MnSCU surveys employers about needed job skills

by Alex Friedrich, Minnesota Public Radio

St. Paul, Minn. — Employers across the country are saying too many American workers don’t have the right skills to fill open positions. In Minnesota, the State Colleges and Universities system is surveying employers in the region to find out what skills they’re not seeing in recent graduates and older workers — and what else employers need from higher education.

Chancellor Steven Rosenstone announced last month a new effort to better match MnSCU programs to needed skills. Since then, system officials have held more than 30 listening sessions in fields such as health care, transportation and engineering.

At one such session last week in Minneapolis, the focus was on information technology, which is a growth industry. In the past three years the number of IT job postings in Minnesota has tripled to about 15,000, even during an economic downturn. But up to 10 percent of those jobs were unfilled, according to Advance IT Minnesota, an office within MnSCU that aims to develop a stronger IT workforce in the state.

That gap could double in the next decade if things don’t change, because Minnesota’s workforce is aging and the number of high school graduates is declining.

So MnSCU officials recently talked with members of the Minnesota High Tech Association. Executives from about a dozen companies got together at the Minneapolis Convention Center to discuss what they need in the work force. What they said was pretty typical of what businesspeople have been telling MnSCU.

Tech executives — like their counterparts across the state — need everything. It just depends on the size of the company.

MNSCU chancellor

Joseph Ward of RJA Dispersions stressed broad technical skills — for example, a chemical engineer who knows computing.

“I’d ask for more cross-training in the engineering disciplines so people can do a bit of IT, or maybe more than a bit when it’s needed,” said Ward.

And some executives said job applicants aren’t required to have a bachelor’s degree, since technology changes a lot over four years. Instead, some suggested offering technical skills in two-year degrees — or in even shorter classes or certificate courses.

Executives at some larger companies said they don’t necessarily want the focus to be on tech skills that they can outsource to other countries.

“Technical will always be there. In fact, it’s easier to teach the technical skills,” said Tim Dokken with Thrivent Financial for Lutherans. “It’s much more difficult to train the soft skills and how to get people to influence, collaborate, work together.”

Those companies prefer well-rounded people. They say many tech workers have liberal arts backgrounds and shifted into technology.

It’s not just skilled graduates that executives wanted out of MnSCU. Lynn Hunt of Hunt Utilities Group says rural employees need more access to education. That means training programs run at their facilities, or online.

“What I’ve seen is the need of reaching both the older and the younger faster at home,” Hunt said. “They don’t have the time to take from their jobs. A very, very small company — you can’t let them go. Each person there is so needed.”

MnSCU will use the information it gathers at the listening sessions to shape the programs it’ll offer in the future. And it will update the survey every few years.

But there are some who question the premise of the MnSCU project, including one of its own faculty members. Monte Bute, a sociology professor at Metropolitan State University, says there’s no proof of a jobs/skills mismatch.

The skilled workers and students are already there, he says. Employers are just unable — or unwilling — to pay wages high enough to attract them.

At the Minneapolis listening session, Bute scolded the business executives in attendance, noting that they pushed for budget cuts and lower taxes while expecting even more out of a strained public education system.

Bute said the government shouldn’t pay for training or education that companies themselves should be providing.

“When is business going to start picking up their share of the tab, and quit expecting families and students to pick up the bulk of the tab?” he said.

MnSCU officials will hold sessions for the agricultural sector in June and July. It’ll address other sectors of the state’s economy, such as financial services and insurance, in the fall.

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Counterpoint

Lori Sturdevant was right to call out the Legislature for failing to pass a bonding bill with significant funding for Minnesota State Colleges and Universities (“Sharp strategy for MnSCU. One catch … ,” April 1. However, she gave a nod of approval to Chancellor Steven Rosenstone’s Workforce Assessment Initiative without adequately investigating his basic premise.

Employers claim that many jobs are going unfilled because the labor pool is unqualified. This thesis remains unproved. Business lobbies are playing Rosenstone like a fiddle. Their disingenuous strategy has little to do with reform or producing well-educated persons. Rather, they want the public sector to pick up the tab for employee training in order to reduce labor costs and maximize profits.

Let us not mince words: Workforce development is corporate welfare.

To be fair, Sturdevant and Rosenstone are not alone in their enthusiasm for workforce development. Business leaders, legislators, state agency commissioners, reporters and editorialists, and even Gov. Mark Dayton have fallen prey to this latest institutional fad. The sociologist Joel Best’s recent book captures this phenomenon: “Flavor of the Month: Why Smart People Fall for Fads.”

