A couple of weeks ago CNBC released its annual list of the Top States for Business 2023. Missouri was an unimpressive 32nd out of the 50 states plus the District of Columbia. Wondering what pulled us down? Well, this year CNBC decided that workforce quality would get the most weight of the 10 components of the index. And in that category, Missouri ranked 49th. We must not stack up too well against other states when it comes to the percentage of workers with college degrees or even industry credentials. Apparently, we also don’t compete well on the outmigration of educated workers, or on worker training programs, or on worker productivity.

So, imagine my surprise when the governor had a press conference just days later to announce a long list of Missouri’s “top” rankings. On some list we rank first in on-the-job-training. That would be for the number of participants, not quality or outcome, but still. There’s a list out there where we’re ranked second for apprenticeships and one where we are fourth for small-business jobs. The list of rankings is described as “incredible statistics that prove why Missouri is the Show-Me state.” Incredible indeed. Sadly, the governor’s list doesn’t include any source information, so we can’t tell who is saying all these complimentary things about our state.

As someone who follows the Missouri K-12 education system pretty closely, I’m not that surprised by the CNBC ranking. Education in the state is in a downward spiral. Last year, 70 percent of our fourth-graders scored below grade level on a nationally administered test. These children are moving on to the reading-to-learn years, and they haven’t learned to read. Middle school isn’t any more promising. Less than one-quarter of our eighth-graders can do math at grade level, according to the latest (2022) national assessments, and just 28 percent have grade-level reading skills.

When students start high school without having mastered the skills they need to succeed, the effects are predictable. Last year, just 60 percent of our 2022 high school graduates met the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE’s) criteria for being college or career ready. It’s hard not to feel sorry for the 40 percent who walked across the stage and were handed a diploma even though they were unprepared for the next stage of their lives. Since we’re looking at rankings, did you know that last year Missouri ranked 43rd for the percentage of high school students who took a college-level Advanced Placement (AP) test in high school? We’re not talking about passing an AP exam; only one in five high school students even took one. Also, less than 8 percent of graduating high school students completed the Career and Technical Ed (CTE) certificate program.

What are the consequences of the poor job we’re doing of preparing our students for life after high school? According to the St. Louis Federal Reserve, the percentage of Missourians with bachelor’s or master’s degrees has been declining in recent years. Not by much —just from 31.9 percent for bachelor’s to 31.7—but is that the direction we want it going? There’s a similar trend line for graduate degrees, which had been increasing every year until a couple of years ago, when they began to decline.

We seem to have a workforce problem, and it appears to be getting worse. Our K-12 enrollment has been declining since before the pandemic and will continue to decline based on the size of recent kindergarten classes. And within those smaller groups of students, the percentage of kids who are at grade level is declining. Smaller percentages of smaller high school graduating classes will be ready for the next stage in their lives. We need leaders who are ready to confront those facts and do something about them. The future of the state depends on it.

These leading indicators may signal what’s next for our work force, but it’s not too late to turn things around. States all around Missouri are letting parents pick where their children attend school—public or private—and having state education money follow them. Families in these states can tailor the education of each of their children, even when those needs differ within the same family. Neighboring states are implementing aggressive early literacy programs, with Mississippi being a standout, and rethinking high schools. Innovation and true accountability are happening . . . elsewhere. Meanwhile, Missourians are being handed a cherry-picked list of statistics that we’re supposed to get excited about.

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As more students consider moving directly from high school to the workforce, they will need quality career and technical education (CTE) at their schools to provide them with job skills and work experience that will qualify them for good jobs after graduation. Are schools ready to respond to changes in the needs and priorities of their students? If not, what will it take to get them ready? How well are CTE programs in Missouri serving students now? Any district that currently treats technical education as a backwater for kids who “don’t have what it takes” for college is already doing a disservice to its community, and the harm done will only get worse in the coming years.

Today I’m releasing two essays: Career and Technical Education and Workforce Development and Investing in the Future Workforce. Together these reports explore numerous aspects of CTE programs in Missouri and address the following questions:

• How is the current state of Missouri’s workforce affecting its economy?
• Are the priorities and practices of Missouri’s CTE programs aligned with what employers in the state say they need?
• What can Missouri learn from other states that have been successful in bolstering their workforces though CTE?
• What incentives can the state give educators to encourage them to help students earn the credentials that employers value?

To read the full reports, click on the links below.

