Closing America's Job Gap: The Role of Higher Education Part I

Hello, everyone. I'm Bob Huckfeld, Director of the UC Center, and it's a pleasure to introduce our speaker today, Mary Walshok, from University of California, San Diego. Mary's going to be talking about innovation and job creation, something that's near and dear to all of our hearts and our sons' and daughters' hearts and our friends' hearts. Thanks, Mary, for coming. I thought I'd talk for about 35 or 40 minutes. Is that the right range? And I hope I'll say enough interesting and or provocative things that we'll get a conversation going. And I'm very, very pleased about the mix in the audience. It's nice to see young people who kind of know what the reality of the world is coming out of college and coming out of universities today. And some of us who are policy makers or leaders in the university can make a difference. Because I take a rather critical perspective of where we are at this moment in time, but I'm impossibly optimistic about how we can move forward in a positive way. And I just want to share, in large part because there's students here today, a little bit about why I became a social scientist, and in particular a sociologist. I grew up in California in the 40s, 50s, graduated from high school in 1960, so I probably could be some of your grandmothers, a grandmother to some of you. And my parents were immigrants from Sweden, and I grew up in a Swedish-speaking home. So like many Asian kids and Hispanic kids who go home and speak a different language at home, we did that at home. And it was very interesting because it was the 1950s in California, right? Where everybody was living in a tract house with a two-car garage, and it was the sort of leave it to beaver days, and I didn't live in a leave it to beaver household. And so I began very, very early to feel the differences that come with different social histories, different ethnic histories, different religious values. And I think it was also significant for the women who were in the room. You will remember what the world was like for women. All you have to do is watch Mad Men on the AMC, right? And it's, you know, there's my young adulthood revisited. It was not a great time, and there were lots of smart women. There were lots of smart kids across a variety of groups who never did go on to college or university life. And in fact, I want to share this story because I think it does sort of connect to everything else I'm going to say. I grew up in a place called Palm Springs. I went to Palm Springs High School, and it was a fully integrated, it's the only high school in Palm Springs. And the smartest girl in our class was a girl by the name of Helen Romero. And we all knew Helen was the smartest girl. But this was 1960, right? Helen did not go to college. And when I graduated from college and actually was in graduate school visiting the home of good friends on one of our breaks, Helen Romero was serving me dinner in the Hicks family household. And I was smart enough to know what's wrong with this picture. The world has changed in wonderful ways, and lots of gaps have been closed or are closing. But there are new gaps that are emerging that have less to do with gender or race than they do with national character and our attitude about the value of our people and what we need to invest in people in order to assure that we can function in a new global economy. And those are the anomalies that fascinate me now. I'm a dean of extension at UC San Diego, professor in sociology, and have spent my life studying work and the economy. And what I'm going to talk with you about today are some of the anomalies that I'm finding most interesting in the American landscape. And one of them is that even though we've had the highest unemployment we've had in decades in this country, there are still an estimated 3 million jobs that go unfilled. In San Diego alone, there are 5,000 jobs for engineers and computer scientists and technical community college level technical workers that are going unfilled because our educational institutions are not producing the kinds of workers that those companies need. Another thing that has happened in this country in contrast to years ago is it's taking longer and longer for young people to finish their college educations. I will assume that everybody sitting up here in the front is graduating in four years, but that means you are not the majority because the majority of students take up to six years. I think there's another development. I'm going to talk about it much more in a moment. Ninety percent of the new jobs that are created in this country are in companies, are in small companies, and in companies that are five years old or less. And I'm going to suggest that much of our education system is preparing us for the jobs that are going away, not for the jobs that are being created. And if you think about it, advances in technology and globalization, both of which are important forces, create imperatives for larger companies to be more efficient, to move their operations abroad, to use technology to reduce costs, and your biggest costs are labor. So large and established companies are incented to reduce employment, not grow it. But it's the small entrepreneurial companies that are still building their capacity, that are still building their marketing linkages, that are on the move, that need lots of talent. They need it early and they often need it locally. Something I think you all know, 50% of the Fortune 500 list turns over about every 25 or 30 