A Sputnik moment for all Americans.

On the State of the Union:  A Sputnik Moment for All Americans

By: Andy Van Kleunen

During his State of the Union address, President Obama called for job-creating investments in innovation and infrastructure, coupled with expansions in education to give more Americans the skills to lead new companies, fill new positions and grow new industries. We applaud the President on both of these fronts. Our nation’s economic future demands a comprehensive strategy—much like those adopted by our international competitors, but to date eschewed by the U.S.—that links investments in job creation to those in education. Gone should be the days when we develop education policies that don’t have real-world relevance to the employment prospects of our workers, and to the competitive needs of American firms.

The Future is Now

Of course, the President’s call for “winning the future” could have its downsides if other policymakers take “the future” too literally. It’s stating the obvious to remind Washington that we have substantial unemployment and skills problems right now, even without the development of the next iPad, bullet train or cancer cure. Millions of today’s U.S. workers do not have the skills to fill open positions, or even enroll in their first community college course. Many are out of work, running out of unemployment insurance, and threatened by the impending de-funding or expiration of programs that could retrain them for another career. With employers saying they want to hire right now, but cannot because of a current shortage of skilled workers, federal policymakers cannot wait until the future to close that skills gap.

We likewise hope that a renewed focus on innovation for the future doesn’t inadvertently lead some policymakers backward to a re-adoption of old misperceptions about the range of skilled workers that will be needed to bring such innovations to market.

Sputnik Didn’t Create a Nation of Rocket Scientists

President Obama compared our current position in the world economy to the 1950s, when the U.S. responded to Russia’s launch of Sputnik with investments in science and technology that, in turn, helped fuel decades of economic growth. The President’s call for comparable investments in innovation and infrastructure today is right on target. But if we are to take a lesson from that first Sputnik moment, we should consider the types of post-war education investments that accompanied those earlier down-payments on science and innovation. 

Post-Sputnik economic growth didn’t happen because America set out to educate a nation of rocket scientists. Yes, it was support for scientists and engineers that led to new technological breakthroughs that got us to the moon. But the impact such breakthroughs had back here on Earth required a more diverse team of skilled Americans. Post-war expansions in higher education, such as the G.I. Bill and federal student financial aid, did not send everyone to college to get a four-year or graduate degree at Stanford or MIT. More than two-thirds of G.I. Bill recipients received technical training toward a “middle-skill credential” encompassing some occupational training past high school, but not a university degree. As a result, while the first “Sputnik moment” may have led to the invention of the semi-conductor or the Internet, such innovations would not have impacted the U.S. economy unless there were millions of newly skilled workers who could translate those advances into the production of the personal computer, the re-cabling of our telecommunications landscape, or a myriad of other productive activities requiring skilled technical workers.

Such will be the case for the innovation industries of the 21st century. Economists have documented that for every U.S. job over the next decade requiring a four-year college degree, there will be another one or two jobs requiring a middle-skill credential. We will need more scientists in our university labs, but it will be the hiring of middle-skill workers by small and mid-sized firms in high-tech manufacturing, clean energy, and biotechnology that will ultimately translate new discoveries into future economic growth.

If our education policies ignore the repeated demand by U.S. employers for more middle-skill workers, new technologies will find other places to put those ideas into production—including in overseas plants, where competitor nations continue to out-train us in direct response to the needs of their domestic industries. We’ll import and consume the fruits of these innovations, but American workers won’t be producing them.

We Need More Maya Wests AND more Kathy Proctors

How can we ensure we have the supply of skilled workers necessary to keep those jobs here in the U.S? During the President’s speech, a number of people sat with the First Lady, representing the best of what we might hope to gain with smart education investments. They included Maya West, Brandon Ford, Mikayla Nelson, and Diego Vasquez, four teenagers whose hard work, curiosity, and access to quality high school STEM programs had put them on a path to be among our future innovators.

But also sitting with the First Lady was Kathy Proctor, a laid-off worker from North Carolina’s furniture industry who, with the help of federal workforce programs, enrolled at her local community college to retrain for the region’s growing bio-medical sector. Kathy, on her own, represented in that gallery the majority of America’s future workers—adults in today’s workforce who are years from retirement, and decades beyond the K-12 pipeline. If the President’s innovation investments are successful, sheer demographics indicate there are not enough people in the K-12 pipeline, like Maya, Brandon, Mikayla or Diego, to fill the jobs in those emerging industries. We will need to be training millions more Kathy Proctors as well. 

Unfortunately, the U.S. continues to badly lag our international competitors on that front. While we are making strides in improving traditional postsecondary attainment (it was noted during Tuesday’s speech that we are now 9th on the OECD rankings for college degrees), we still are near the bottom in international rankings for investments in job training—training that is often structured to meet the needs of working adult students like Kathy at community colleges, labor-management training funds, or community-based apprenticeship programs.  Federal funding for key workforce education and training programs has declined by over 25 percent in inflation-adjusted terms over the past decade—excluding the temporary bump in Recovery Act funding that has since run out. President Obama’s new funding initiative for community colleges is a step in the right direction, but the $2 billion program is one-fifth the size he originally proposed to Congress, and represents a fraction of what we’re spending on four-year degree attainment. 

These are the imbalances that we must address, even during this time of intensifying budget battles in Washington, if we are actually going to translate President Obama’s Sputnik moment into a nationwide response in which every American is part of the team that puts our economy back on track for lift-off.

Andy Van Kleunen is Executive Director of National Skills Coalition, a broad-based coalition of employers, unions, education and training providers, and public officials working toward a vision of an America that grows its economy by investing in its people so that every worker and every industry has the skills to compete and prosper.