Lack of College Graduates Equals Lack of Better Wages

Low levels of higher education hurting economic progress, experts say

By Ben Szobody

Staff Writer, The Greenville News

Greenville's campaign to parlay high-skill and high-tech businesses into better wages across the Upstate is handicapped by what new census figures show is a startling lack of college graduates.

In the six-county Upstate region that heavily trades jobs and employees, fewer than one in four people had a bachelor's degree in 2008 — the Achilles heel of any effort to lure new employers, raise per capita income and rebound from a historic recession, experts say.

Behind the figures is an Upstate region long reliant on low-skill manufacturing work and often prone to viewing higher education with suspicion.

The bachelor's degree — so often a passport to higher-income jobs — is significantly less common among Greenville-area residents than it is in neighboring metro areas, peer communities in the Southeast and economic trendsetters such as Austin and Raleigh, according to an analysis by The Greenville News of figures from the 2008 American Community Survey.

The quicker way to a more educated work force — importing college graduates — poses other challenges, such as how to keep them here and how to navigate cultural resentment when newcomers flooding the region make an average of $10,000 a year more than native-born residents, according to economists and census figures.

The longer-term problem is one of attitudes and funding, changing the way native-born residents feel about school while making it more affordable, say business and political leaders.

“Aspiration levels have to rise,” said Bruce Yandle, dean emeritus of Clemson University's College of Business and Behavioral Science.

Tom Smythe, a Furman University economics professor, said that when it comes to how native residents view higher-education knowledge, “I don't think we've made that turn yet.”

Rex Carter, a Greenville attorney and the state's former speaker of the state House of Representatives, said the cost of college remains a major obstacle and that instead of increasing incentives, South Carolina leaders are letting tuition get “way out of sight.”

“The Legislature, to some extent, can control the cost,” Carter said, adding, “We know this. We're pricing the average student out of the market.”

State Sen. Danny Verdin, R-Laurens, said there's little doubt that the larger Greenville area trails most of the Southeast when it comes to the availability of college graduates, which he said is probably the “most significant factor” that prospective employers consider.

Still, he said the effort to educate more workers has to happen in coordination with everything else an employer wants, and that a move by the Legislature to cap tuition would be “overreaching.”

‘Startling' connection

Smythe said his own calculations show that if South Carolina could increase the percentage of residents with bachelor's degrees to match the national average, it would generate an additional $1 billion in tax revenue.

Yandle said the relationship between education achieved and wages earned is so strong it's “almost startling,” and that the Upstate compares poorly even to other metropolitan areas in South Carolina because of the large footprint left behind by a low-skill manufacturing economy.

“You can't get to higher income, and the welfare that goes with it, without having an educated population,” he said.

Many of the regional jobs lost in the recession won't come back, while the jobs that are up for grabs depend ever more heavily on research and technology, said Joe Erwin, a Greenville advertising executive and former chairman of the state Democratic Party.

Those jobs will go to educated people.
At Erwin's firm, Erwin-Penland Advertising, that doesn't mean Ivy League graduates or people with 4.0 grade point averages, but rather graduates who have waded through the intense competition of college, who are curious, who push themselves against their peers and have a finger on the pulse of society.

The Upstate can't always attract outsiders for such jobs, Yandle said, because educated workers shy away from high taxes and crime rates.

Working in Greenville's favor, however, is a concentration of business services — such as accountants and software developers — that attracts more of their kind and the overall “coolness” factor of the city itself that sociologists are now measuring in terms of the arts, lively downtowns and overall quality of life, Yandle said.

In cool-heavy Austin, nearly 40 percent of the over-25 population in the four major counties surrounding the city have a bachelor's degree, with one county boasting a 43 percent share, according to the new census figures.

About 44 percent of the people living in major Raleigh-area counties have bachelor's degrees, including 55 percent in one county.

In Greenville, the number is 24 percent, or fewer than one in four people in the six-county Upstate area from which a local employer would look to draw workers. In Greenville County itself, 30 percent of residents have a degree, the figures show.

The region also lags the larger Charlotte and Atlanta areas, where the percentages of people with bachelor's degrees in the major surrounding counties are 30 percent and 36 percent respectively.

Columbia and Charleston, which have historically relied less on the manufacturing economy, have 28 percent and 29 percent of residents with bachelor's degrees in the major counties from which they draw workers.

In the five major counties around Nashville, 32 percent have bachelor's degrees, while the Knoxville-area percentage is 28 percent, census figures show.

The American Community Survey's 2008 annual report includes figures for only major counties with populations of more than 65,000.

Importing managers

Carter said the breadth of the education gap is a “tremendous surprise” to him, and that although South Carolina has made major strides when it comes to technical education, it has somehow failed to entice students to go further.

“We should have all of our resources directed towards getting that child into college and keeping him in college if we expect a complete, full economic recovery,” Carter said.

Smythe said education is a “counter-cyclical” investment, meaning that when the economy is bad, people have time on their hands for more school, and the public investment should go up.

Any area not currently investing heavily in schools — South Carolina is one of them — is poorly positioned to recover from the recession, Smythe said.

Asked about the Legislature's role in rising tuition, Verdin said he supports encouraging institutions to watch costs closely, though he couldn't support any of the proposals he's seen to limit tuition growth because he said it amounts to too much legislative manipulation.

Smythe said the region is essentially importing its educated managers now, and that one key will be convincing them to stay and put down roots since educated people tend to produce more educated people.

“It's a self-perpetuating engine,” he said. “And somehow we've got to convince people that it's the right thing.”

Social resentment of newcomers is nothing new, Yandle said, noting that for long periods of time every family that arrived in South Carolina raised per capita income.

He said the state has done well to improve the geographic and financial access to a range of technical schools, community colleges and universities, but that many natives still lack the role models and incentives to chase a college degree and stop at nothing less.

Erwin said the chief obstacle is political will, and that the years spent debating school vouchers and other worthwhile issues has nonetheless come at the expense of a broad, cohesive effort to give basic problems such as SAT scores and graduation rates a shove in the right direction.

Erwin said executives at some of the biggest companies in the region have made clear to him that they're ready to get behind “anything” that will improve those key benchmarks, ensuring that there will be a talent pool of people who can vie for competitive jobs that, in a global economy, could end up almost anywhere else.

Data Editor Thomas Woodham contributed to this report.

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