How does this bedazzling process work? Every institutional fad needs a good story — a perplexing problem and a compelling solution. What is the problem that Rosenstone seeks to solve? Minnesota’s jobs-skills mismatch. How is he going resolve this predicament? He has made an “all in” bet on workforce development.

Where did MnSCU’s “mismatch” story line come from? Credit David Olson, president of the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the MnSCU Board of Trustees from 2007-10. Olson proselytized the jobs-skills mismatch for the chamber while simultaneously reshaping MnSCU’s educational mission as workforce development.

MnSCU is planning 50-plus “listening sessions” with “Minnesota employers to gain a better understanding of their current and future workforce needs.” Sponsoring this initiative with MnSCU are the Minnesota Department of Employment and Economic Development, and none other than the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce. Does Rosenstone really expect unbiased data from these listening sessions? His workforce-development strategy depends not on dog-and-pony shows, but on reliable evidence of a jobs-skills mismatch.

Economists from Columbia University, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and New York University devised a sophisticated skills-mismatch index that they used in a 2011 study, “Measuring Mismatch in the U.S. Labor Market.” They published a follow-up paper on March 29. Their conclusions raise doubts about any significant structural or long-term mismatch:

“Based on this mismatch index, we conclude the following: First, the index displays considerable cyclicality, increasing notably in recessions. Second, the index has fallen appreciably during this recovery and is now near its pre-recession level. This pattern suggests that although mismatch rose considerably during the Great Recession, that rise proved temporary.”

In other words, the market has been working out the mismatch. Even during the recession, the problem was, to some extent, an illusion. It was often not a shortage of skills but employers’ inability to find workers at the wages offered. The way to resolve a labor shortage in a free market is for employers to raise wages. If they don’t, workers are free to pursue other opportunities.

The jobs-skills mismatch may be little more than a public-relations ploy by employer associations to get the public sector to pay for apprenticeships and job training that employers once provided. These same business lobbies have spent a small fortune seeking lower taxes, resulting in higher-education cuts that made tuition increases inevitable. Corporations not only want to call the tune for public higher education, they want students and their parents to pay the piper. Back in the day, students became well-informed citizens; today, they become commodities for industry.

These policy decisions about the future of higher education constitute a moral hazard. Economist Paul Krugman defined moral hazard as “any situation in which one person makes the decision about how much risk to take, while someone else bears the cost if things go badly.” Rosenstone and Olson, on behalf of MnSCU Board of Trustees and the Minnesota Chamber of Commerce, are making a risky gamble on Minnesota’s future. Students, faculty and taxpayers will bear the cost if this wager is lost.

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Equally deluded are the handful of “principled” libertarians who claim that unions are a coercive imposition on their “freedom.” They want neither to belong to a union nor to pay anything for the benefits that a union bestows upon them. Economists call these two groups “free riders.” In truth, that is just a polite euphemism for freeloaders.

The Inter Faculty Organization (IFO) forces no one to join. However, you are mistaken if you believe that you are not dependent on the union for the wages, benefits, and workplace protections that you enjoy. Because non-members receive the same benefits from our contract settlements as do members, we ask that you pay a “Fair Share” of the cost of bargaining and protecting the provisions of that agreement.

The IFO holds to a rather old-fashioned idea: We are a community of scholars. In the 12th century, Peter Abelard established at the University of Paris the progenitor of the modern college and university. Modeled on the medieval guild, Paris exemplified the principle of autonomy, a federated and self-regulating community of teachers and scholars.

During the 20th century, trustees and a new class of professional administrators eventually destroyed those self-governing faculty guilds that had persisted for 800 years. Teachers and scholars increasingly became wage slaves in a corporate university, at-will employees with few protections, minimal bargaining power, and little say in governance. Administrators and trustees held a monopoly of power in higher education.

Faculty members soon realized that without their traditional form of self-governance, they were individually subject to autocratic behavior by administrators and trustees. The community of scholars became a shape shifter—it organized faculty unions.

The IFO improves and protects your wages, health coverage, pensions, and contract rights, whether you are a member or not. With the combined 2006 and 2008 contracts, the IFO won salaries increases of nearly 17 percent. Since the Great Recession, we have protected those gains and stopped ongoing attempts to cut faculty salaries and benefits. Even if you are not a member, we provide professional representation if the administration violates your contractual rights.

Most importantly, the IFO has organized a countervailing power to the potentially absolute power of MnSCU and local university administrations. We now have shared governance in public higher education. This faculty power grows from a democratic and participatory organization that projects a collective voice—we hang together, or the powers-that-be will hang us one by one. Much of the time, the slogan “The union makes us strong” seems a cliché; the RTW campaign has made this assertion a pragmatic truth.