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I’ve written  previously about IRC attainment in Missouri, using data from 2017 and 2018 that the Show-Me Institute obtained through a data request. These data were useful because IRC attainment was broken out  by district and school, allowing for a detailed analysis of where in the state specific IRCs are earned and how that could support local economies.

However, documents from the Career and Technical Education (CTE) advisory council meeting in October 2019 contained IRC attainment data from 2013–2019. These data can provide further context, such as what IRCs students have earned over the years and which IRCs are growing in popularity, as well as overall attainment trends. The data show that IRC attainment spiked from 2013 to 2016, and has since slowly increased.

But this trend doesn’t hold true for all IRCs, including some IRCs for jobs that are in demand in Missouri, such as the CompTIA credential for technology jobs. The chart below shows that some IRCs have actually experienced a decline in attainment in recent years. This should be cause for concern since Missouri needs more students graduating with in-demand credentials, not fewer. To help encourage more high schoolers to earn an IRC, Missouri should consider implementing an IRC bonus pay program. An IRC bonus pay program would give a small bonus to a teacher for each student of theirs who passes an IRC exam.

These data can call to attention the gap between the economy’s need for IRCs and the low attainment of IRCs for Missouri high school students. Missouri should be trying to strengthen its workforce, and IRCs can be an effective way to do that. 

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After graduation, districts and schools follow up with their graduates to see what they’re currently doing, and then DESE compiles the data. I connected the DESE data with the federal data set that labels each district with different locale types, ranging from big cities to remote rural areas. You can see the results in the graph at the top of this post (the data may not add up to 100 percent due to data privacy and inability to contact all students).  

Looking at the 2018 data, 33 percent of rural district students entered employment and 35 percent enrolled in a 2-year college following graduation, both of which were the highest percentages for each category out of all locales. On the other hand, rural schools had 21 percent of its students attend a 4-year college or university, the lowest percentage out of all locales.

Workforce preparation for rural communities, thus, should have a strong focus on preparing students for high-demand, well-paying jobs they can enter soon after graduation. This could mean students taking the proper classes and having access to the credentials and skills training they need to be set up for a successful career immediately. Taking job-specific courses or earning college credit during high school should also be an option to help bridge students from high school to technical school.

Missouri needs to consider the data when planning for workforce development. There are good jobs available to Missourians, and the state needs to make sure students are ready to fill them.

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• Subsidies for General Motors
• Course Access
• Workforce Development
• Low-income Housing Tax Credits

Click on the link below to read more.

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IRCs are awarded by third-party industry organizations and certify that students have mastered skills needed for a particular job such as a welder, automotive technician, certified nursing assistant, or software developer. Recent research from ExcelinEd shows that, in addition to improving employment prospects, earning an IRC is associated with increases in graduation rates, college enrollment, and earnings.

In the study, which was released this month, researchers looked at outcomes for hundreds of thousands of students and found overall positive outcomes for IRC earners. In Florida, Indiana, and Kentucky, earning an IRC was positively associated with graduating from high school on time. Students in Florida and Kentucky who had earned an IRC were more likely to receive an associate’s degree if they enrolled in community college. The researchers also observed up to a 12 percent boost in wages for full-time workers after high school in Florida and Indiana.

The only potentially negative effect the researchers observed was that credential earners in Kentucky were less likely to graduate with a bachelor’s degree if they enrolled at a four-year college or university. One possible explanation they provided is that “the opportunity cost of each additional year of education is higher for credential earners than non-earners.” In other words, students just may not have thought it was worth finishing a bachelor’s degree and would rather be working.

Unfortunately, high schoolers in Missouri earn only about 8,000 IRCs each year, meaning that only a small fraction of the over 180,000 high school students who participate in a career and technical education program earn an IRC.

Some states have enacted policies that reflect the value they see in credential-earning, and Missouri should take note. For instance, Florida implemented a bonus program for teachers awarding them $25 or $50 for each student who earned an IRC. During the 2007–08 school year when the program started Florida high schoolers earned only 803 credentials total. Last year, they collectively earned over 121,000 IRCs.

Missouri policymakers have already shown a willingness to invest in our workforce—the legislature just passed Fast Track this session to help adults who want to pursue degrees in high-demand fields—but are they funding programs that are proven to work? Clearly, financial incentives have worked to get more students IRCs in Florida, and students have benefitted. With such a payoff for a relatively small investment, teacher bonus pay looks like a win-win-win for the state, teachers, and students.

Listen to our podcast on this subject here.