years. And we tend to think of companies like General Motors and General Electric who have been here forever. We forget all the companies that have fallen off the list and we don't pay attention to companies like Qualcomm in my community, which is only 27 years old, but is a Fortune 500 company. And so who the employers are is a very, very important question. And then a second data point, or final data point I want to share with you, is even though we focus so much on the baccalaureate degree, when you look at studies of where the jobs are going to be, about 33% of the 47 million jobs we expect to create in the next decade will require a bachelor's degree. Another 30% will require a community college or skills certification degree. But again, in very specific areas, which is what I'm going to talk about. So what I'm suggesting is there's a mismatch between where jobs are and where the emerging jobs are coming from, and how we're preparing young adults, whether it's in community colleges, state universities, or universities, for that future. And quickly, you're all policy folks and social science majors, so these are obvious points, but I do want to underscore that the new realities in the workplace are really profound. And I want to share a story of globalization with you, so that you don't think when I say globalization, I'm just talking about Apple computer. Because when you hear globalization, people think about Toyota cars and Apple computer. I want to give you two examples from San Diego, California, of globalization. One of them is a woman by the name of Susie Spafford, a perky little blonde who went to San Diego State University and got a degree in art. And she started out making little greeting cards with yellow duckies on them. You know, happy birthday, happy Mother's Day. She's a wonderful illustrator of almost cartoon-like characters. And she eventually branded it as Susie's Zoo. If you go into a Hallmark card shop, you go into an airport card shop, you'll see Susie's cards. Susie began selling her cards at art fairs on Saturday and Sundays in Balboa Park in San Diego. And then she started going to regional trade shows where greeting card shops and novelty shops go to buy product. And after her first trade show, she had a demand that exceeded her capacity to serve the supply, which was her, her mother, and her husband. They were the company. And Susie began to go into production. Susie's my age, and 35 years later, she's manufacturing cups with little ducks in Taiwan. She's manufacturing cards and jewelry and baby gifts, all on the little ducky theme. And she is a global enterprise. But she started as a graduate of San Diego State University at a craft fair. But she knew how to navigate her way through the maze of building an enterprise and eventually going global. A second example I'd like to share with you, and I'm not sharing UC examples because, again, in the tech world, it's so much more obvious, but I'm trying to get at who lives in California and where does their future lie. There was another wonderful, iconic person in San Diego, California by the name of Arthur Porras. Arthur grew up in El Centro. His father was a farm laborer and his mother was a housekeeper. And he also went to San Diego State University. He was the first one in his family and moved to San Diego and also majored in art. But Arthur ended up working for one of the big furniture chains that was based in San Diego. We're talking about the 1960s. And helping them design their window treatments and their displays to sell the furniture. Very, very gifted guy. So he got invited by the owner of the chain to put together their exhibition for a big L.A. furniture fair. And at this furniture fair, he was discovered. And the reason I know this story is that Arthur and I were at a dinner party one night and I was talking and he leaned forward and said to me, He spoke perfect Swedish. And he asked, I mean this is a very dark-skinned, black-haired guy. And I said, I said, how do you speak Swedish? And he told me the story of what happened to his life at that furniture fair in L.A. in the late 60s. A Swedish furniture maker known as Dux. Some of you know Duxiana Beds. You see their ads. They sell in this country. Came up to him and loved his display. Loved the use of color. Loved the way he put it all together. And offered him a job to be a designer with the company. He said, I'm sorry, I live in Chula Vista, California. I have three kids. They play soccer. My wife's a public school teacher. I'm not moving to Sweden. No problem. You can work out of your home. It's the computer age. It was just beginning to be the computer age. And travel. So Arthur then goes on to describe to me how he would design his furniture and then send stuff over and fly over to Sweden for approvals. He would go to Portugal for his fabrics because the colors he liked and the fabrics were the best in Portugal. And they manufactured in Taiwan. So he would have to go to Taiwan. And their U.S. marketing firm was in New York City. So at least twice a year he went to New York City. But he always got home to coach soccer in Chula Vista. That's the global economy. And that's what we're not communicating with kids. We're not helping them see that first-generation college goers, that artistic, entrepreneurial people who grow up in small towns can build a global enterprise that not only creates wealth for them but creates jobs in their region. And it's because of this second reason. Because of the technological advances, it's possible to do that. But