Education can’t fix everything

The more education the better, for Nevadans and Nevada’s economy. And unlike a natural disaster or a global financial crisis, education isn’t beyond Nevada’s control. It’s something we can do something about.

So Gov. Brian Sandoval and the Legislature deserve credit for recognizing that spending more on education is essential to a more textured economy with new industries and new opportunities — the “New Nevada,” as Sandoval is fond of saying.

Outlining his “New Nevada” vision in his State of the State address earlier this year, Sandoval said, “We know the jobs of the future will require two-thirds of us to have post-high school credentials.”

Alas, we don’t know that. And a closer look at the data reveals a decidedly grimmer economic future, an all but certain scenario that Sandoval and like-minded politicians, along with economic diversification enthusiasts, higher education administrators and everyone else enamored with “workforce development” relentlessly ignore.

According to Sandoval’s office, the claim that two-thirds of the “jobs of the future” will demand more than a high school diploma is based on a National Governors Association analysis of nationwide projections.

Nevada-specific data tell a different story. The state Department of Employment, Training and Rehabilitation projects that by 2022, slightly less than half of all Nevada jobs will require credentials beyond high school.

Another 20 percent won’t require a college degree, but instead some type of certification. Those jobs include truck driving, HVAC repair and other perfectly good but not particularly futuristic occupations. Sandoval carefully used the term “post-high school credentials,” which encompasses such training.

But just in case anyone, perhaps not unreasonably, misconstrued the governor to mean that two-thirds of tomorrow’s jobs would require, at minimum, a degree from a community college or a university, well, according to DETR, only about 30 percent will.

That doesn’t let anyone off the hook. The employees of the future will change jobs more frequently than any employees in history, and the more education someone has, the better the chance that some of her jobs will be good ones. Education bestows cultural literacy and a capacity to analyze problems and navigate obstructions — surely invaluable qualities even in jobs that don’t technically require a degree, such as, say, the care and feeding of drunken tourists. And of course education tends to make life spicier and more fulfilling.

But let’s say Nevadans heed Sandoval’s admonition, and after several years, two-thirds of adults have post-high school credentials. At least half of Nevada jobs are still going to require only a high school diploma — or less. Food service and retail employ more people than any other occupations, and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Those professions, along with others projected by DETR to comprise the dozen largest occupations of 2022 (janitor, security guard, home health aide, cashier, office clerk, etc.) require no more than a high school diploma. The average pay in those jobs: $12.15 an hour.

In other words, 40 percent of our workforce will earn substantially less than what the aforementioned workforce development advocates view as a “middle-class” salary — no matter how many Nevadans have post-high school training.

Education won’t fix that.

And when 40 percent of the workforce makes a living that is precarious at best, well, if the “free market” was going to fix that, it’d already be fixed. The 21st century market has proven incapable of delivering middle-class incomes to working people. For two of every five Nevada workers, a living wage won’t be a reality unless and until they and their fellow Nevadans make employers pay one, either via ballot initiative or through their elected representatives.

Wages are only one part of the solution. There are lots of others, from paid sick leave for employees to universal pre-K for their children to correcting financial and judicial systems that abuse the rights and the pockets of low-income workers, especially and disproportionately women and minorities. And like education, those are factors that are not — or at least not entirely — beyond our control. We can do something about those, too.

In the context of Nevada’s long and stubborn refusal to give economic diversification more than lip service, Sandoval’s agenda counts as progress.

But spending public money to train workers as per the preferences of a few favored industries – the “workforce development” policy at the heart of Sandoval’s “New Nevada” – is not an inclusive economic plan. It doesn’t even pretend to hold out the promise of broadly shared prosperity. (For that matter, it belittles education’s responsibilities to students, society and democracy, but I digress.)

“Workforce development” advocates are “for” education. And they like studies. Naturally, then, they especially like studies showing that the most important factor determining a person’s income is educational achievement.

As many if not more studies show that the most important factor determining a student’s educational achievement is the income earned by that student’s parents.

If Sandoval &Co. sincerely want to prepare Nevada students for the future, they’ll do all they can to make sure Nevada parents are paid more and treated fairly in the present.

Hugh Jackson is a freelance journalist and a part-time instructor at UNLV. Follow him on Twitter: @jhughjackson.