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If employers are looking for a more skilled workforce, getting more students to earn industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) would be a step in the right direction. IRCs are credentials awarded from industry groups after passing an exam, allowing the bearer to demonstrate proficiency in a specific field. Earning an IRC is a great way to jump immediately from high school to a job.

85 percent of businesses responding to the workforce survey said they have some or considerable difficulty finding applicants with an IRC (only around a quarter of respondents said IRCs were not applicable). According to the survey respondents, IRCs are the most challenging type of educational attainment for employers to find in prospective employees, even including postsecondary degrees.

The variety of survey respondents is also notable. Responses came from a number of industries including healthcare, education, manufacturing, construction, and finance. This is good evidence that the problem of IRC scarcity is widespread and not just confined to pockets of the Ozark economy. The Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education has approved 81 types of IRC exams; only 16 of those exams were completed successfully by an Ozark student. In total, a mere 470 IRCs were awarded to high school students in the Ozark region in 2017. If each IRC was earned by a different student in the graduating class, then only 8 percent of Ozark graduates would have an IRC. The real number is likely even lower than 8 percent, because one student can earn multiple IRCs.

The survey responses make it clear that there’s unmet demand in the Ozark region for students graduating with an IRC in hand. One way to increase IRC attainment is to offer a financial incentive to schools and teachers. An IRC bonus pay program would give teachers financial compensation for each of their students that earn an IRC. Florida implemented an IRC bonus pay program and saw an explosion in students earning IRCs.

The Ozark region has a workforce problem that IRCs could help solve. It’s time to get creative in finding ways to prepare students for life after high school.

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If we had just $10 million to spend on fixing this situation, would it be better to ensure students are career ready before they graduate from high school, or put that money towards those who were part of the 58 percent and have not been successful? To be certain, both are important. But which is the better investment? I think the former.

One of the most high-profile bills in the 2019 legislative session awarded corporate welfare to General Motors. Tacked on to that bill was a measure spending $10 million to create the Fast Track workforce development program. The program will cover tuition for Missourians who are at least 25 years old, make less than $40,000, and want to go back to school to pursue a degree in a “high demand” field. Students are allowed to transfer and can take up to one year off. And when they’re finished, they must remain in the state for three years and be employed full time within twelve months. If students don’t comply with these requirements, the grant will then convert to a loan.

Missouri community college tuition averages $5,750 for in-state students. If a student qualifies for a Pell Grant, most of that cost would be covered. Pell Grants are generally awarded to students with total household incomes below $20,000, which means Fast Track would primarily cover people making between $20,000 and $40,000. Let’s just say, for the sake of argument, that a typical Fast Track student received a quarter of their funding from the program and finished their program in two years, which is an extremely conservative estimate Under this scenario, the program could serve a maximum of 7,000 students. It’s a lot of money to put toward a complicated program that likely won’t be able to serve many students and may or may not result in a more skilled workforce in Missouri.

What about the first option—improving the career readiness of our students before they leave high school? One proven way to do this is to create financial incentives for career and technical education (CTE) teachers who make sure their students are career ready. These are students who earn an industry-recognized credential (IRC), such as the Automotive Service Excellence credential or the Certified Nursing Assistant credential. At a cost of just $500 per credential-earning student, with some of that going to the district, some to the CTE student, and some to the teacher, $10 million could improve career outcomes for 20,000 Missourians each year. States that have implemented programs like this have seen exponential growth in the number of students who leave high school with an IRC in hand.

Giving CTE teachers an opportunity to earn a few thousand extra dollars each year is a simple and direct way to improve our workforce. Creating a new government bureaucracy to manage a complex new government program very well may not be.

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During the 2017–18 school year, over 180,000 high schoolers in Missouri took at least one CTE class, but fewer than 28,000 concentrated (taking three or more classes) in any one area. What’s more, fewer than 8,000 students earned an industry-recognized credential (IRC), a signal to employers that the student has mastered some set of skills. Many Missouri students—especially those not interested in going to college—could benefit from earning an IRC and leaving high school career ready. 

A recent report from ExcelinEd shows that there are thousands of well-paying jobs that could be readily accessible to Missouri’s high schoolers if they were earning the right credentials. According to the report, Missouri met only one out of five indicators of a quality CTE program.

