by Cathy Calfo, Executive Director, The Apollo Alliance

The oil-slicked beaches, out-of-work fishermen and devastated local economies along the Gulf Coast are a stark reminder of our nation's costly addiction to oil. While the Gulf States are now experiencing the most disastrous consequences, Americans nationwide bear the costs of this addiction.  Each day, we send more than $1 billion overseas to purchase oil, and the clean-up to oil spills like the BP disaster is an added financial burden to the American people.  Meanwhile, working people and their families here at home who live in communities without viable alternatives to cars and traditional fuels are dependent on oil and face the hardship of wildly fluctuating gas prices. This is not sustainable for our economy, and it's not sustainable for our environment.

As the world recovers from the current recession, and moves to lessen its dependence on carbon-intensive fossil fuels, the manufacture of advanced public transit and freight vehicles that utilize cleaner, more efficient technologies is emerging as a key growth sector in the new global clean energy economy. The goal of putting the United States at the forefront of the low-carbon economy, and assuming leadership in the design and manufacture of new world-class clean transportation systems, is yet another important reason for America to pursue new transportation policies that spur domestic demand for cleaner ways to move people and goods throughout our economy.

Next generation rail vehicles, energy-efficient buses, and clean trucks are all central components of a cleaner transportation system that can, and should, be made in America. To examine what it will take to build a dynamic U.S. industry around the manufacture of transit systems and clean freight movement, the Apollo Alliance has called upon leading transportation manufacturers, labor unions, and transportation, energy and economic development policy experts to join a TMAP task force and give us their best ideas. We also turned to a set of respected research partners from Duke and Northeastern Universities and the Worldwatch Institute to help us document the job creation potential of a large-scale investment in advanced transportation infrastructure.

America's existing public transit investments already support more than 1.9 million jobs throughout the economy and generate more than $100 billion of economic activity. These investments also generate environmental benefits, saving the equivalent of 4.2 billion gallons of gasoline and reducing carbon emissions by 37 million metric tons each year. Expansion of service and adoption of new technologies can increase these savings even more. Each additional rider on public transit reduces carbon emissions by 4,800 pounds per year, and adoption of hybrid and alternative drive technologies in buses and medium to heavy-duty trucks can reduce fuel use and carbon emissions by 20 to 50 percent.

A recent study by the Economic Policy Institute, in partnership with Surdna grantee Transportation for America, finds that a $500 billion transportation reauthorization (increased from $286 billion in 2006) that aggressively funds expanded public transit and passenger rail services could create 7.1 million jobs throughout the economy, more than 760,000 of which would be in the manufacturing sector. In the freight sector, widespread deployment of advanced medium to heavy-duty trucks could create 124,000 jobs by 2030; and investments to support the manufacture of modern, efficient freight rail cars could support up to 50,000 new jobs.

Currently, the public transit bus, clean truck, passenger and transit rail industries support nearly 50,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs throughout their supply chains.  Jobs in these supply chains are spread across all 50 states, among more than 320 existing companies that could scale up to meet expanded demand. Filling the current backlog of public transit capital investment needs alone - estimated at more than $75 billion - would dramatically expand the market for new public transit vehicles, systems and their component parts. Over the next six years, an estimated 27,600 transit buses, 4,000 passenger rail cars and locomotives, and 220 light rail cars will need to be replaced.

Moreover, freight sector demand for cleaner trucks and rail services is poised to grow as a result of continued growth in freight shipping tonnage combined with new freight efficiency policies, such as the tighter fuel economy standards for heavy-duty vehicles expected in the fall of 2010 and pending legislation that would expand incentives for heavy-duty electric and natural gas trucks. Even without new regulations or incentives, the market for medium to heavy-duty hybrid, plug-in hybrid and full-electric trucks is expected to increase by 63 percent per year over the next five years.

Under the Safe, Accountable, Flexible, Efficient Transportation Equity Act: A Legacy for Users (SAFETEA-LU), less than 20 percent of total federal transportation spending is invested in public transportation, a trend that has left our nation's transit systems underdeveloped and in a state of disrepair.  Today, almost 30 percent of all transit assets - rail, bus and paratransit - are in poor or marginal condition.

The first step toward the creation of new jobs manufacturing buses, rail cars and other transit vehicles will be to build a stronger domestic market for these vehicles through increased investment.

A $30 billion investment to double current public transit ridership by 2030 would save nearly 5 billion gallons of gas each year - an amount three times greater than our annual oil imports from Kuwait. This level of investment would also support more than 3.5 billion job-years of employment throughout the economy, including more than one million in construction of public transit infrastructure and more than 500,000 in transit-related manufacturing. Adding investment to intercity passenger rail and building a high-speed rail network will create even more economic opportunity.

In 1956, President Eisenhower laid the foundation for decades of American prosperity through a national transportation policy suited to the automobile age. Today, on the cusp of an emerging low-carbon economy, we must again use forward-thinking transportation policy to drive national prosperity.

