Will jobs come?

This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2011, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

Ears in the conservative Utah Legislature perk up whenever a proposal is defined as positive for economic development. Legislators favor low corporate taxes because a business-friendly tax structure attracts companies looking for new locations. They believe lots of roads and better infrastructure will encourage businesses to expand.

But they are overlooking what has become one of the biggest, if not the biggest lure for businesses: a well-educated workforce. Utah business leaders agree that quality education is at least as important to economic development as low taxes and roads. The Salt Lake Chamber calls education the gold standard for economic success.

A nationwide study by two researchers at Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce predicts that the jobs Utah can attract in the coming decade will require that 66 percent of adult Utahns hold college degrees or certificates. Of the 1.6 million projected Utah jobs, only about one-fourth will be filled by high school graduates, while the bulk will be available only to those with associate, bachelor's, or graduate degrees, according to the Georgetown study.

Only about half the Utah workforce currently holds such degrees, and Utah's rate of college completion has dropped precipitously.

More than a third of high school graduates are not ready for university-level work, and secondary-school graduation rates and test scores, especially among the growing minority population, are decreasing. Despite spending the least per student, Utah used its pre-recession surpluses on tax cuts that hurt schools.

Clearly, Utah policy makers need to define and fund a plan to turn those statistics around. But, unfortunately, many of Utah's conservative lawmakers don't see education as an economic-development tool; instead, they see it as a necessary evil, a suspicious entity that they can't totally control, although they keep trying. Public schools are seen as promoting socialism, with all that talk about evolution and sex education and infiltration by teacher unions.

While they waste time accusing schools of promoting liberalism, legislators perennially threaten education's already bare-bones budget. Now they are talking about cutting education for the third straight year.

Utah stands at a crossroads. The future of the Beehive State hinges on elected officials finally grasping that public schools — kindergarten through college — need their strong support to produce a well-educated workforce capable of stepping into the jobs of the future.