History proves education investments get best return

CHANGING TIMES: Brown University professor John R. Logan said he was attracted to sociology in part because he came of age during the 1960s. / COURTESY JOHN R. LOGAN
CHANGING TIMES: Brown University professor John R. Logan said he was attracted to sociology in part because he came of age during the 1960s. / COURTESY JOHN R. LOGAN

Brown University sociology professor John R. Logan came of age in the mid-1960s during a time when the country was undergoing tremendous social, political and economic changes. While many of his fellow college students at the time immersed themselves in those changes, Logan was so fascinated that understanding how they occur and impact society became his life’s work.
As for Rhode Island’s current struggle to right its economy, he says there’s plenty of evidence to suggest where attention should be placed.
I always end up focusing on education,” he said. “The places with the more educated and more skilled workforce are the ones that are going to do better economically.”

PBN: What is the main focus of your work now at Brown?
LOGAN: I am primarily an urban sociologist who works across disciplines, including demography, politics and economics. I’m doing several major projects. One is directing a study of how America has changed in the last 20 or 30 years, supported by the Russell Sage foundation. It has 14 teams of researchers around the county looking at different aspects of social change. The topics range from income and wealth inequality, to immigration trends to changes in the family.

PBN: What attracted you to this kind of work in demographics?
LOGAN: When I was an undergraduate student at Berkeley in the mid-1960s, the civil rights and the anti-war movements were furious. A lot of changes were in the air. Even though I was a top student in math and science in high school and my teachers expected me to go into a career in physics, or something like that, I decided that the need was to try to understand changing social conditions and politics. I was quantitative and scientific in my orientation, and I decided to apply that to social and political questions. Social science has allowed me to examine so many different topics. It might be about grandparents having the responsibility of taking care of grandchildren, income inequality or the effect of the recession on different groups.

PBN: What have you found in your research that might be helpful as far as economic conditions in Rhode Island today?
LOGAN: We have a large and growing Hispanic population, Dominicans and all kind of other backgrounds. Education and health problems are more accentuated among Hispanics. Sometimes it’s hard to see what are broad social issues or something about the newcomers that puts them in this position. My view is that they just happen to be the ones who are at the bottom and suffering from trends that are nationwide.

PBN: Does it present any specific challenges to businesses in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts?
LOGAN: One challenge is the increasing gap between people who are living well and people who are living poorly. In Providence, within a few blocks of each other, we have neighborhoods with high foreclosure rates and high unemployment and other neighborhoods doing very well. Rhode Island is a relatively poor state that has experienced deindustrialization and has not replaced that economy very fully with new kinds of activities. In this state, the problem is mostly the poor performance of urban schools and the poor performance of the first and second generation of Hispanics, because they are inevitably an increasing share of the region’s workforce. We’re heavily dependent on the quality of that workforce and the quality of their education.

PBN: What are your thoughts about possible solutions to these workforce issues?
LOGAN: I think the issue of a quality high school diploma and vocational tracks at two-year colleges are at least as important as a four-year college education. Everything we accomplish, we accomplish by the investments we make. I think we have to be willing to make big investments and to experiment, and expect some of the money we spend is going to be wasted, as we struggle to find what works, as far as linking education to the needs of the labor market.

- Advertisement -

PBN: What’s your view of the future of economic development in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts?
LOGAN: I think the entire region is similar, in the way it’s been a long process of losing large kinds of industry and not being able to replace them. In the short-term, I’m confident we’ll have a modest recovery from the recession. But like many people, I expect it’s going to be only a partial recovery. We can’t depend on an expanding economy to take care of the current problems. I always end up focusing on education. In the end, the places with the more educated and more skilled workforce are the ones that are going to do better economically. Earlier generations often dropped out of high school, but it was a period when you didn’t have to be educated in order to be a productive member of society. Technology makes basic literacy and the ability to perform much more important. Businesses need workers who are adaptable and capable of learning to do new things quickly, and to do them right. •INTERVIEW
John R. Logan
POSITION: Professor of sociology, Brown University
BACKGROUND: Logan does national and international research in the social sciences and has published extensively on demographics and urban planning. His areas of special interest include population change, immigration and minorities and the politics of urban development.
EDUCATION: Bachelor of arts in social science, University of California, Berkeley, 1968; master of arts degree in sociology, Columbia University, 1969; Ph.D. in sociology, University of California Berkeley, 1974
FIRST JOB: Community organizer in East Palo Alto, Calif., working on issues of housing and school segregation
RESIDENCE: Providence
AGE: 66

No posts to display