By Catherine Rampell
via economix.blogs.nytimes.com

We’ve written several blog posts about the small share of American college students majoring in the so-called STEM fields — science, technology, engineering and mathematics — with the implicit premise that more bachelor’s degrees in technical fields is both desirable on a macroeconomic level and is professionally advantageous at the individual worker level. A former dean of an engineering school suggests that thinking may be wrong.

Daniel Jelski, a chemistry professor at the State University of New York at New Paltz and previous dean of New Paltz’s School of Science & Engineering, argues in a New Geography essay that humanities degrees may be more important for tomorrow’s job market than is generally believed.

He bases this on three “Laws of Future Employment”:

Law #1: People will get jobs doing things that computers can’t do. Law #2: A global market place will result in lower pay and fewer opportunities for many careers. (But also in cheaper and better products and a higher standard of living for American consumers.) Law #3: Professional people will more likely be freelancers and less likely to have a steady job.

The implications of Laws #1 and #2, he says, are that STEM jobs will not be particularly safe in the future, since he believes they are “easily computerized and tradable.”

The more valuable skill sets, he argues, will be those that computers can’t offer, like empathy and sociability — skills that you might be more likely to learn in an English course than one in linear algebra.

By Liz Dwyer, Education Editor
via www.good.is



With the unemployment rate hovering near the 10 percent mark—and hiring freezes and layoffs still the norm—an increasing number of college grads are turning to the one employer who’s always hiring, even in tough economic times: Uncle Sam. The number of bachelor’s degree holders enlisting in a branch of the United States Armed Services is on the rise.

Over the past two years, the Army’s seen the biggest spike in diploma-holding enlistees. In 2010, almost 6,000 college graduates signed up for duty, 2,000 more than in 2008 when the economy still seemed healthy. The Navy saw 1,425 college graduates enlist, up from 1,000 in 2008 and the Air Force bumped its college graduate enlistment up to 900 from 2008′s total of 553.

We may be at war, but Ben Harris, a political science and communications double major from Ohio State University, isn’t dwelling on the possibility of dying in combat. He graduated two years ago, and given the realities of the recession, he had to settle for a job at a “chicken-finger place” and shack up with his parents. Instead of heading off to graduate school to wait out the tough economy—and rack up more student loans—Harris told the Columbus Dispatch that he’s considering joining the Army or the Air Force because, “I’ll get more skills and more education.”

The perks—VA benefits, access to military base stores, preference for government jobs, and a reduction in student loans (the Army will repay up to $65,000 of a soldier’s qualifying student loans, the most of the armed services branches)—are undeniable. Plus, when you enlist with a bachelor’s degree, you enter as an officer, which means you receive higher pay.

The only branch to not see a significant enrollment bump is the Marines. According to Maj. John Caldwell, a spokesman for the Marine Corps Recruiting Command, “Young men and women join our ranks to become a United States Marine. They do not see the Marine Corps as a path to something else but rather as a destination unto itself.”

photo (cc) via Flickr user Boston Public Library

By Catherine Rampell
via nytimes.com

Still don’t believe us when we say that college is worth it? Just look at the latest jobs numbers.

In December, workers with bachelor’s degrees or other postsecondary educations gained jobs. On the other hand, the number of workers with high school diplomas or less who were employed fell.

Here are the numbers:



Workers with at least some higher education have been doing better than high school grads for a while now, too.

Over the last year, an additional 1,068,000 bachelor’s degree recipients have found work, for example, while the number of employed workers with no more than a high school diploma fell by 551,000.

Interestingly, though, the least-skilled workers have also added jobs over the last year. The number of high school dropouts who had jobs rose by 126,000 from December 2010 to December 2011:



It’s not clear why those with the very least education would be doing better than those with high school diplomas.

The numbers do support David Autor‘s argument that the work force is hollowing out, producing very low-skill service jobs that generally cannot be done by machines or workers abroad (like food services) and higher-skilled jobs that require greater schooling (like medical jobs).