 

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The Apollo Alliance is a coalition of labor, business, environmental, and community leaders working to catalyze a clean energy revolution that will put millions of Americans to work in a new generation of high-quality, green-collar jobs. Inspired by the Apollo space program, we promote investments in energy efficiency, clean power, mass transit, next-generation vehicles, and emerging technology, as well as in education and training. Working together, we will reduce carbon emissions and oil imports, spur domestic job growth, and position America to thrive in the 21st century economy.

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The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project

The Strategic National Arts Alumni Project - commonly known as SNAAP - is an annual online survey for graduates of degree-granting arts education institutions.  The project encompasses arts high schools through undergraduate and graduate art and design colleges, conservatories, and arts schools and programs within comprehensive universities.

In 2008, SNAAP was officially launched as a collaboration between two university-based research centers:  the Indiana University Center for Postsecondary Research and the Vanderbilt University Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy.  In its first two years, SNAAP surveyed over 6,000 arts graduates of more than 90 institutions. More than 100 new institutions will participate in the third and final field test in the fall of 2010.

When fully implemented, SNAAP will provide information about the educational experiences and career choices of arts alumni. Preliminary data from the 2009 field test, in which 3,700 alumni from 54 institutions responded to the survey, gives substance to the generally-held concept that arts graduates have diverse careers.

Findings include:

• Over half of all alumni responding to the 2009 survey (53%) have taught or currently teach the arts
• Eight in ten (80%) have been self-employed at some point in their careers
• 20% founded or co-founded their own for-profit or not-for-profit company

Not all arts graduates work in the arts, of course. The 2009 survey reports that approximately 11 percent never intended to be artists.  Of those who once worked as professional artists, but no longer do, SNAAP data reveal that 43 percent say their arts training was relevant to their current work. Further analysis will allow schools and researchers to understand more precisely which skills are most relevant, which skills graduates feel were lacking in their training, and what experiences led them to persist as an artist or to seek other work.  Most importantly, for the first, time, schools will actually get detailed information about what their graduates are doing - the nature of their employment, the occupations they work in and their ongoing engagement with art.  SNAAP will help arts schools reform their educational offerings by improving their understanding of the world in which their alumni try to make a life and a living.

SNAAP's mission is to advance arts training in America by learning about the lives and careers of graduates, both those who become artists and those who pursue other careers.   The arts sector lags behind other sectors - health, science, engineering, business -- in developing useful data to inform education policy.  Over the past five years, educational leaders, funders and scholars from across the cultural sector have taken the lead to correct this critical gap in knowledge.

George Kuh, Chancellor's Professor of Higher Education at Indiana University and SNAAP director says "SNAAP is positioned to be the self-sustaining center of arts research, policy and service that we have intended from the outset."

SNAAP's Senior Scholar, Steven J. Tepper of the Curb Center, notes that, "Never before has a project of this scope been attempted. The data that SNAAP will provide about the role and relevance of arts training in society and about the careers of arts-trained workers is unparalleled."

Beginning in 2011, all arts high schools and postsecondary institutions with arts graduates will be able to participate in SNAAP for a modest fee to learn about their graduates.  In 2012, Vanderbilt's Curb Center will convene a national gathering of arts education leaders to discuss the implications of SNAAP's findings, and will subsequently publish a landmark report on Training and Preparing Artists and Creative Workers in the 21^st Century.

Further information about SNAAP is available at http://snaap.indiana.edu.

 

Guest Commentary by
Andy Van Kleunen, Executive Director, National Skills Coalition

Economic times are bad, and the nation wants answers:  What should policymakers be doing to get millions of Americans back onto a path toward prosperity?  And what will the U.S. economy look like when it finally comes back from the Great Recession?

The media is on the case, and in its quest has recently given a lot of ink to the rarely covered topic of workforce development.  For those running or funding local workforce programs, such press attention has seemed long overdue.  With community college enrollments at unprecedented levels, and a near three-fold increase in clients at Workforce Investment Act (WIA)-funded One-Stop Centers and training programs, worker demand for new skills is at an all-time high. Unfortunately, much of the recent coverage has presented two contradictory pictures of the economy:  one in which targeted investment in workforce skills is a no-brainer, the other in which job training is dismissed as inconsequential or out-dated.

Witness two articles that recently appeared within weeks of each other on the front page of the New York Times. On July 1^st, "Factory Jobs Return, but Employers Find Skills Shortage" tells of Cleveland-area manufacturers who cannot find applicants, even among recently laid-off factory workers, with the necessary math and technical skills to fill waiting positions-a challenge which the National Association of Manufacturers says is hampering hiring by up to two-thirds of its members.