To put in perspective what kind of opportunities students are missing out on, let’s take a look at careers in just two industries. In 2018, some 617 students in Missouri earned an Automotive Service Excellence Certification. But there were over 3,600 job postings requiring that credential, and these jobs paid over $15 an hour last year. The unmet demand is also apparent in digital designing. There were over 3,300 job postings for Adobe Certified Associate and Adobe Certified Expert credentials each—again, these jobs pay at least $15 an hour—yet there were only 146 Missouri high school students who earned an Associate credential, and none received the Expert credential. Perhaps not enough students are interested in these careers to meet the demand, but are they even aware of these opportunities?

One way to improve awareness and options for students is through teacher bonus pay. If CTE teachers have skin in the game—for instance, $50 for every student of theirs who earns an IRC—they would have an incentive to get more students that could excel in a particular field working towards earning an IRC. Florida has such a program and students there earned over 140,000 credentials during the 2016–17 school year. Overall, one in six Florida high school students earned a credential, compared to just one in twenty high school students in Missouri.

Like many states, Missouri has a workforce problem. But with some simple changes, which other states have implemented successfully, we could increase the number of students earning credentials, while aligning those credentials to the job market. Good information paired with the right incentives can help move Missouri’s CTE in the right direction. 

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The report projects Missouri to be the ninth-highest state in tech growth over the next decade with 2.9 percent growth, ahead of the national 2.1 percent projection. The tech industry includes energy, environmental, life sciences and information technology (IT).

Despite projected growth, Missouri workers may not be prepared to fill the needs of an expanding tech industry, as jobs could outpace the availability of skilled workers. A survey by Gallup of 1,000 Missouri employers find that only 44 percent were satisfied with the current availability of skilled workers, and only 15 percent agree that high schools are preparing students for the workforce. In 2016 one of the largest workforce gaps was in Science and Technology—around a 9 percent gap  between the workforce demand and available workers.

This gap shows the need for more high school graduates prepared to enter the tech field. If students graduate with the proper credentials, they could have access to a high-demand job and enter the workforce immediately. The largest tech sector in Missouri is IT, of which high school students can earn over 15 IT-related industry-recognized credentials (IRCs) approved by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE). An IRC is a nationally recognized credential that tests job skills, awarded by a third-party professional organization. In 2018, fewer than 500 IT-related IRCs were earned among Missouri high school students (less than one percent of the graduating class if all test takers were seniors) according to data received from DESE.

Florida and North Carolina have found that providing bonus pay to teachers is one way to get more students to graduate with an IRC. Bonus pay encourages high schools and teachers to focus on the important work of preparing students for a career.

A growing tech sector would be a huge boon to Missouri’s economy. But if we don’t act now to ensure our workforce is ready for these jobs, the potential boon will turn into a missed opportunity.

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At the heart of our efforts is one of economic growth. Our message that Missouri is open for business cannot be just lip service coming from this building (the Capitol). The policies we pass must focus on cultivating employers and not controlling their businesses,” Haahr tells the House….

Haahr also focused on conservative policies during his address, saying that “gone are the old ways of thinking that public money alone can end our problems.” He tells the House that Missouri has passed a balanced budget without raising taxes for 15 years that “that will not change on our watch.

Other items, including some health care and transparency reforms, appear to have some inertia behind them, but time will tell what eventually makes the cut and can find a pathway through the Senate.

On the other side of the building, Senate President Pro Tem Dave Schatz laid out a similar vision as that of the House, focusing on employment growth and job training. A recent St. Louis Public Radio piece outlined his agenda:

We face an economy that is very different than the one many of us grew up in,” said Schatz, R-Sullivan. “Advanced, practical skills are the ticket to the middle class and economic prosperity. We need to invest in the citizens of our state by offering training opportunities, regardless of age and experience. And any Missourian that wants to better themselves through hard work and education should have their state as an ally.

What does seem clear is that both the House and the Senate are generally in step with Governor Mike Parson’s priorities of workforce development and infrastructure, particularly roadways. How the two chambers will come to an agreement on specific ways forwards is an open question; the Senate, for instance, may be more predisposed to use a new internet sales tax to fund some of these items—which as we’ve said before, should be a non-starter.

But all things considered, these are good starting places for state government to be beginning the year from. We’ll keep you posted on their progress or, heaven forbid, their lack thereof.