MnSCU controls public higher education at 31 colleges and universities. Chancellor Rosenstone says he is running a $2 billion business and, befittingly, has joined the board of the Minnesota Business Partnership—an organization composed of the CEOs of the state’s 100 largest banks and corporations.

A Board of Trustees, appointed by former Governor Tim Pawlenty, governs MnSCU. Business leaders, including current and past executive directors of the Taxpayers League of Minnesota and the Minnesota Business Partnership, dominate the board. The market ideology that permeates MnSCU has no sympathy for faculty unions. In fact, there are Trustees and MnSCU employees who support efforts to weaken and destroy public unions.

Consider doing your job without the IFO having your back. It is not a comforting thought. The choice is yours—union solidarity today or wage slavery tomorrow.

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T.S. Eliot thought that April was the cruelest month. I disagree. For me, spring is a time of rebirth and rejuvenation. I would argue that autumn is the most cold-hearted time of year.

Last fall I was afflicted with a mysterious neuropathy that baffled my neurologist. A couple of months later I had hip replacement surgery and a fortuitous x-ray revealed tumors on my lungs. They diagnosed me with stage 3 granular pulmonary lymphoma, a cancer so rare that there are only 500 to 600 cases in the medical literature. Turns out that neuropathy is a symptom of the disease. Who knew?

The prognosis is poor. The median survival from diagnosis is 14 months. More than 60 percent of patients die within five years. I completed chemotherapy in July and the cancer was in remission. However, within a month troubling symptoms appeared. I was increasingly short of breath, gasping after 15-20 paces.  Pulmonary embolisms formed. Most days I took two naps. I had no energy; the smallest tasks were beyond me. Walking became a precarious adventure.

Heart function is one potential victim of chemotherapy. Mine has declined to 20-30 percent. The neuropathy has also worsened. My legs are numb from the knees down and I have minimal feeling in my feet. The outlook is grim. For me, autumn is akin to what Dylan Thomas called “the dying of the light.”

Even as a small boy, I found fall the saddest season. I grew up on an isolated rural homestead and rode the bus to a country school. As the autumn light rapidly diminished, I trudged up our half-mile lane each evening in a darkening and bleak landscape. The few flickering lights in the house and barn were of little consolation. The prairie’s sinister spell of fall twilight lifted once I moved to the city.

Only after I bought a rustic cabin on a river 22 years ago did those distant mood swings return with full force. I remain exuberant until the Summer Solstice. Then the days begin to shorten, only so minutely through July and August. The dying of the light accelerates rapidly from September until the Winter Solstice, and my spirit correspondingly withers. I always close down my cabin on the weekend when Daylight Saving Time ends. As I finish the final tasks, this idyllic setting is awash in dead leaves and darkness. I go into emotional hibernation until the next spring.

This autumn has been particularly difficult. My retired brother flew in from Vancouver Island for two weeks to close down the cabin and winterize our home in the city. While I appreciated his visit and help, it only heightened my sense of helplessness. This must be what the late autumn of life feels like.

I held up remarkably well during chemotherapy. However, the damaging aftereffects of chemo and the doctors’ dim prognosis for recovery have finally broken my spirit. My primary doctor recently gave me a questionnaire for depression: “Little interest or pleasure in doing things;” “Feeling down, depressed or hopeless;” “Feeling tired or having little energy;” Feeling bad about yourself;” “Trouble concentrating on things.”

The results were, frankly, depressing. I have a new stamp on my passport—Prozac Nation. I am now taking an anti-depression drug. When it kicks in, I hope it raises my low spirits. Regardless, no mood-altering drug will change the results of my latest checkup. Autumn just got a bit more cold-hearted.

The cancer is back. It has re-appeared in my lungs and spread to my liver. I feel no urge to “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Nevertheless, I am not yet ready for a calm acceptance of the coming darkness. I will rejuvenate soon, in spirit if not body. I look forward to opening my cabin in the spring and watching the Yellow River flow, where one day my ashes will be scattered.

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by Russ Stanton, IFO Director of Government Relations

The Inter Faculty Organization (IFO)  Board of Directors has elected Monte Bute to the position of Action Coordinator. The IFO represents faculty at Minnesota’s seven state universities. The Action Coordinator will chair the Action Committee and:

• Help publicize the valuable work and efforts of the IFO and its members to various external constituent groups.
• Engage in efforts to build solidarity and community within the IFO and its membership and with various external groups.
• Coordinate information flow between faculty and the Negotiating Team regarding issues and progress of negotiations.
• Coordinate actions that will move the negotiation process on and encourage settlement.
• Keep the Negotiating Team informed of action plans and be receptive to input from the Negotiating Team; and
• Work with the GRC to encourage efforts at writing letters to legislators and the local press.

