Abold effort is needed to prepare Texas’ workforce for the future

If the hiring manager at your business appears eternally pessimistic, it’s likely because only 38 percent of Texas workers have any form of certificate or degree beyond a high school diploma.

In case you think those under age 34 are more likely to have advanced training, guess again.

Texas’ youth may be our future, but workers over 55 are slightly more educated as a group, giving Texas one of the least educated labor forces in the country, according to U.S. Census data.

“If you have the skills, you have a complex job that pays more. If you don’t have those skills, that doesn’t mean you don’t have a job, it’s just lower paying,” Woody Hunt, an El Paso businessman, told a Texas Association of Business education conference last week. “We don’t want low-paying jobs.”

Texas’ economic future relies on high-paying jobs, so that’s why Hunt led a committee at the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board to draft 60X30TX, a strategic plan developed to deal with the state’s piteously low level of educational achievement. The plan calls for 60 percent of the Texas workforce to hold some kind of post-high school certificate or degree by 2030, at a cost less than 60 percent of the graduate’s first year of income.

That means increasing the number of certificates and degrees granted from 290,000 in 2014 to 550,000 in 2030. That goal could go higher, though, since the plan calls for benchmarking Texas’ goals to what other states and other developed countries achieve during the same period.

“This is an audacious goal, but that’s how great things happen,” state Rep. John Zerwas, R-Simonton, said at the conference to rally support.

Frankly, the goal is the minimum of what Texas needs, because the state is already falling behind.

“Wehave a workforce that is no better educated among 18- to 34-year-olds than the old guys, the 55- to 64-year-olds,” Hunt

WASHINGTON — Worries about the global economy pushed American consumers’ spirits to the lowest level in almost a year, the University of Michigan reported.

The university’s consumer sentiment index fell to 87.2 this month from 91.9 in August.

Richard Curtin, chief economist for the survey, said consumers are disturbed by signs of trouble in the Chinese economy, the world’s second-biggest after the United States, and continued economic stress in Europe.

Still, the Michigan index is up from 84.6 a year ago.