Remember Mike Rowe? —2M Open Jobs, but skills Mismatch, What’s wrong with an Honest Day’s Work?
In manufacturing alone, Carnevale said, “while the overall number of jobs will decline by a million jobs over the next decade, there will be 3 million job openings due to retirement.”
The openings don’t really require advanced degrees, he added. But employers do need workers with solid skills in math and other disciplines. And that means more emphasis on vocational training, Carnevale believes.
So, what to do? Carnevale says it requires rethinking a college-is-for-everybody attitude. And that raises some uncomfortable issues.
“”Underneath this mismatch problem is a moral dilemma,” said Carnevale. “If we decide that we’re going to, especially in high school, begin to train people for vocations — especially vocations that … don’t require four year[s of] college — we’ll quickly find that the kids who are available for that are black, Hispanic or low income. … We’ll end up ‘tracking.’ That makes it very difficult for political leadership and policy leadership to focus on this issue. It creates a moral dilemma where we can, if we want to, make people better off. But if we stick to the purity of our ideals, which is that everybody goes to college and gets a four-year degree, we’re not going to be able to get there.”