Lois Henry: Education picture in Kern isn't pretty
| Tuesday, Dec 09 2008 08:30 PM
Last Updated Friday, Mar 27 2009 12:57 PM
Well, we’re back in the national spotlight.
Yup, time to start screening calls from far-flung friends and relatives who want to know, once again, why you live here.
The number of Bakersfield residents with bachelor degrees or higher (13.5 percent of the population) was so low we’ve been named seventh in the top 10 most uneducated cities in the nation in a recent Forbes magazine survey.
OK, that’s bad enough. But dig a little and it gets worse: the number of high schoolers dropping out in Kern is up. Not just for one year, but over the last three years, we’ve had a steady increase of kids leaving school between 9th and 12th grades.
In the Kern High School District alone, our dropout rate is 25 percent. Twenty-five percent!
UGH. Just unplug the phone!
If you’re sitting there with your big degree and good job, your kids safely graduated and tucked away in a large university and you’re thinking, “So what?”
I’ll tell you what.
A populace’s educational achievement is both the chicken or the egg for its economic achievement. Less brain power equals less horsepower in the local economy, and that affects all of us.
According to the Forbes piece “...the less-educated cities have weaker economies. According to September data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (the most recent month available) the 10 metropolitan areas atop the list have an average unemployment of 5.1 percent. The 10 at the bottom? 9.4 percent. The national average that month was 6 percent.”
Kern County’s unemployment rate in October was 9.9 percent. But even the Forbes article couldn’t pin down what follows what — do the high degrees attract more high-end jobs or visa versa?
For Richard Chapman, president of the Kern Economic Development Corporation, a public-private organization tasked with bringing jobs to Kern county, it’s a reality he deals with daily.
“It’s a Jekyll and Hyde syndrome,” he told me. “We have a poor educational ranking, but we’ve seen progress in terms of some employers favoring this area because our labor costs are so low.”
While mid-range jobs, such as warehouse work, are certainly better paying and less cyclical than non-skilled ag work, having a job that requires a degree may make a more stable economy overall, according to previous studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
A 2007 survey by the Bureau showed that for people without a high school diploma, the unemployment rate was 7.1 percent compared to 2.2 percent for those with at least a bachelor’s degree.
“It is a serious problem,” Mark Evans, associate dean of Business and Public Administration at Cal State Bakersfield, said of Kern’s “brain drain.”
A problem the CSU Chancellor’s office hasn’t exactly been helpful with, by the way.
Evans and others at Cal State Bakersfield sent a proposal to the Chancellor’s office to create an “applied studies” degree that would have allowed people to complete a four-year degree in various technical areas using a mix of credits from time worked in the field or military training and courses through Bakersfield College.
That’s a very realistic approach for our area given the need for so many kids to start working after high school.
The Chancellor’s office said no because 1) they didn’t like the original name of the degree, which would have been an Administration Degree and 2) they felt the electives in the program listed too many options.
Okaaaaaaay.
Evans said the university will rework the proposal and resubmit it next spring.
“I’m optimistic we can get it approved,” he said. After all, the CSUs at Domiguez Hills and Stanislaus already have similar programs.
Such a program would work well with the proposed expansion of vocational opportunities at Kern High School District being pushed by trustee Joel Heinrichs.
While the focus on voc-ed may seem contrary to a push for higher degrees, research shows voc-ed actually increases the likelihood that kids will go on to college.
“They may start out thinking they want to be a medical technician, but when they see all the options, the say, ‘I think I’ll shoot for an RN,’” Heinrichs said.
Besides, Kern County is so far down in terms of education, increasing even the number of certificated employees and those with two-year degrees would be a substantial bump in our educational level overall.
And that sounds pretty smart to me.
These are Lois Henry’s opinions, not necessarily The Californian’s. Her column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Call her at 395-7373 or write lhenry@bakersfield.com .
