that approximately 40 percent of U.S. adults are functionally illiterate in reading, mathematics, and the ability to understand simple documents such as maps and train schedules. And 14 to 16 percent of American-born college graduates tested were functionally illiterate.

The literacy study does provide one perverse ray of hope: the cohort of people over fifty-five years old is much less literate than the younger adult population. Therefore, as the older workers leave the workforce the average literacy level should rise slightly. Unfortunately, the forthcoming replacement workers—those between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four—will be insufficiently prepared for the high-tech jobs to come, especially compared with their international competitors.

According to the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), only about one-fourth of U.S. twelfth-graders can perform math and reading proficiently and one-third of the total are below basic levels of proficiency. Thus millions of young people leave high school each year without the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in the workforce. Many of those who go on to college will be unprepared to benefit from higher education: approximately 30 percent of entering freshmen need remedial courses in reading, writing, and mathematics. (See "The College Payoff Illusion," by Edwin Rubenstein, in this issue.)

In core academic subjects, U.S. high school graduates fare poorly compared with their peers across the globe. Recently, American twelfth-graders scored near the bottom on the Third International Mathematics and Science Study, and U.S. students placed nineteenth out of twenty-one nations in math and sixteenth out of twenty-one in science. Our advanced students fared even worse, scoring dead last in physics. The evidence suggests that, compared to the rest of the industrialized world, our students lag seriously in critical areas vital to our economic future.

Good education will be indispensable for economic success. The United States will not remain competitive with the rest of the world if large numbers of our employees are unable to perform the work required of them.

Improving Education

K-12 Education. Improving our elementary and secondary education system is the most cost-effective way to increase the number of skilled workers in the workforce. Increasing the number of high-school graduates with appropriate reading, writing, mathematics, reasoning, and computer skills would go a long way toward filling the available jobs and laying a suitable foundation on which workers could upgrade their skills once in the workforce.

During the past fifteen years, the U.S. has tried every conceivable "reform" to improve our education system. We have spent millions of dollars tinkering with it by adding more school days, testing students, testing teachers, building new facilities, buying computers, and trying hundreds of faddish programs. The test scores alluded to earlier show the dismal results. Rather than trying to reform the system, we need to redefine it entirely, by injecting competition and incentives to achieve—not just for students but, perhaps more importantly, for teachers and administrators as well.

With this in mind, more than thirty states around the country have instituted charter schools. These are new forms of public school run by teachers, parents, community organizations, and private companies. They adopt various approaches to education, and parents elect to enroll their children in these schools insofar as the schools appear likely to meet their children’s needs. Charter schools cost no more than regular public schools (and often less), and are far less bureaucratized and burdened by regulations. They are held accountable for their performance by the public body that chartered them—in most cases a local or state school board. Evaluations by Hudson Institute and other organizations suggest that charter schools can improve the basic education of America’s youth while placing healthy competitive pressure on regular public schools.

Other attempts at injecting competition into primary and secondary education have not spread as quickly. Milwaukee and Cleveland are using vouchers, in which tax dollars appropriated for education go directly to low-income parents instead of schools. Parents choose the schools that best fit their children’s needs, whether public or private, just like their wealthier counterparts. Several cities have privately funded voucher programs that work similarly. Preliminary evidence from these programs suggests that they increase achievement of participating students, particularly compared to their peers who do not participate.

Post-Secondary Education. The U.S. may well have the best system of higher education in the world, but it is showing distinct signs of decline. As we noted in our 1997 Hudson Institute study Workforce 2020, "higher education has lowered its standards and the rigors of its curriculum to accommodate the large numbers of people enrolling. It is a common refrain from employers that a college degree does not mean what it used to. . . . Graduates may be . . . surprised to find themselves unqualified to fill available high-skill jobs in the future."

The U.S. has a serious mismatch between higher education and economic needs. A Hudson Institute study by Chester E. Finn Jr. found that more college degrees were granted in home economics than in mathematics, and more in "protective services" than in all the physical sciences combined. Yet a large share of the unfilled jobs today and those that are growing in the economy are in the technical fields, and we are not preparing enough people in these areas. We need to encourage postsecondary institutions to be more flexible and to respond to labor market demands.

There is a common perception in this country that we need to deal with. Americans are infatuated with the college degree and believe it to be a ticket to the middle class. Yet, as Edwin Rubenstein notes, not all college grads experience equal financial gains. For instance, degree holders in the social sciences earn less than those who earned their degrees in the physical sciences and technical fields. Furthermore, a large share of the fastest-growing occupations in the years to come will require education beyond high school but not necessarily a four-year college degree. Colleges and students should make a conscious effort to ensure that a student’s huge investment in a college education pays off in useful skills and knowledge.

Adult Education. The most obvious way to increase the pool of skilled workers is to encourage every person eligible for the labor force to be in the labor force and to help workers upgrade their skills to take advantage of available jobs. Most communities have no real strategy for helping adults cope with the realities of the new economy. Most urgently needed is an information system that informs adults about economic trends and job availability. Many adults also need help in analyzing their own strengths and figuring out how to enhance their skills to compete for available jobs. Also, although most communities have a myriad of educational programs available through colleges and universities, all too few of these are well-organized and made convenient for working adults.

Decentralization, Incentives

Training people for the workforce and matching jobs and workers are largely local matters that call for decentralized approaches. Individuals armed with timely information about employment opportunities can figure out for themselves which skills are most likely to advance their careers. The problem today is that most people lack access to good information about labor markets or quality education programs that suit their interests and abilities. Labor market information programs operated by state governments and funded through employer taxes are not designed to provide this type of consumer information. In most communities, no one entity is responsible for providing labor market or career development information to adults preparing for or already in the workforce. And most high-school and college career counseling programs are woefully inadequate.

Federal job training programs—which now cost approximately $25 billion per year—do not help most workers. These programs are designed largely for adults who are entering the workforce for the first time, have spotty work histories, or lack the basic skills required for entry level jobs. The programs are highly regulated by federal and state governments, and notoriously ineffective.

Employers have been much more successful at job training, spending millions of dollars upgrading the skills of their workers through creation of firm-specific training programs, partnerships with competitors, and contracting with community and technical colleges to provide appropriate classes. Government and community resources can support these types of program rather than prop up ones that have long outlived their usefulness.

Unless we build the skilled workforce we need, it will become increasingly difficult for manufacturing and technology-driven companies to meet production goals in the U.S. If that happens, more jobs will move to companies—and countries—where workers have the necessary skills. Workers, firms, and countries that have the foresight to deal with this problem will have a distinct advantage in the years to come.

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