By Motoko Rich
via nytimes.com

Private Sector Gets Job Skills; Public Gets Bill



When companies are deciding where to build new facilities or whether to expand in places where they already have factories or offices, states compete to shower them with incentives like tax breaks and help buying land. Increasingly, companies have come to expect that state and local governments will pay for job training, too.

For Sunday’s paper, I wrote about a $1 million customized training program that North Carolina designed for the benefit of Caterpillar, Inc., the global industrial equipment maker. The company opened a new plant in Winston-Salem in November, and the state is paying to train nearly 400 workers who will make axles for mining trucks.

North Carolina is also spending about $1.5 million to train workers for a new Honda Aircraft plant in Greensboro. About 163 workers went through training at Guilford Technical Community College in various areas including jet assembly and electrical system installation in the hopes of securing a job. Because Honda delayed the opening of its production lines, some of those workers, like Kent McDaniel, featured in this report from the video journalists at Purple States, decided to seek work elsewhere. Others, like Linda Merritt, stuck it out and are now working at Honda.

By Catherine Rampell
via nytimes.com

Workers are dropping out of the labor force in droves, and they are mostly women. In fact, many are young women. But they are not dropping out forever; instead, these young women seem to be postponing their working lives to get more education. There are now — for the first time in three decades — more young women in school than in the work force.

“I was working part-time at Starbucks for a year and a half,” said Laura Baker, 24, who started a master’s program in strategic communications this fall at the University of Denver. “I wasn’t willing to just stay there. I had to do something.”

Many economists initially thought that the shrinking labor force — which drove down November’s unemployment rate — was caused primarily by discouraged older workers giving up on the job market. Instead, many of the workers on the sidelines are young people upgrading their skills, which could portend something like the postwar economic boom, when millions of World War II veterans went to college through the G.I. Bill instead of immediately entering, and overwhelming, the job market.

Now, as was the case then, one sex is the primary beneficiary. Though young women in their late teens and early 20’s view today’s economic lull as an opportunity to upgrade their skills, their male counterparts are more likely to take whatever job they can find. The longer-term consequences, economists say, are that the next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts, whose career options are already becoming constrained.

For now at least, many young women still feel that the deck is stacked against them.

“Almost everyone in my program is female,” said Ms. Baker, who hopes a master’s degree will help her get a job running communications at a nonprofit group. “That’s partly because of the program, but also because as women we feel like we have to be more educated to be able to compete in really any field.”

Women still earn significantly less than men. And in the two and a half years since the recovery officially began, men age 16 to 24 have gained 178,000 jobs, while their female counterparts have lost 255,000 positions, according to the Labor Department.

Apparently discouraged by scant openings, 412,000 young women have dropped out of the labor force entirely in the last two and a half years, meaning they are not looking for work.

Among young men, the labor force fell during the recession but has been flat since the recovery began. Today, across all age groups, an unemployed female worker is 35 percent more likely to drop out of the labor force in the next month than an unemployed male worker.

Some studies suggest that women are pickier about their job choices than men. Already earning lower pay, women are less willing to work when wages fall further, especially if they are able to rely on an employed (and these days, often newly re-employed) husband. Women are also more reluctant to work night or weekend shifts, according to government data on how Americans spend their time, partly because they have more family responsibilities.

“The jobs out there just aren’t very good, and men seem more willing to take them for whatever reason,” said Jonathan L. Willis, an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City. “The women are looking at those same jobs and saying, ‘I’ll be more productive elsewhere.’ ”

Then there are societal influences that affect a person’s willingness to take a lesser job or return to school.

“There is still this heavy cultural message that men should be out there earning money and supporting themselves, and they feel more distressed by losing their breadwinner role,” said Stephanie Coontz, director of research at the Council on Contemporary Families. “We’ve made much more progress overcoming the ‘feminine mystique’ than this masculine mystique.”

While these roles evolve, community colleges are reporting record enrollment.

Both men and women are going back to school, but the growth in enrollment is significantly larger for women (who dominated college campuses even before the financial crisis). In the last two years, the number of women ages 18 to 24 in school rose by 130,000, compared with a gain of 53,000 for young men.

