High Unemployment and Jobs-Skills Mismatch: A role for robust CTE!

FRESNO - This city is grappling with one of the most troubling contradictions of the new economy: Even as it has one of the nation's highest unemployment rates, it has thousands of job openings. . . . Evidence of a skills mismatch became increasingly clear in Fresno after the housing bubble burst, causing joblessness to nearly triple. Unemployment hovers at 16.9 percent, but managers at the 7,000-employee Community Medical Centers say they cannot find enough qualified technicians, therapists, or even custodians willing and able to work with medical waste. The situation is much the same at Jain Irrigation, which cannot find all the workers it wants for $15-an-hour jobs running expensive machinery that spins out precision irrigation tubing at 600 feet a minute, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. "The job requires at least a high school education, and maybe some technical training, but we don't seem to be getting the right people applying," said Aric J. Olson, Jain's president. . . . "For years, I thought the only challenge was that businesses were not growing and that we needed to find ways to increase demand," said Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin (R), who before being elected in 2008 co-founded the Regional Jobs Initiative, aimed at relieving chronic unemployment. But a 2004 survey of Fresno area employers discovered thousands of job openings despite relatively high unemployment. "It was a total light bulb moment for me," Swearengin said. "The survey revealed a whole other problem. Certainly, a company needs demand for a product. But if they don't have people with the skills to fill jobs, it is hard to sustain growth." To read more, click here.

The second is a report released at an American Youth Policy Forum in Washington D.C. The report, Pathways to Prosperity is the result of an extensive study of our national failure to prepare millions of young people to lead successful lives as adults, despite decades of efforts to reform education and billions of dollars of expenditures. Evidence of this failure is everywhere: 

·         in the dropout epidemic that plagues our high schools and colleges;

·         in the roughly half of our young people who reach their mid-20s without earning a postsecondary degree or industry-recognized credential;

·         and in teen and young adult employment rates not seen since the Great Depression.

Pathways to Prosperity, a new report from the Harvard Graduate School of Education, argues that our national strategy for education and youth development has been too narrowly focused on an academic, classroom-based approach. Meanwhile, many other advanced industrial nations are succeeding with a broader, more holistic approach that places greater emphasis on career and technical education and work-based learning. Pathways to Prosperity contends that in order to regain the educational leadership we held for more than a century, the United States must build a more comprehensive network of pathways to serve youth in high school and beyond. To read more, click here.