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• Workforce development wasn’t just mentioned in the speech—it was singled out as one of the two most important policy priorities moving forward. Patrick Ishmael has been out in front of this issue, writing on the importance of workforce development, particularly in the area of vocational training. Readers of this blog may also have seen posts by Emily Stahly on the potential for charter schools to help give Missouri a more skilled workforce, and by Abigail Burrola on how a focus on industry-recognized credentials could better prepare our high-school graduates for good jobs after graduation.
• Infrastructure was the other issue designated as a top priority, particularly the pressing need to fund necessary repairs and improvements to Missouri’s highway system. Back in 2016, Joe Miller wrote a comprehensive paper on options for funding the Missouri Department of Transportation. More recently, Graham Renz and Patrick Tuohey have advocated for user fees as the best way to fund our state’s transportation needs, whether through a gas tax or some form of tolling.
• The Governor noted the drain on the state’s finances caused by Missouri’s high incarceration rate and his desire to avoid building more prisons. Ways to help keep prison populations down include reform of laws governing mandatory minimum sentencing and efforts to help ex-offenders enter the workforce, as Patrick Tuohey has written.
• The need to control the growth in the cost of the state’s Medicaid program was also discussed. Elias Tsapelas has not only written on this topic, but has also looked at measures being taken in other states to address the problem

Even topics mentioned only in passing during the speech have been covered by Show-Me Institute analysts, including telemedicine, tax credit reform, and educational challenges facing children with autism and other disabilities.

It’s encouraging to hear that so many long-overdue reforms may be on the docket during the current legislative session. As we watch to see if 2019 will bring important changes to Missouri policy, we’ll continue to research and advocate free-market solutions that will help move our state forward.

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The Missouri Department of Education and Secondary Education (DESE) publishes district-level data on standardized test results that we can use to track whether students are gaining or losing ground as they progress through the primary school grades. Student scores are tiered in four categories: below basic proficiency, basic proficiency, proficiency, and advanced proficiency.

Let’s look at math scores as an example. In 2017, 61 percent of Missouri districts had at least half of their third-graders achieving proficiency or above. (These districts show up as blue in the maps below.) There is plenty of room for improvement in these scores, but also plenty of time—third-graders have nine years of K-12 schooling ahead of them.

Unfortunately, the eighth-grade scores show that many students have fallen even further behind. Only 12 percent of districts had at least half of their eighth-grade students achieving proficiency in 2017. The eighth-grade map shows far fewer blue (above 50 percent proficiency) districts and many more orange and red (below 50 percent proficiency) districts than the third-grade map. It should hardly surprise us when these students struggle in high school—by the time they get there, they have been on a downward trajectory for several years. (Note: White areas on the map encompass districts that had so few students that they could not provide data due to concerns about student privacy.)

Show-Me Institute writers will be diving deeper in future blogs and publications to better understand how our state can get high-schoolers ready for the workforce (and for college) by the time they graduate. Workforce development depends on effective preparation of our students, which in turn (certainly in Missouri’s case) depends on a detailed and accurate view of school performance.

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(Data for maps from Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education 2017 Content Area Assessment Data)

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Hundreds of career and technical education (CTE) programs across Missouri offer practical training in fields such as agriculture, business, health care, culinary arts, construction, computer science, and others. In many cases, students who complete the required coursework are issued certificates to that effect. But a school-issued certificate alone isn’t always enough to ensure students can access the workforce; they need credentials that carry weight with employers in the world beyond school.

Private-sector employers have everything to gain by ensuring that new graduates are ready to start work right away. That’s why many professional associations issue their own industry-recognized credentials (IRCs), such as Certified Nursing Assistant (CNA) or Automotive Service Excellence (ASE) certification. CTE students don’t have to take IRC exams to graduate, but passing an exam can save students time and money at the outset of their careers. For example, a CNA certificate that could be earned as part of a student’s high school coursework might otherwise require about 5 months of coursework and several hundred dollars in tuition at a community college.

To promote IRC attainment among high school students, several states have begun offering teachers bonus pay for every student of theirs who passes an IRC exam. For example, for every student who leaves high school ASE certified, the auto shop teacher might receive $25 to $50.

Linking teacher bonuses to IRCs has boosted student IRC attainment in states that have adopted the policy. For example, Florida awards a $50 bonus to a teacher for each student who earns an IRC after taking a course that could earn them college credit in the relevant subject, and $25 for each student who earns an IRC after taking only high-school–level classes. IRC attainment has grown from 803 graduates in 2008 to over 86,000 in 2017.

Similarly, since offering CTE teachers bonus pay when students earn IRCs, North Carolina has seen a 53 percent growth in five years. In the 2016–2017 school year, over 160,000 IRCs were earned. By comparison, there were 8,566 IRCs earned in Missouri the same year (according to information provided by DESE), meaning that Missouri has plenty of room for improvement. Unbelievably, just six high school students passed the Masonry IRC exam and just five passed the Construction IRC exam in Missouri last year.