The education gap aside, in some ways young women will already have an advantage over men in the coming decade. Many of the occupations expected to have the most growth, like home health aides and dental hygienists, have traditionally been filled by women. That is not to say that men cannot take those positions, but they may not want to.

“Today young girls are told they can do anything, go into any occupation. But if boys express any interest in traditionally female occupations, they get teased and bullied,” Ms. Coontz said. “Lots of guys are not understanding what’s happening to traditional low-income or middle-income male jobs.”

Jobs in the male-dominated manufacturing industry and in other sectors involving manual labor have been, and still are, in structural decline. These careers can also be hard to maintain indefinitely because youthful strength eventually fades. And now many manufacturing workers do not have pensions to carry them through when their bodies do break down.

“It doesn’t surprise me that in a poor economy women are ramping up their schooling,” said Heather Boushey, an economist at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning research organization. “The real question is: Why aren’t more men doing that too?”

The main risk in going back to school is the accompanying student loan debt. Tuition increases have been outpacing inflation for years, a trend accelerated by state budget cuts.

“Our funding per student has been cut 25 percent in the last three years,” said Stephen Scott, the president of Wake Technical Community College in Raleigh, N.C., which is one of the fastest-growing community colleges in the country. Consequently, class sizes have risen, and so has tuition. But the students — again, mostly women — still pour in.

“We now have 6,000 students on a waiting list because we didn’t have the resources to offer more classes,” he said.

Those attending more expensive private schools, like Ms. Baker, will have an even tougher time guaranteeing that their educational investment pays off. Including the loans that financed her undergraduate education at Wartburg College in Waverly, Iowa, she will complete her master’s program next year owing about $200,000 in debt.

“I have to have faith that I will eventually get a good job that pays enough to pay my living expenses and pay back my loans,” she said, “and hopefully make me happy in the process.”

By Jim Witkin
via www.nytimes.com


In the world of computers, Silicon Valley is recognized as the spawning ground of technology start-ups. For financial institutions, Lower Manhattan has long been the place to set up shop.

And of course Detroit has historically served as the epicenter of American automaking, evolving in recent times from a manufacturing center to a headquarters city. Still, there is no guaranty that its dominance is permanent.

Among the places vying to become a nexus of automotive development is this college town of 140,000 at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, some 1,300 miles from the Motor City. Already it has earned a reputation as one of the country’s leading engine and transportation research centers, digging into the dirty business of civilizing some of the industry’s biggest and least sophisticated engines.

The Engines and Energy Conversion Laboratory here, part of Colorado State University’s school of mechanical engineering, was founded 20 years ago by Bryan Willson. The results of its work, especially in fuel injection and ignition systems, have been adopted by major industry suppliers like Delphi, Bosch and Eaton, component providers to auto, truck and industrial engine makers.

Work at the laboratory also involves emerging technologies — smart grids, electric vehicle components, alternative fuels and new twists on conventional drivetrains — that will be vital for transportation systems of the future.

Bringing this work to market will require a new approach. “With such a diversity of new technologies, you are starting to see expertise emerge and new businesses form in places like Silicon Valley, Austin and Colorado,” Dr. Willson said. “I expect much of this will not happen in Detroit.”

Many start-ups, hoping to commercialize these new technologies, have already formed or been drawn to the area as a result of programs sponsored by the city of Fort Collins in collaboration with local companies. The goal, according to Josh Birks, the city’s economic adviser, is to build a critical mass of clean tech and transportation-related businesses.

This transformation started with a competition. In 1990, General Motors, with the Energy Department as a co-sponsor, challenged 25 engineering schools around the country in a program that converted GMC 2500 Sierra pickups to run on natural gas. Though the Colorado State University team did not win the competition, placing second, the technology it developed proved useful for a fleet of natural gas hybrid buses operating in Denver.

From that experience, Dr. Willson took away a guiding principle that would inform his future work. “We didn’t want to just conduct experiments or write papers and have them sit on a shelf,” he said. “We wanted to have impact, so what we do here is the messy work to make sure these innovations actually become products.”

