THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 31, 1996 TAG: 9603300387
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: D1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY LON WAGNER, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 100 lines
As Hampton Roads leaders gather once again to plan a way to pull together the region, they would be wise to consider a long-ignored plum that can improve a region's competitiveness: education.
Economic prospects for the immediate future could be improved by focusing on adult education and work-force retraining, according to a report released today called ``The State of the South.''
To prosper, cities need to deal with aging workers and a decline of young entrants into the work force.
To bring better jobs to a region, leaders should boost community college and other programs that train and educate the 75 percent of the work force that will never have a four-year college degree, says MDC Inc., a Chapel Hill-based nonprofit firm that focuses on developing the work force.
``Those guys who are obsessed with K through 12 education - the governors, the president, the CEOs - are missing the point,'' said MDC's George Autry. ``If we only relied on K through 12, we'd be a Third World backwater.''
Jobs of the present and future will require more than a high school diploma or skills taught at vocational schools, but less than a university education.
``A worker armed with only a high school diploma today has fewer prospects than a dropout a generation ago. . . '' the report says. ``The states that prosper will be those that educate and train the 75 percent of the population who do not receive university degrees.''
MDC's wide-ranging report assess the South's progress since 1970 on racial issues, income, jobs and poverty. It also points out areas in which the region has fallen short.
The South - defined in the report as the 14 states from West Virginia to Florida to Texas - created 8.1 million jobs since 1980. That's 2 million more than if the region had only added jobs at the same rate as the nation.
Virginia, North Carolina, Arkansas and Tennessee have more jobs in relation to their working-age populations than the United States as a whole.
The downside? Southerners are paid less for the same jobs than workers elsewhere. Manufacturing jobs paid only 77 percent of the national average, up from 74 percent in 1970 but still a poor showing. Service-sector workers in the South made just 87 percent of the national average.
On the subject of earnings disparity between blacks and whites, again there were signs of progress and failure. Two-income black families have moved to 86 percent of the income of similar white families. The 14-point gap can be attributed to blacks having weaker connections to both education and the labor market - ``a legacy of past discrimination,'' the report says.
A more serious problem, though, is that Southern black married couples who are doing relatively well economically comprise only 49 percent of the region's black families.
Nearly as many black families - 45 percent - are headed by single women whose average income in 1993 was just $12,000. Eighty four percent of the region's white families are headed by married couples. And even white, single-mother families have a median income of $22,000, nearly double that of their black counterparts.
Educating the work force could deal with these shortcomings and others, the report says. The solution involves partnerships among businesses, community and technical colleges, secondary schools and other institutions.
Programs are in the works at Tidewater Community College and Thomas Nelson Community College on the Peninsula to address employers' needs. But Tidewater President Larry Whitworth says technical education isn't cheap and often isn't glamorous enough to attract funding from the state.
Nearly every state university individually received more state funding in the latest round of budgeting than all of the state's 23 community colleges together, Whitworth said.
``It's taken a long time for the word to get out,'' Whitworth said. ``It is part of the responsibility of a community college to train the work force, but it's a little more expensive than doing straight classroom work on campus.''
Still, Tidewater Community College has begun some industry-specific training, including teaching workers how to be front-line supervisors and training some downtown Norfolk office workers in computer skills, Whitworth said.
At Thomas Nelson Community College in Hampton, the Virginia Peninsula Total Quality Institute has run a ``boot camp'' to train new hires for computer company Gateway 2000 in basic computer manufacturing, institute Director Malcolm Fortson said. Gateway pays for the courses, the workers take the classes on their own time, and the company will be reimbursed with state economic development incentives if the workers remain employed for a certain amount of time.
Fortson also has been talking to the Center for Creative Coalitions in Portsmouth about the possibility of doing pre-employment training for stores expected to set up in the MacArthur Center mall in Norfolk.
Another model is Siemens Automotive in Newport News, which mapped out an education and training curriculum for its workers. The training, which the company pays for, takes place at the manufacturing plant and the workers take the classes on their own time.
``There were basically a low-skill work force putting together brakes and low-tech auto parts, now they're a skilled, high-tech work force,'' Fortson said. ``And it's essentially the same group of workers.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic
JOHN EARLE/The Virginian-Pilot
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
by CNB