“The quality, cost and availability of talent” is one of the top three factors considered in corporate investment — often the most important factor, Stephen Moret, CEO of the Virginia Economic Development Partnership (VEDP) told the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) at a council meeting earlier today. And Virginia is blessed with one of the most highly regarded systems of public education in the country, he added. “Overall, it’s an incredibly positive story for Virginia.”

But that doesn’t mean the higher ed system couldn’t use improvement. In a presentation to SCHEV, of which he is a member, Moret advocated synchronizing higher-ed goals with economic-development goals. In particular, he said that the state should attend to the problem of “mal-employment” — a type of under-employment in which people holding Bachelor’s Degrees work in occupations that don’t require a four-year college degree — and the out-migration of educated workers.

There are roughly 10 million full-time employed people nationally with a B.A. or higher who are mal-employed, Moret said. Another way of looking at the data is that 45% of people in the workforce with only a B.A. are either mal-employed or unemployed.

The Virginia Plan for Higher Education has set a goal of making Virginia the “best educated” state in the country. One justification for setting such an ambitious goal is that incomes are closely correlated with education. States with higher average levels of educational attainment tend to have higher incomes. But Moret says that average numbers can conceal the fact that some people with B.A. degrees barely make more than workers with high school diplomas or Associate’s degrees.

Moret gave several potential explanations for mal-employment. First, the supply of B.A. degrees may exceed demand in some fields. Second, college students are not preparing well for their transition into the working world. Third, some college grads may not be acquiring college-level skills. Businesses say they are looking for employees who have honed their critical-thinking and communications skills, but ample evidence suggests that a significant percentage of students make little progress in college.

A related issue is geographic mobility — college grads often move outside the state. The higher the level of education, the higher the propensity to move. Traditionally, Virginia has been an importer of human capital, but with the sequester-related squeeze on the state’s economy, more people have been leaving than coming in recent years. More than half the out-migrants in 2015 had B.A. degrees or higher, Moret said.

Moret outlined the implications of these trends — which he researched in pursuit of his doctoral degree (see “Thinking on a Higher Plane about Higher Education“) — for higher-education policy in Virginia.

• No one is looking very closely at the mal-employment issue in Virginia. Fortunately, SCHEV is well equipped to do so. It has already compiled the Virginia Longitudinal Data System (VLDS) of educational and employment data. Moret recommended adding occupational, hours-worked, and self-employment data to get a more complete picture of the relationship between education and mal-employment.
• Virginia’s higher-ed strategic plan should consider in-migration, out-migration, and supply and demand for different types of degrees. “If we’re going to become the best educated state in the country, we have to focus on retaining [educated workers] as well as producing degrees,” he said. While he didn’t explicitly say so, Moret implied that if Virginia produces more college graduates than can be supported by the economy, many will leave, and many will wind up mal-employed — a potential misallocation of higher-ed resources.

The economic development chief also made a pitch for developing a world-class program to provide customized workforce training for companies locating in Virginia. And he said that SCHEV should do a better job of ensuring that college grads acquire fundamental critical-thinking and communication skills.

The response from other SCHEV members was generally positive.

Minnis E. Ridenour, a retired Virginia Tech executive, wondered if the state’s higher education plan, which aims to be the best-educated state and increase the number of degrees granted by 100,000 above previous projections, might contribute to mal-employment.

“Let’s make this a priority as a topic” to discuss periodically, said Tom Slater, a Richmond attorney. He urged SCHEV to begin compiling statistics on under-employment and workforce migration.

Virginia may get a head start on at least one of Moret’s goals — ensuring that graduates have mastered critical skills. Joseph G. DeFilippo, director of academic affairs and planning, earlier had briefed the Academic Affairs Committee on progress in efforts to develop a program to assess the quality of education delivered by public Virginia institutions.

The proposed policy articulates a common vision of a high-quality undergraduate education. It establishes four core competencies common to the education of all Virginia students, regardless of major—critical thinking, written communication, quantitative reasoning, and civic engagement—and requires institutions to identify two additional competencies that reflect institutional priorities for student learning.

Institutions will design and conduct rigorous assessments appropriate to the specific outcomes they expect students to achieve, and use the results of those assessments to enhance the quality of their educational programs.

Staff will work with institutional representatives to develop institutional-specific schedules for assessment and reporting on each of the required competencies.