The lab’s messy work was evident on a tour through the facility. In one corner sat an enormous 140-liter natural gas-powered engine that once turned a compressor used on natural gas pipelines. Over the years, Dr. Willson and his students have pioneered several improvements to a computer-controlled fuel delivery system that greatly reduces the engine’s nitrogen oxide emissions.

Today the technology can be found on almost every gas pipeline engine in the country, and it has helped establish a national reputation for the laboratory. Enginuity, a start-up working here, commercialized much of this technology and in 2008 was acquired by Dresser-Rand, which supplies equipment to the oil and gas industry.

Nearby, a team of graduate students huddled around a large engine connected to a bank of diagnostic machines by a tangle of wires. A test of a laser ignition system, in which light rather than electric current runs over fiber-optic cables to optical spark plugs, was under way.

“If you look at the future of automotive engines,” Dr. Willson explained, “you are going to see higher levels of exhaust gas recirculation and a much more difficult ignition problem, one that we are looking to lasers to solve.”

Exhaust gas recirculation directs some of the engine’s exhaust back to the cylinders, where it combines with the air-fuel mix to help reduce nitrogen oxide emissions. Many automotive engines depend on this technology to meet emissions standards.

In the building’s basement is a small-scale electricity grid where, among other projects, students study the impact that a growing population of electric vehicles may have on the power distribution network. Behind the building, a company co-founded by Dr. Willson, Solix Biofuels, is developing a low-cost system for producing fuels from algae. Solix intends to license the technology to large energy producers.

In the far corner of the building was a Cummins diesel engine owned by VanDyne SuperTurbo, a spinoff from Woodward Governor, a large Fort Collins-based energy management company. VanDyne pays to use the laboratory’s resources, including several students, to conduct durability and emissions testing on its SuperTurbo technology, a device that adds a two-way mechanical drive to a turbocharger.

In this wrinkle on conventional turbocharger design, the engine can drive the turbo directly, and the turbo can push power back into the engine through a direct mechanical link, a system known as turbocompounding. Testing suggests that the technology could offer fuel efficiency gains and carbon-dioxide-emission reductions of 30 percent, enabling automakers to use smaller engines.

VanDyne is in its second round of venture financing and talking to several truck and auto diesel engine manufacturers, according to its chief executive, Ed VanDyne. It recently signed a deal with the Army, which will test the SuperTurbo on its tanks and heavy vehicles.

For its first three years, VanDyne occupied space at the Rocky Mountain Innosphere in Fort Collins, a nonprofit business incubation program started in 2007 and supported by the university, local businesses and the city. Since then, the program has created 27 companies that now employ 133 high-tech workers, according to Mike Freeman, who serves as chairman of the Innosphere board.

Mr. Birks, the Fort Collins economic adviser, said the Innosphere was emblematic of the city’s commitment to what he called “the front end of business formation.” Through this program, VanDyne received low-cost office space and free access to patent lawyers and accountants, as well as help developing business plans and raising financing.

High-tech businesses in the area can also participate in one of the local innovation clusters where local start-ups and established companies in related industries work together, with help from the university and city on marketing and skill-building. Initiatives typically involve projects in the community that allow member companies to showcase their capabilities.

Once these start-ups can stand on their own through the efforts of Innosphere or one of the cluster programs, most are choosing to stay in the area, Mr. Birks said. “What we are seeing is that corporate headquarters, research and development and the prototyping all stay fairly close to where the company was incubated and founded,” he said.

Other companies are choosing to move to the area. One, Czero, is working with the engines laboratory to develop a hydraulic hybrid kit that recovers energy when a vehicle is braking and is particularly suited for vehicles that make frequent stops.

“We moved our company from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins because the university and the city have created an amazing atmosphere here, very pro- business and pro-innovation,” said Guy Babbit, chief executive of Czero and director of the newly formed Colorado Engine and Transportation Innovation Cluster.

Because demands on the university’s engine research are increasing, it is planning a large addition, expected to begin construction next year. Dr. Willson has been approved by the city’s planning commission to rebuild the original smoke stacks on the historic Art Deco-style building. But he plans to replace them with wind turbines to generate electricity for the laboratory.