The Midwesterner: Blogging the Global Midwest

Failing Economies Shorten Lives

A recent study has come up with some shocking news: life expectancy of the least educated white Americans, both men and women, is going down. White women without a high school diploma now live five years less on the average than they did 20 years ago: for white male dropouts, the decline is three years.

This is a calamity matched only by the six-year decline in longevity among Russian men in the waning years of Communism there. But that decline, blamed on rampant alcoholism, has been mostly reversed.

What's going on here? No one really knows, but my bet is that the cause is economic -- the collapse of the industrial, steady, low-wage jobs that once supported even the least-educated Americans. These people once were lower middle-class. Now they're just poor, the losers in the global economy, increasingly cut off from jobs, a steady income and, not incidentally, decent health care.

Cheaping Out the Future

We've written before about the declining support by Midwestern states for the state colleges and universities -- especially the big research universities -- that bear their name. A new report has just documented just how sharp this decline has become, why it's a national problem and what it means for our ability to support ourselves in the future.

The report is called "Diminishing Funding and Rising Expectations: Trends and Challenges for Public Research Universities" and is the result of a study by the National Science Board, an arm of the federal National Science Foundation.

Basically, the report says that most states -- including all Midwestern states -- are cheaping out the universities and research that will be their key to competing in a global economy.

A Vote For Ignorance

The voters of Missouri, by an overwhelming margin, have just voted to cripple their state in the global economic sweepstakes and to permit their children to be uneducated and unemployable in that economy.

The ballot in the election this week didn't say exactly that, of course, and the decision is unlikely to survive court challenges. But its impact is clear: as an example of a state surrendering its economic future to religious rigidity and political pandering, it's hard to beat.

The vote was on something called Amendment 2, which amended the state constitution to give Missourians -- including children in school -- the right to express their religious beliefs. That's what the official ballot title said. The official ballot language -- a sort of summary of the amendment -- said "that a citizen's right to express their (sic) religious beliefs regardless of their religion shall not be infringed and that the right to worship includes prayer in private or public settings, on government premises, on public property and in all public schools."

So far, so bad. Both the Missouri and the American Constitutions already guarantee freedom of religion, so that part of the amendment is unnecessary. Prayer in school and on government premises may or may not violate separation of church and state, but the amendment's language invites a court challenge that Missouri is likely to lose.

Jobs and the Soft Skills Gap

In this time of economic downturn and high unemployment, an amazing number of employers complain that they have jobs to offer but can't find qualified workers. Often, these are extremely high-tech jobs that require specific and intense training. But the problem may be more basic than this.

Too many young people are simply unprepared to enter the work world, at any level. Is this the fault of the schools, of businesses, of parents -- and how do we fix it?   

A fascinating article in two newspapers serving the northern Illinois towns of Sterling, Dixon and Rock Falls said that too many young people -- high school graduates, largely unlikely to go on to college -- simply have no idea how to apply for a job, or any clue as to the impression they make on a potential employer. These are "soft skills," the reporter, Bridget Flynn, wrote, as opposed to the "hard skills" of running machinery, but they are as crucial as math or science when it comes to getting a job.

Good Jobs -- But Where Are the Workers?

The number of manufacturing jobs in the Midwest is going down, but factories say they can't find workers to fill manufacturing jobs. As they say, it's a puzzlement.

A Chicago Tribune article laid out the problem, without pinpointing the reason or saying what to do about it. In his invaluable blog, Bill Testa, the vice president and director of regional research for the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, has charted the trends -- Midwestern manufacturing jobs down sharply (from 4.2 million jobs in 1998 to only 2.7 million in 2010), with any improvement likely to be "modest."

This is the heartland of manufacturing, right? We know the Midwest has always lived on factory jobs. Even if the number of those jobs have declined, many factories are still there. Many factory jobs these days pay well. Most workers in factory towns don't go to college, so would be attracted to industrial jobs -- or so you'd think.

All this makes sense. And yet the workers don't seem to be there.

The Higher Cost of Higher Education

In a global economy that demands at least some post-secondary education for all its workers, the same economy may be pricing these workers out of a chance for an education.

This is not exactly news, especially to parents and students who have seen the yearly increases in tuition and other costs gallop ahead of the inflation rate for many years. But a combination of factors -- continuing rising costs, unsustainable student debt, and a terrible job market -- may be pushing this problem to the crisis point. It's a national situation, of course, but of particular concern to the Midwest, which desperately needs to educate its workers for the global knowledge economy.

Higher Education Faces Reality

Apparently it's no fun being a plain old garden-variety university, doing nothing except what universities are supposed to do, which is to teach students. Every self-respecting university, it seems, wants to be a research university, churning out research that changes the world and, one hopes, bags a Nobel Prize or two.

It's not going to happen. Nor should it. Shrinking support for higher education will dash some of these ambitious dreams. As it does, it will give these schools -- indeed, all Midwestern colleges and universities -- an opportunity to rethink their real role in education and how they can best serve not only their students but the region.

Is There a Place for Small Colleges?

They're strewn across the Midwestern landscape, as iconic of an endangered way of life as the small towns that house them. A few offer advanced degrees, but most are four-year colleges, conferring bachelor degrees only. Largely founded by religious denominations, both Protestant and Catholic, they defend that doctrinal purity today against the pressures -- mostly economic -- of a world that may go on without them.

These are the mini-institutions of higher education, private colleges and universities of the Midwest, most of them no more than a few hundred to a couple thousand students, overshadowed by the giant state schools that dominate Midwestern education, dwarfed even by the community colleges that increasingly compete with them for students.

Global Education Plays in Peoria

I wrote in a recent blog that I had been to China in connection with a program there run by Illinois Central College, a community college in Peoria, Illinois. I want to expand here on that program, because what ICC is doing, in Peoria and in China, is my idea of global education, and holds the key for the ability of today's students to thrive in tomorrow's global economy.

ICC does two things in China. First, it works with Chinese colleges to help train dealers and distributors there for Peoria-based Caterpillar. This is done on contract with Caterpillar, which pays for the service. Second, ICC sends some of its students to China for an intense education in both Mandarin and in the way the Chinese do business.

Setting Universities Free

The Chicago Council's newest Heartland Paper, "A Master Plan for Higher Education in the Midwest," by James J. Duderstadt, is a magisterial piece of work, living up to the author's goal of a "roadmap" to Midwestern education, especially higher education, and its role in the region's economic future. From K-12 to universities to lifelong education, the former University of Michigan president covers the scope of education, as seamless as it is ambitious.

Duderstadt's roadmap is a guide to the long-range future, but it also is very timely -- more timely, in fact, that we had expected when we asked him to write it for us. Readers of this blog got a preview last week, and the report itself is to be unveiled this Thursday, March 31. A couple of his recommendations seem to pop from the week's headlines and demand attention now.