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Denigrating young 'drifters' is wrong
Exellent rebuttal to a very ugly article that made all sorts of outrageous, unsubstantiated claims. As Bill Mathis observes, such claims move beyond being merely unfounded, and they surround education issues today.
By William J. Mathis
"Drifters." That's the term the chairman of the state's Next Generation Commission, William Stenger, used to describe one-third of Vermont's young people. Rep. Michele Kupersmith and Labor Commissioner Patricia Moulton Powden repeated this pejorative name, according to news report. Using a broad brush, Stenger speculates that these young people "are probably in the unemployment line this morning" and that "the drifters might be receiving welfare checks or even sitting in a jail cell."
Such mean characterizations move beyond being merely unfounded. If our government and business leaders use phrases that bleach our young citizens in the gray haze of vagrants on the edges of criminality, we have cause to be cautious about the commission's vision for our future.
For a state with achievement at world-class levels, high graduate productivity and low crime, the criticisms are not only unduly harsh, they are factually incorrect.
The basic claim that one-third of Vermont students are unskilled and unprepared is not true. Stenger's further claim that only one-third of graduates go on to higher education is also untrue. The Vermont Student Assistance Corp.'s survey of what recent graduates actually did showed that 65 percent went on to higher education, and 23.1 percent were working full-time. Once part-time workers and the military are counted, the unemployment rate for recent Vermont high school graduates is 2.8 percent — a full point lower than the rate for the general population. Even with a liberal tolerance for measurement concerns, the facts belie the claims.
At this same presentation to the Central Vermont Workforce Investment Board, Representative Kupersmith repeated an oft-used but incorrect myth. "The employers have the jobs, but Vermont lacks the trained work force."
Unfortunately, we don't have the jobs. According to Commissioner Powden's own Vermont Department of Labor, only two of the top 20 job openings in Vermont require a college degree. Most of the rest of the top 20 are low-skill and low-paid jobs: cashiers, salespersons, teaching assistants, child care, food preparation, counter attendants, cooks, stock clerks, janitors, laborers and maids.
The two job categories in the top 20 that require a college education are nurses (260 openings) and elementary teachers (141 openings). Vermont has about 8,000 high school graduates each year — and they know how to do arithmetic. The students know there are few good jobs in Vermont. Their leaving is simply a rational and wise personal economic decision. Certainly, many come back after they have seen a bit of the world. But of the non-returners, 45 percent of them said there were no good jobs in Vermont. In fact, the Next Generation's own report clearly says that lack of good jobs is a major reason that youth do not return. In light of the evidence, Representative Kupersmith's remark is dumbfounding.
The state's director of the Human Resources Investment Council, Chip Evans, opined that Vermont is in a global economy. He therefore reasons that the solution is to give young people higher-level skills. "Build it and they will come" is a nice theme for a movie, but building a high-skill work force without high-skill jobs produces high-skill unemployment. If we first built the jobs, we would attract our very own highly qualified graduates who have said they want to come home.
The governor's scholarship program is advertised as a way to keep Vermont youth in the state. Any scholarship program is good, as higher education is becoming financially impossible for children from middle-income families. However, unless the business community steps up and creates jobs to match the talents of our youth, neither scholarships nor work force training programs will stem the outward flow.
The Next Generation Commission has produced some high-quality reports on the demographic and employment challenges facing Vermont. Yet fantasizing a phantom population of drifters to train for phantom jobs discredits their own good work. The discord between the commission's actual findings and their presentation is perplexing. Perhaps we see a continuation of the mantra of misinformed myths about education and training by some business interests. Perhaps the Workforce Investment and Human Resources Boards seek more public dollars to subsidize arguably unneeded training programs.
Faced with a declining and graying population, the state needs a long-term economic plan. Certainly education and training are important for work-force creation and sustenance. But other factors are vital, as well. Courageous business leadership, transportation, government policy stability, cultural amenities and encouraging "economies of one" are ripe areas for exploration. However, if we misjudge the problem while coloring it with unseemly language, we are less likely to achieve our common goals of a robust economy and a good society.
William J. Mathis is superintendent of schools for the Rutland Northeast Supervisory Union and teaches education finance at the University of Vermont.
— William J. Mathis
Rutland Herald
2007-07-11
INDEX OF OUTRAGES
Pages: 380
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