New York Times
October 27, 1999

LESSONS

Shortage of Skills? A High-Tech Myth


By RICHARD ROTHSTEIN

W e've got bipartisan agreement that our new high-tech economy
demands radical education reforms. What worked once won't work
anymore.

As Al Gore puts it, 60 percent of new jobs will require advanced
technological skills. Bill Bradley says school improvement is one
thing we need to lead in the 21st century. George W. Bush demands
reform because our new economy requires higher skills.

But it is not really true. Overall skill growth required by jobs of
the future is modest. In fact, skill requirements are growing more
slowly than in the past. School improvement may be a good idea, but
we need better reasons for it than a false skills crisis because if
we reform schools for the wrong reasons, we will reform them in the
wrong ways.

Of course, schools must prepare young people for millions of new
jobs. But, while technologically sophisticated jobs will grow, the
biggest chunk of openings will be in services -- and not very
high-tech services at that.

In the next decade, about five million new jobs will be created for
food workers, including kitchen help, waiters and waitresses.
Another four million will be for cashiers and retail salespeople.
More than three million will be for clerks. Two million will be for
helpers, packagers and laborers. Openings for truck drivers will
abound.

Managerial and professional occupations will also need more
workers, but their numbers pale compared with openings requiring
less education. Employers will hire more than three times as many
cashiers as engineers. They will need more than twice as many
food-counter workers, waiters and waitresses than all the systems
analysts, computer engineers and database administrators combined.

How did we convince ourselves that schools must prepare an entire
generation of young people who know calculus? Partly, we have
confused occupational growth rates with the number of new jobs.
Computer engineering and science employment will increase by a
whopping 100 percent, while food service grows by only 11 percent.
But computer science is a relatively small field, so new positions
generate rapid growth rates. There are more waitresses today, so
smaller percentage growth yields more new jobs.

We are also misled by a truism that more employees use computers at
work. Computers often reduce skill levels. Think about supermarket
cashiers using computers to scan bar codes. Many workers may need
less education, not more, when jobs are computerized.

And we naturally focus on what is new, overlooking what is
unchanged. Amazon.com may market in cyberspace, but it creates more
jobs for warehousemen than for Web site designers. It takes no more
education to drive a forklift at Amazon than at Kmart.

Of course, we do face some shortages in skills. But we also have
many jobs where workers, including college graduates, are now
overeducated for tasks they perform. And many shortages in skills
are temporary. We don't have enough engineers, but a decade ago we
had too many. Students then, seeing few openings, switched to other
fields, creating today's shortage.

In time, supply and demand will readjust. We shouldn't confuse
shortages in specific fields with an overall lack of academic
qualifications.

The Labor Department projects an increase from 1996 to 2006 of less
than 1 percent in the overall share of workers in occupations
requiring a college degree.

False expectations that if all children get higher math scores they
will all get better jobs encourage us to duck critical decisions
about how schools relate to society. We rightly want schools to
equip rich and poor, black and white, to compete equally for better
jobs. And we want all young people, regardless of background, to
get good jobs, for which we expect better schools to qualify them.

But this hope can't be fulfilled. We already enroll enough college
students to fill foreseeable vacancies in professional fields.
Increasing the number of applicants does little to increase the
number of vacancies.

So we face a challenge: If academic outcomes improve for all, what
will determine which children win, and which lose, that race?

Imagine that schools further narrow achievement gaps between
advantaged and disadvantaged children. If highly paid, highly
skilled jobs are limited, and more children from Brooklyn win them,
fewer children from Scarsdale will do so. If improved
qualifications empower more poor children to become computer
scientists, more rich children will have to settle for being
waiters.

This seems decent and fair, but we have a lot of introspection,
debate and economic reform ahead before it can happen. Perhaps, for
example, raising academic achievement for disadvantaged children
also requires, as a practical matter, raising the relative pay of
waiters to make these jobs more acceptable to advantaged children
(and to their parents, who are asked to pay taxes to improve the
competitiveness of inner-city graduates).

We can't face these critical issues of 21st-century education with
minds clouded by a "high tech jobs of the future" fog.