also, because of technology, all jobs are requiring higher and higher-order skills and a capacity for continuous reinvention and innovation. It's not like you learn American history once, you get past the test, and it's over. You're learning over and over and over again. The demographic shifts are also incredibly important when thinking about jobs. I'm doing a project in northeastern Indiana in a town which is the hip and knee replacement capital of the world. This is a growth industry. It's Warsaw, Indiana. And again, you have to be a certain age to understand what is happening as people age. But all of these joint and prosthetic devices that older and older people require is creating a boom business. But also, the rise in health clinics, the rise in exercise and fitness programs, the exponential increase in tourism, the growth in learning and retirement programs. In other words, if you want to know the products and the services for which there's going to be a demand, just look at demography. And that's what I always tell my kids. Look at who's in the second grade today. Look at who's a senior in high school, because those are going to be the customers, the patients, the clients, the co-workers of the future. And this transition of baby boomers has profound implications for jobs. And when I share the 10 top jobs, you'll see why. The other new reality that you hear everywhere, and I brought some op-ed pieces from the Union Tribune newspaper. I write a lot about jobs, if anybody wants to pick up on them, where we drive home this point that there's the distinction between the well-educated college grad and the blue-collar worker, the skilled worker, the person who does things and the person who knows things is one of the worst problems we have in this country today. Because even with a bachelor's degree, you've got to be able to do something, right? If it's only to create a website about a biotech company. But even with a welding degree, you've got to know a little bit about physics if you're going to do a nuclear plant welding. You've got to know a little bit about composite materials if you're going to weld a propeller for a windmill, for wind energy. And we've sort of made this artificial distinction. There's the college-bound and the rest. And I think it's a huge problem in this country today. Another example, and giving away my age, but at Palm Springs High School, I went to my 50th high school reunion, guys. And my best friend in high school was the smart boy who went off to Harvard and never came home, right? Went straight through, got not only an undergraduate degree but a PhD in economics. But we were reflecting on the fact that at Palm Springs High School, he had to take woodshop and auto mechanics as well as the college prep. And I took, I think it was sewing or home economics. But there was this notion that you needed to do something. And he said to me, as an economist, and then of course he worked in his father's hand laundry, so he understood the world of work. I worked in my father's smorgasbord restaurant, rolling meatballs, bussing trays, taking cash. And we were reflecting on, do kids growing up today have that range of experience? And understand that thinking and doing are both important. So what are the megatrends that are affecting jobs in light of these four global, if you will, more macro trends? And I'm going to go through these really quickly. But I think it's very interesting because if you read Manpower, which is a temporary work agency, came out with a report about six months ago. The highest demand job in America today is a welder. 100,000 jobs for welders that are unfilled. But part of the problem is those jobs are working with materials the old fashioned welders haven't been trained to use. So we put the need to repurpose skilled and technical workers as a key issue in America today. I did some interviewing at Michigan State University where they've got a big biofuels initiative. And their vice president for research, when I said, well, what kind of jobs do you think this is going to result in? Lots of high value, high wage jobs. And he said, well, there'll be some of those, some of the men and women in white coats. But actually, Mary, biofuels is a pipe fitters industry. And think about a pipe fitter. Think about if we really do all the promising things, a positive environmental strategy would be. My sink would have four or five different holes in it, right? And how you would pipe my house and get all that stuff out into the pipes in the street. I mean, these are complicated and new kinds of skills. The second thing is this extraordinary demand we have in this country for engineering and computing skills. And you'll see that one of the fastest growing jobs is mobile media. They can't hire enough in terms of mobile apps. But also, home-based businesses where people are providing web services and engineering consulting services. It's very interesting how these things are shaking out. Health IT, the poor administrative records, but also the lack of articulation of client records, even within divisions within the same hospital system or clinic, is another megatrend we see. And the education of adults across a multitude of practice areas. There's a reason all of these proprietary educational providers are emerging, folks. There's a market. And these are adult learners who cannot go full-time to a university of California or can't get the courses they need with the overcrowding at the state university and the community colleges. And so if you look at job trends, teaching