Pushing Back on Cultural Bias Against Academic Attainment

We've heard several people comment over the last several months about a perceived bias against education in our great state. The basic recounting goes like this:

• Getting through high school was good enough for me and my parents to get a decent paying job.
• I see friends' kids who go to college leave the state.
• Therefore, I'm not that thrilled about my kid going to college, and I'm certainly not going to encourage it.

The bias manifests itself in other ways, such as resistance to teacher pay raises ("they already make more than most of us, and they get the summers off!").

I haven't seen any definitive data backing up this perceived anti-education bias, but research does shed some light on one of the above points: While people without college degrees move more often, people with degrees (college or higher) are in fact twice as likely to make lasting long-distance moves from home.

What impact will these facts have on the impact and future of the Promise Scholarship? (Jim Russell of the Cleveburgh Diaspora blog, poses this riddle: Since education makes a person more likely to leave your region, how do you justify your investment in human capital?) And what can we do to work against the trend and have a large percentage of Promise Scholars, or any other scholars, stay home - or at least come home after working elsewhere for a time?

There is certainly something to be said for escaping the homeland for a while to learn new skills, meet new people and form new perspectives. Other states don't seem to fret quite as much as we do about losing our young, but many do indeed fret. The key is, are we attracting more of other states' young people to make up what we lose? The answer over the past several decades has been an emphatic "no."

The group Making Opportunity Affordable, a non-profit initiative to improve access to and performance in education, points out:

Today, West Virginia is the lowest-performing state in the nation in the percentage of adults 25-64 who have a college degree. Assuming that current trends in college completion and in-migration of college-educated adults continue, West Virginia will remain substantially below the nation on this measure in 2025. This will leave the state short of the college-educated population needed to meet workforce demands and compete with best-performing nations. 

Note the comparison to other nations, not just other states.

And as anti-illegal immigration groups such as FAIR (Federation for American Immigration Reform) highlight in their population projections, West Virginia is not exactly re-filling our stock of young people with immigrant groups either.

Why does all this matter? At some point, new generations have to refill and recreate jobs. And in today's intellectual-property driven economy, highly educated young people are critical. Without an aggressive, single-minded pursuit to increase West Virginia's average educational attainment level our economy and overall quality of life will suffer. There is no way in the global new economy that West Virginia will ever be out of the cellar in almost every economic and social category without a dramatic change in this dynamic.

And yes, we need to challenge those who counter that our West Virginia quality of life isn't dependent on being rich or educated with the fact that an incredibly strong correlation exists between economic/academic attainment and key quality of life factors such as health and happiness.

This is a HUGE challenge for our state, probably THE biggest challenge. Innovation must be encouraged. Risks must be taken. Investments must be made. And I would suggest these charts be blown up into a poster and hung in every classroom in West Virginia:

This isn't about being elitist. It isn't about keeping up with the Joneses in the endless state-rankings. It's about the quality of all of our lives here in West Virginia, however you define it. Without a significant spike in highly-educated young people to fuel entrepreneurship and fill high-skill positions, our state will continue to be wagged by other states' tails. 

Comments

[Elizabeth Damewood Gaucher]

Thank you for articulating this so well, and for putting it "out there" despite the complex dynamics that can lead to misunderstanding. We need to develop the self-confidence that allows everyone who lives here to feel free to work, study, and travel in other places in the world without equating those experiences with being disloyal to our wonderful state. On the contrary, I think without a commitment to go beyond our old boundaries -- whether that means pushing ourselves to new levels of education or of geographic exploration that allow us to bring innovative best practices and new knowledge home -- we cannot truly claim to love our state.

[Kevin DiGregorio]

Good stuff as always. I think there’s also a cultural bias in WV not only against academic attainment, but also against wealth attainment. One of our problems is that we are against anyone making a high salary. We need to change that culture so that we applaud high salaries and strive to achieve them. And I’m not saying we should be in favor of a $5M salary for a CEO whose company loses money every year, but should be in favor of paying $90,000 or $150,000 or $200,000 for quality engineers, leaders, business folks, and other wealth creaters and creatives.