Two weeks later, the Times published "After Training, Still Scrambling for Employment," which questioned the Recovery Act's training efforts, based on the unfortunate stories of some re-trained workers who are still unemployed.  This was followed a month later by a widely reprinted Labor Day piece from the Associated Press that further questioned the relevance of skills training even for a post-recession economy, given that manufacturing and the trades will be dead, and the only good jobs will be for those with a bachelors or graduate degree.

So, what's the real story?  Here are a few observations to help to clear the confusion, along with some other recent press coverage to fill out the picture.

Don't let conflicting terms obscure the future reality about middle-skill jobs.

The AP story's depiction of an "hourglass economy"-where all jobs will either require low skills or a four-year college degree, with nothing in the middle-has been convincingly disproved by the research of Professors Harry Holzer and Bob Lerman and the organizing of National Skills Coalition's Skills2Compete campaign.  Yet with so many construction and factory workers currently unemployed, some journalists have been drawn to analyses arguing that many skilled, non-professional jobs are dead and never coming back.  But this is a leap that mistakes current fluctuations in the business cycle, or the restructuring of specific industries, as indicators of a brand new economy without middle-skill jobs.  The data do not bear this out.

Further confusing reporters is how some analysts are using the term "middle skills."  For example, journalists have recently cited a study by MIT Economist David Autor that says the U.S. labor market is polarizing, middle-skill jobs are disappearing, and successful workers will require "high skills" that he narratively equates with a college degree.  Yet an analysis of Autor's paper shows that many of the occupations which he argues will be the source of future well-paying employment are, by Holzer and Lerman'sdefinition, middle-skill jobs requiring training past high school but not a four-year diploma.

Even the aforementioned AP story, which states that there will be no middle-skill jobs, says there will be lots of jobs requiring "specialized" technical training-in other words, industry-validated, middle-skill training by another name. While the terms clash across these articles, there actually seems to be a lot of agreement on the substance.

Some employers can't find skilled workers.  Fill that gap, and we help the recovery.

It's not just manufacturers in Cleveland.  The story is everywhere: the Wall Street Journal, Manpower's survey of its employer-clients, the Business Roundtable's national survey of firms, reporting by CBS news.  Employers in certain sectors are ready to hire.  Yet the structural skills mismatch that hampered their growth before the recession continues to slow hiring still today.

In fact ,as reported by Times columnist David Brooks, a recent International Monetary Fund study claims that the U.S. unemployment rate of 9.6% could be two to three points lower if more unemployed workers had been re-trained to the latest specifications.  This was no fault of these workers.  While their industries were transforming around them, the U.S. did less than their European and Asian counterparts to upgrade workers' skills.  As a result, many laid off Americans with strong employment records have not been able to re-enter newly created jobs in their former industries, or even enroll in training for another skilled occupation, because of limited basic skills.  Michigan found that one-third of the displaced auto workers entitled to re-training at a local community college couldn't enroll because of limited basic reading and math skills.

Thankfully, data from the U.S. Department of Labor show that people who are receiving publicly funded workforce services are benefiting.  While placement rates are down due to the economy, retention rates and average earnings for re-employed training graduates are comparable or higher than they were pre-recession.  Hopefully more re-skilled workers will soon see those labor market benefits as well, as aggregate demand increases and creates more employment opportunities.

Not All Training is the Same.  Industry Engagement is Key.

Not all job training is created equally.  Yet reporters sometimes make pronouncements on the effectiveness of training based on any graduate they encounter-whether that's someone who received a 6-week word processing certificate, or someone who earned an associate's degree in an occupation with a waiting employer committed to their hire. These are not equal cases.

When success stories are reported, they often prove to be connected to training developed in collaboration with employers and other industry or sector partners.  Some in the press (CNN, among others) have also begun to acknowledge the findings of a recent, multi-year study by Public / Private Ventures on the effectiveness of sector-focused workforce programs.

National policymakers are starting to realize this distinction as well.  In July, the House of Representatives passed-with bi-partisan, unanimous support-the SECTORS Act, which would dedicate federal funding to the creation of sector partnerships involving multiple firms, training providers, and other stakeholders.  The Brookings Institution likewise noted at the White House Auto Communities conference (of which the Surdna Foundation was a sponsor) the promise that SECTORS holds for increasing workforce skills to support local industry-targeted development.  This is particularly true for cities that want to re-tool their manufacturing and export capacity-a strategy that, as reported by the New York Times and Washington Post, our European competitors have already assessed is unattainable by the U.S. if it does not address its current skills deficit.

In sum, there is still a lot that we, our policymakers and the press still have to figure out regarding what will get our economy back on track toward prosperity.  But there should little confusion about where new skills investments should figure into that solution.

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The National Skills Coalition (formerly The Workforce Alliance) is a diverse network of local leaders drawn from the ranks of business, labor, community colleges, community-based organizations, and the public workforce system who have come together to advocate for an America that grows its economy by investing in its people, so that every worker and every industry has the skills to compete and prosper.   For more information, go to www.nationalskillscoalition.org.