adults in the military, in education and training programs at hospitals, in these new and emerging for-profit and not-for-profit companies. Another trend, and I'm going to really stick on this one in a few minutes, is international skills. Language translation, cultural, social, and political know-how, international law, regulatory affairs. I had a Korean-American student at UCSD who was crestfallen, I think his parents were crestfallen, when he didn't get into Bolt for law school. He got into Hastings. And he came to me and he said, what am I going to do, I'll never get a good job. And I said, Kim, do you speak Korean? Oh, yeah, of course I speak Korean. Do you read and write in Korean? Yes, I read and write in Korean. You're going to get a terrific job. Don't worry about it. You're a lawyer who can read and write and speak Korean? Do you realize how that's going to differentiate you in the marketplace? I think I made him feel better. I have no idea what his parents thought. But the fact is, I run a big extension program at UC San Diego. We have more. Here's the data point, you'll see it again in a minute. It's so disturbing to me. Extension has more enrollments in foreign language classes than the entire UCSD undergraduate campus. Kids are not learning languages. And kids whose parents, like mine, speak Swedish, I can read Swedish at the second grade level. There are only 8 million Swedes in the world, so that may not be as much of a crisis. But if you're a Spanish speaker, a Chinese speaker, a Vietnamese speaker, a Portuguese speaker, Brazil, boy, do you want to know your language? And do you want to be able to read and write? And as we argue, it's not just so you can represent a computer company. It's so you can talk to people across a desk at a hotel. It's so that if you have a patient who comes into your clinic, a woman with gynecological issues, you can communicate with her or talk to a family about the needs of their children. And to me, as a Swede with parents who spoke four languages and could read and write in three, it's amazing to me that everybody in America is just not very good at languages. So, where are some of the great jobs based on these mega trends? Well, embedded engineering, and again, I'm not the engineer, but it drives me crazy, right? My car has a voice that speaks to me, right? Your GPS system, your heating system now turns itself off and on in your house and talks to you. That's what we mean by embedded engineering. And more and more, these sort of, what I still call automated processes and the companies that produce the goods and services have demands. Mobile media, mobile apps. I live in San Diego, very, very large wireless sector. What is Qualcomm, which started as a company in the 1970s in a field called remote signal processing, which was contracts with Navy ships and aviation around communications and having clear wireless telephony. They morphed into a telephone company and now they don't consider themselves a phone company, they are your wireless apps. All the stuff that's inside that little smartphone, as we call it. And where are they putting all of their R&D money right now? Health, mobile health. So they're looking for programming people and people who have knowledge about health issues for a more preventative approach to health and ways in which people can use their smartphone to connect to their doctors, to be reminded to take their pills, to be told where the nearest clinic is if they have a crisis. It's fascinating. Occupational health and safety. Again, as work environments become more and more sophisticated, issues related to chemicals and production are still very, very important. I mentioned English translation and foreign languages, renewable energy and the greening of all jobs. In the little book that a couple of colleagues and I did called Closing America's Job Gap, we have a profile. This is from just a couple years ago. Actually, she got her teaching credential through UC San Diego and couldn't get a teaching job. So she got a job as a clerk, receptionist, in a hotel so she could eat and came to Extension and enrolled in a certificate program in environmental practices. Six or seven courses. Ways in which you can light and cool and recycle and renew and organize the workplace to be environmentally sensitive. And so she started telling the manager at the hotel, you know, if we just did this with the paper, we would save X percent. If you would just change the bulbs. Some very obvious and not so obvious things. They were so pleased with all the suggestions she made that she is now the environmental services officer for the entire hotel chain. And she never went back to teaching. Well, she never got into teaching. But she was smart, she was literate, right? She'd gone through her college education. The job wasn't there she was trained for. But she went back and developed some skills in an area where there was high demand. And what we're seeing is across all work sites, people are looking for people with knowledge about positive environmental practices. We put action sports innovators on this because we happen in San Diego to have a really big action sports cluster. Started in the 50s with one surfboard company. And now we have over 600 companies. And oh, I just drew a blank on the fabulous redhead skateboarder, Sean. You know who I mean. Yes, thank you. Sean White. You know, he's now got a skateboard company that's doing about three million a year. And who knows where it's gonna go. But it's everything from helmets for... Designing helmets