Unemployment Rates for Engineers, IT Workers on the Rise

In purely economic terms, look at the difference in earning capacity based on educational achievement.  Someone with a bachelor’s degree will earn nearly one million dollars more in 1999 dollars over their 40 year work life  than the high school grad. That is the difference between a comfortable life with piano lessons for your kids and living without health insurance, driving a beater car and feeding your kids soup and crackers for dinner nite after nite. And we do have drop outs in this state. A recent study by the Gates Foundation shows that half of all African American, Hispanic and Native American kids in our state are dropping out of high school. And notice how the value of a bachelors degree and advanced degree continues to increase even though our workforce is becoming more educated.  When we talk about the “two” Washingtons it is not east vs west; urban vs rural; tech vs agriculture. This slide is the two Washingtons. The top tier can participate successfully in the technology based economy and the bottom tier cannot. To me this slide explains why Tim Eyman wins elections, and it challenges us to work very hard to give every child in this state a chance at a college education. 40 year synthetic earnings estimates for full-time, year-round workers, in 1999 dollars: BA degree: 2.1 m (more than one-third than workers who did not finish college and nearly 2x as workers with a HS degree) Men vs. women: difference in salary between men and women:  $350,000 for high school dropouts.  $450,000 for HS graduates and about 2x that amount for BA degree holders.  Men with professional degrees may expect to earn almost $2m more than their female counterparts over their work life. 

By contrast, Washington state’s investment in research institutions has been declining for the last decade. This is not really breaking news, but the implications are just beginning to penetrate. The TA worries that if we wait till it is obvious it will be way too late. It is easy to point fingers at elected officials, but they cannot really be entirely blamed for this state of affairs. For example, the legislature has done what it could in supporting university capital projects, which can be used as matching money, while struggling to balance the budget in difficult economic times and severely constrained conditions. Frankly, it has been a series of small and medium-sized decisions and non-decisions over several decades that has gotten us here. It is the PEOPLE of the state who have to understand that this mismatch cannot last forever.