R.I. needs to teach workers, study says

BYLINE: Benjamin N. Gedan, Journal Staff Writer

The chronic problem is getting worse and poses a serious threat to the state's economic health.

CRANSTON - The state's failure to produce skilled workers has placed it on a "collision course" that will yield stagnating incomes and a sluggish economy, according to a new study by the Rhode Island Economic Policy Council, an advisory panel made up of leaders in government, education and business.

The study, titled Education and Workforce Scorecard, says the average level of education in the state is declining at the same time as the skills required by employers are rapidly increasing.

That disconnect, the report says, could speed the outsourcing of jobs to China and India, while producing a spike in unemployment in Rhode Island.

"Large numbers of Rhode Island adult job seekers and incumbent workers lack the skills to fill vacancies in high-demand occupations," the study says. "Rhode Island's economy and work force are moving in opposite directions."

Many businesses already complain of their struggles to recruit skilled employees. And the state's average salary, $37,000, is $3,500 below the national average.

In Rhode Island, a state with just 1 million residents, 142,000 adults lack a high school diploma and 35,500 have limited English language skills, according to the report, released at the EPC's quarterly meeting yesterday.

The meeting - attended by Governor Carcieri, Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline and the presidents of the University of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island School of Design - was held at Taco Inc., a Cranston manufacturer that recently expanded its plant.

But Taco is clearly the exception in Rhode Island, where manufacturing jobs for less-educated workers have been disappearing.

Given the expansion of outsourcing and automation, the remaining manufacturing positions require greater levels of technical skills, experts say.

The jobs in biotechnology and information technology that Carcieri is trying to create have a far higher standard, according to Gary S. Sasse, executive director of the Rhode Island Public Expenditure Council and a member of the EPC.

"The number-one economic development problem Rhode Island faces is the presence of a skilled labor force," Sasse said in an interview. "There's a mismatch between the skills our people will have and those that industry will demand."

Real wages are falling for workers without a college education, and the failure to improve the state's education system could produce a heavy burden of social spending to support low-income residents, Sasse said.

For now, however, the situation is projected to worsen.

The educational challenges are occurring just as baby boomers prepare for retirement.

By 2020, the share of the work force that has not graduated from high school is expected to increase in Rhode Island, while the percentage of workers who have graduated from college will drop, according to data from the National Center For Public Policy and Higher Education that was included in yesterday's report.

The percentage of Rhode Island residents with a graduate degree is also projected to decline, according to the study, the latest in a series of "scorecards" that have also examined the state's economy and the science and technology sector.

"Our education system chronically under-supplies workers with higher education and over-supplies workers with little education," the report says. "Yet all sectors of the economy, even sectors such as retail and personal services . . . increasingly demand front-line workers with the skills to add value to the customer experience."

The report includes several policy recommendations, including steep increases in state spending on adult education.

Rhode Island expended about $4.3 million on adult education in the 2005 fiscal year, and the council has called for that to jump to $19 million by 2010, according to Christopher L. Bergstrom, the council's executive director.

The report notes improvement on state tests, and it praises efforts to institute a statewide science curriculum.

But in an interview yesterday, Bergstrom acknowledged that broad changes in school curricula are also necessary to prepare Rhode Island students for the so-called innovation economy.

"The skills to innovate," he said, "are skills the K-to-12 system was never designed to produce. It was designed to produce the work force for an industr ial economy."

bgedan@projo.com / (401) 277-8072