for cyclists with wireless phones built in. For helicopter skiers. For surfboards, skateboards, wetsuits. And of course, golf clubs. And all the composite materials. Callaway Golf, Appsworth Golf. And the reason we put this on here is this is an expanding industry. And nobody thinks about it as a place to go to work. And these industries use a lot of engineers. They're global. I mean, the surfboards are selling all over China and Japan and Italy. They don't just sell in Southern California. So some of these former surfer dudes actually do have a jacket and a tie on the back of the door in case an Asian buyer comes in. But otherwise, they're wearing their flowered shirts. And so thinking about the growth, again, demography. The growing middle class in Asia. The aging but health-oriented middle class in Europe and the United States. And thinking about what are the industries as well as the general interest in health and fitness. Setting up an independent consulting practice is one of the highest growth areas. I want to read a quote to you because I think this is where we fail students the most. According to Bloomberg Business Week, the number of self-employed who work exclusively from home increased from 3.47 million in 99 to 4.34 million in 205. The total population of working from home at least some of the time increased from 9.4 million to 11.10 million. That's almost 10% of the labor force. And the expectation is that these home-based businesses are going to grow over time. In the old days, for my generation, if you said, I'm a consultant or I work at home, it meant you were unemployed, right? Nowadays, it could mean that you're running a web design and e-marketing business, that you're doing accounting, that you're producing greeting cards or marketing personal services, or that you're doing feature writing for various newsletters and magazines. And basically, the future, it's very likely that one out of four of us will be working in these small, more home-based businesses. But in order to run these kinds of businesses, you need to have a product, you need to know how to use the web, you need to know how to do accounting, marketing. In other words, you've got to bundle a lot of skills. And a sociology degree doesn't equip you to do that. So the question is, how do we help smart kids do that? And I mentioned geriatric health care. Not just the production of all the implants and prosthetics and vitamins and health foods that the geriatric set is going after, but actually health care, so that oncology nursing, regrettably, is one of the fastest-growing fields in America. So what are the public education systems in the West doing? Given these trends and given where things are developing. Now I'm the glass-half-empty person, okay? For a few minutes. No foreign language requirements. Why should we require kids to take Spanish or Portuguese or French or Chinese? If they're interested, they should take it. You know, not everybody's good at languages. And no meaningful work experience. I teach in my sociology class, almost every kid over the last ten years who's had a job that's been in retail, they aren't working in a desert ham laundry. They aren't working in a factory. They aren't getting internships or jobs in some of the research and manufacturing settings that are in our region. And we need to ask ourselves, can we do a better job, I would argue, starting in high school? Of connecting even very academically gifted kids to work environments. And very little project-based learning. You interview employers almost every... Even the person who's in a home-based business is having to timeline and manage the activities of multiple players, right? They have to keep a calendar, they have to do their accounting, they have to do their billing, they have to meet deadlines, they have to get expertise when they take on a special client, they have to know how to find that expertise, they have to know how to value it, make a deal, move quickly, negotiate. And we don't give a lot of that kind of experience in our classes. I do ask students in my sociology class to do field work in the community, and I get very high rankings from students because of that. Not because I'm a good teacher, but because it's the first time I ever met somebody who's working in biotech or in healthcare. So more and more opportunities for project-based learning and meaningful work experience. And this relates to reward individual performance, not teamwork. The other thing that I think we need to revisit as educators in this country, from high school through college, is the importance of advisors and mentors. There's tremendously good research on schools that have very successful entrepreneurship programs. One study recently happened to choose my university as one, but also MIT. Their schools of engineering have programs within them to educate kids about entrepreneurship and starting companies, but they attach them to mentors. The mentors are volunteers. The universities don't pay for them. And they have much higher rates of success. We know this, too, about junior and senior high school kids, how important mentors could be. And yet we don't systematically build it into our educational experience. And then there's a disconnect between those who teach and train and those who employ and develop. I won't be so bold as to say this is true across all research universities, but I will say, outside of the school of engineering and the school of medicine, most of my faculty at UC San Diego do not interact with people who own restaurants.