New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman has written an Op-Ed piece that should give all those involved in talent acquisition pause . There is "actually a critical, but unspoken reason for the Great Recession". That reason has coincided with the mortgage crisis and the subsequent meltdown on Wall Street and in financial markets wrapped around the world. At the same time, Americans were spending more than we ought on houses we couldn't afford, we were not investing in the one thing that could help us maintain our global competitive advantage:education.
In fact, many see our Nation's sub-standard education as the primary reason for the downfall of our global competitiveness. Strategic thinkers with high-end analytical, problem solving skills -- those who invent new ways to old jobs or who create new services or who attract new business -- are fairing far better than highly educated engineers, lawyers, and accountants focused on more routine tasks tasks that increasingly have been outsourced overseas. Consequently, the frightening realization is this: college educated, task-oriented workers will likely never get their jobs back. Those jobs are gone. But there are numerous lucrative jobs that go unfilled with U.S. workers simply because we have refused to grow our own through education -- the immediate case-in-point that springs to mind is that of health care workers.
We've got one segment of our population that is undereducated who either dropped out of high school or did not graduate from college (about 72%) -- -- and another part of our population that needs to be re- college-educated. So while we think about solving the problems that originated with sub-prime mortgage, we have to understand that a sub-prime education helped get us where we are today. From where I sit, the opportunity cost of not investing in an affordable education for all Americans is far greater than the cost of doing the right thing.
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