Monte Bute is an associate professor of sociology at Metropolitan State University in Minnesota. His opinion essays appear on the editorial pages of daily newspapers in the Twin Cities. Bute also frequently testifies on higher education issues before the Minnesota Senate and House of Representatives.

Bute began teaching at Metropolitan State as a community faculty member in 1984. He finally finished a long-delayed B.A. at the university in 1991. After a 20-year career as a community organizer, he realized that his next mission in life was teaching. To fulfill that calling, Bute began graduate school rather late in life. Professor Bute has been a prolific writer over the years, publishing 65 articles in scholarly publications and the popular press.

Sociologists of Minnesota (SOM) gave Bute the Distinguished Sociologist award in 2004. Bute has received Metropolitan State University’s Outstanding Teacher award and the Excellence in Teaching award. He has also been given awards by Minneapolis Community and Technical College, the Jobs Now Coalition, and the Job Training Partnership Association.

Professor Bute is a past president of both Sociologists of Minnesota and the National Council of State Sociological Associations (NCSSA). Bute has been the editor of Sociograph, associate editor of the Sociological Imagination, and has served on the editorial board of Contexts, a journal of the American Sociological Association. He has been a fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota.

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This post first appeared on the opinion page of the St. Paul Pioneer Press on Thursday, July 15, 2010. I adapted this column from remarks I made upon receiving Metropolitan State University’s 2010 Alumnus Award.

Teaching, learning and hemlock

Creating capacity for dialogue — with one’s self

Gov. Tim Pawlenty used a recent appearance with Jon Stewart on ‘The Daily Show’ to promote his market elixir for the purported ills of higher education. If his idea of an ‘iCollege’ were to become the norm, liberal arts professors like me would have little choice but to join Socrates in drinking the hemlock.

“Can’t I just pull that down on my iPhone or iPad whenever the heck I feel like it, from wherever I feel like?” he said. “And instead of paying thousands of dollars, can I pay $199 for iCollege instead of 99 cents for iTunes?”

Implicit in this sound bite lurks a philosophy of education: College is primarily a consumer transaction. Pawlenty’s business model makes no mention of quality, rigor, or critical thought. In his iCollege, the development of well-educated persons and well-informed citizens would take a back seat to the convenience and cost of buying credentials online.

Gov. Pawlenty: Socrates and I beg to differ. If only teaching and learning were so effortless. Let me assure you, as a college teacher and lifelong learner, they are not.

Education does not occur within the head of a teacher or between the ears of a student. Instruction takes place in that mysterious space between educator and pupil. The teaching-learning process is a dialogue — and nothing demonstrates this truth like its absence in a classroom, or online. The educator speaks and gestures inarticulately; the pupil sits mutely, mystified by the charade. The teacher pretends to teach and the student pretends to learn.

Monologues like this are a perversion of teaching and learning. What is more common in classrooms and online is what the social philosopher Martin Buber calls “technical dialogue.” In this circumstance, the educator transmits knowledge and skills and students receive and utilize these tools. The transaction is only skin-deep. Technical education seeks competence, not the meaning of life.

In genuine dialogue, teachers bring not just knowledge and skills but their deepest selves to the encounter. The purpose of this vulnerability is to reduce the distance between the instructor and the pupil. This dialogical moment creates a sacred space, what Buber calls the “between.” Within this realm — for both the teacher and the learner — intellect encounters heart and soul. “Good teachers,” writes the educator Parker Palmer, “join self and subject and students into the fabric of life.”

Once the student embarks on this journey of self-discovery, the quest for meaning is transcendent. A true educator does not impose but seeks only to further the student’s personal destiny. For Buber, this ends the educational process. I would argue that he neglects a crucial final step in teaching and learning.

Whether it is an introductory course or a senior seminar, I begin each class by telling the students that it is my intention to help them kill their teachers. (Since my demanding nature always rubs a few students the wrong way, I take the precaution of explaining that my meaning is metaphorical, not literal.) This invariably baffles beginning students, as it should. My remark is like a Zen koan, a riddle to ruminate upon until understood. If it still puzzles a senior, I realize I am only one semester away from failing as an educator. What is the point of my tutelage? Pursuing their own counsel, students must leave their teachers behind, no matter how cherished or respected. Teachers, on the other hand, should welcome such autonomy, seeking intellectual peers, not disciples.

Socrates describes this last stage as “a discourse that the mind carries on with itself about any subject it is considering.” Carrying on a dialogue with oneself is the hallmark of becoming one’s own teacher. This capacity for contemplation has always been the ideal outcome of a liberal arts education. The most valuable endowment that any university possesses is a wealth of such graduates — and wise the society that invests in their education.

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