The number of young workers holding bachelor’s degrees in the six New England states will decline by the year 2020 – that’s the chief prediction of a study released late last month by the Nellie Mae Education Foundation in Massachusetts.
It’s a finding that “we’ve known about in general terms,” said Jack Warner, commissioner of the R.I. Office of Higher Education. But the foundation documented it carefully, using data from a variety of sources and compiling it in a report called “New England 2020.”
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Massachusetts and Connecticut will suffer the largest drops in educational attainment, the foundation study found. Only 40 percent of workers will hold a bachelor’s degree or higher in Massachusetts in 2020. That’s down 3 percentage points from 1993. In Connecticut, the drop is predicted to be about 4 percentage points for the same time period, from 34 percent to 30 percent.
Though Rhode Island’s outlook could not be determined, because of inconsistencies in the collected data, the study’s co-author Stephen Coelen said the demographics of the southern New England states are so similar, “I would be very surprised if Rhode Island’s situation was much different from what’s happened in Massachusetts or Connecticut.”
Warner said the findings indicate “that if we don’t do a better job educating [the] students coming to us now, then the educational attainment levels are going to drop.” That’s going to have a negative impact on the future labor pool.
“If our educational attainment drops, we will be far less competitive,” Warner said, making it harder to attract new companies to Rhode Island.
The report states that “without question, the most salient feature of demographic change is the influence of minority populations” in the New England states.
By 2020, about 25 percent of Rhode Island’s working-age population will be composed of minority populations, according to the study. And about half of the 25- to 29-year-olds in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts will be minorities.
Rhode Island has “not been successful at getting them into universities,” Warner said, because “too many lower-income students do not get the skills they need in order to handle college-level work when they graduate.”
Oftentimes, he said, those students are studying in schools that lack the funding and supplies they need. But even with better academic preparation, students from the poorer demographic might be deterred by the high cost of attending university, he said.
“Financial aid has not kept pace with the inflation of tuition,” Warner said. “I think the state does need to invest more in higher education and in the state’s financial aid programs.”
The state’s Board of Governors of Higher Education raised tuition for a full-time student at the Community College of Rhode Island by $216 for the coming year, an 8.7-percent increase. Students attending Rhode Island College next year will pay $282 more, a 6-percent increase. For the University of Rhode Island, tuition will be bumped 6 percent, or $437.
All three tuition hikes were made partly because of a lack of state funds, due to the year’s initial budget deficit of $300 million, Warner said.
At the same time, the money the state has invested in higher education grants and scholarships has fallen for the second consecutive year, to about $6.8 million in the 2005-06 academic year, down from about $9 million in 2004-05 and $10 million in 2003-04, according to data from the R.I. Higher Education Assistance Authority (RIHEAA), the only state-funded college-education assistance program in Rhode Island.
State grants range from $250 to $1,400, depending on need, said Mary Ann Welch, director of program administration for RIHEAA, and are open to any Rhode Island student, not just those attending state schools. About 11,700 students received grants in 2005-06.
“There’s a tremendous need for them,” Welch said. “We have students who do not get awards because of limited funds.”
Even with state and federal grants, Warner said, it’s tough for students from low-income families to afford both tuition and room and board. And when students start working in addition to going to school, that becomes a “deterrent for them to finish.”
“They are finishing with large debt levels,” he said. And that debt is a deterrent to their attaining graduate degrees.
Warner said the good news from the study is, “we’re a large importer of college students.”
“The question is, how do we take this influx of college freshmen and get them to stay,” he said. “The answer to that question is three-fold: it’s jobs, it’s jobs and it’s jobs.”
In addition to providing more, better-paying jobs to retain college graduates, Coelen said, the New England states need to work harder at making college accessible to their minority populations.
“Those populations are valuable to New England,” said Coelen, who is also a professor at the University of Connecticut. The study report states, “If it were not for predicted growth in minority populations, these states would be even more hard-pressed to find young workers to fill jobs and fuel their economies.”
