The education generation?

The perfect storm?
Glenn DuBois wouldn’t put it that way. To the contrary, the chancellor of the Virginia Community College System is an up-beat, can-do guy who prefers to meet challenges rather than moan about them.
Still, in an interview with The Daily Progress editorial board, Mr. DuBois said he wished to engender a sense of urgency about certain problems facing the commonwealth’s education system.

Elements of the brewing storm:
—Loss of America’s “most educated generation” of workers as they age and retire.
—Replacement of that generation with a new pool of workers who are less educated than their predecessors.
—Simultaneous competition from other nations that are catching up to America, and planning to pass us, in terms of workforce education and skills.
—An economic downturn and budget constraints that threaten to limit funding from education just when, as the chancellor sees it, needs are growing.
The World War II generation was called “the greatest generation.” Their children, the baby-boomers, are “the most educated,” whose productivity and creativity have energized America’s economic engine. They have been aided by the contributions made by the best and brightest young people from other nations who have come here for schooling and stayed for opportunity.

But other nations have caught onto the America’s secret, and are catching up to America’s level. They are doing so by intensively educating and training their young people. And young people who may come here now for higher education are more likely than ever to return home with their new skills to help advance their own nations.
Meanwhile, this country’s “domestic production” of skilled and educated workers may be flagging, says the chancellor. We seem complacent about high-school dropout rates, he said, while some other advanced nations have a dropout rate of zero.
“Domestic production” of educated workers may be a national problem, but it is particularly acute in Virginia.
Today the commonwealth has, overall, a highly skilled workforce because it has been able to recruit talent from other states, other nations. As competition for educated workers increases, that will be harder to do. Already, only 24 percent of Virginia-born workers, ages 25-64, possess a bachelor’s degree or higher.
That puts Virginia in the bottom quartile of states in developing and retaining highly educated workers.

The next generation of U.S. workers, Mr. DuBois says, includes higher percentages of African-Americans and Hispanics, which historically have had lower education rates. “We have to change that history,” he says. If these groups are going to supply more of America’s workers, then we have to educate them in order to have skilled workers.
And all this at a time when state and national leaders, and taxpayers everywhere, are worried about the current fiscal crisis and the legitimate need to save money.

The economic cycle will swing upward again, of course. And then America, and Virginia, will need skilled workers to fuel resurgent growth.
The question to ask now is: Will we have them when we need them?