More students getting IRCs could create a stronger workforce for our state. Other states are finding creative ways to make this happen—shouldn’t Missouri?

The post How Can Missouri Get More Out of Its CTE Programs? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

As I’ve said before, state workforce development policies have to encompass the spectrum of professions in Missouri rather than just prioritize college educations, and the “Ditch Diggers” poem and video help to give human faces to the argument.

The post Video: An Ode to the “Ditch Diggers” Building Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

While it may be true that Missouri’s 2-year and 4-year colleges have room for improvement, business leaders should not overlook the potential to shape high school education to better meet their needs. In particular, the flexibility of the charter school model and ability to focus on career and technical education (CTE) should appeal to businesses and students throughout the state.

Bucking the traditional high school model, Robert Schwartz with the Thomas B. Fordham Institute explains that charter schools could “be co-designed by charter leaders in collaboration with regional employers and community college leaders. This would ensure that its programs were focused on preparing young people for careers in high-growth, high-demand industry sectors like IT, health care, and public services.”

In Fresno, California, a career technical education charter school—the product of coordinated effort by community and business leaders and the Fresno County Superintendent—is opening this fall. Not only does the charter high school’s curriculum align with what industry leaders want, but students can also take college courses at a local community college. In Wisconsin, the Green Bay Area Public School District received a grant from the state department of education to open an innovation charter school that would prepare at-risk students for high-tech jobs.

There is no good reason why similar opportunities are not available to Missouri’s students. Even now, industry leaders could work with local school districts to open a CTE charter school. Better yet, Missouri could allow charter schools to expand throughout the state and authorize universities to sponsor charter schools anywhere, not just in Kansas City and St. Louis.

Instead of just concentrating on higher education or writing off charter schools as only for urban areas, business leaders should seriously consider the role charter schools could play in developing a more skilled workforce.

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Missouri’s low unemployment rate is welcome news, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. There are other important factors that predict economic well-being, such as labor force participation and statewide output, where Missouri’s economy is underperforming compared to other states. Tennessee, for example, is a demographically similar state but has shown significant growth compared to Missouri while also boasting a 3.5 percent unemployment rate.

As shown in the graphs below, Missouri’s labor force is stagnating. During an economic expansion, one would expect the number of interested laborers to increase. Missouri, however, defies these expectations. Our labor force shrunk by almost 30,000 people from 2016 to 2017. In this same period, our neighbor to the southeast, Tennessee, saw a spike in their labor force with 81,000 people joining.

People are entering the workforce in Tennessee to take advantage of the employment opportunities there. Some are Tennessee residents who have decided to look for work, and some are coming from outside the state. The state’s low unemployment rate suggests that Tennessee is capable of absorbing these additional potential workers and turning them into payroll employees. Compared to Missouri, Tennessee is attracting and employing people at a faster rate.

Additionally, Missouri’s production lags behind that of Tennessee as well. Missouri’s real gross domestic product, the measure of overall economic health, is growing slowly. Since 2012, Tennessee routinely experienced 2 to 4 percent annual growth in real GDP. Missouri struggles to hit 1 percent annual growth. The growing gap between Missouri’s and Tennessee’s GDPs, shown below, is stark.

Such slow growth is problematic for Missouri’s economy. The national economy is doing well, but Missouri is failing to take advantage of the rising levels of consumption, investment, and employment found throughout the country and is consequently losing out on major economic opportunities.

So what about Tennessee as compared to Missouri makes its economy grow faster and pull more people into the workforce? There are a few possibilities. First, Tennessee has no income tax, and two years ago Tennessee began to phase out the tax on investment income and will eliminate it entirely by 2022. Second, beginning in 2014 Governor Bill Haslam started reforming higher education by offering all high school graduates the opportunity to earn an associate’s degree or professional certification at no cost to them. Moreover, there has been greater coordination between colleges and businesses to ensure that the curriculum fits employers’ needs so that students learn skills that are in high demand. Third, Tennessee is a Right-to-Work state. Fourth, Tennessee is known as having a business-friendly environment.

It may be hard to pinpoint exactly what has led to Tennessee’s success, but tax-cutting policies combined with investment in workforce development and other pro-business policies like Right to Work stand out as reasons Tennessee is experiencing growth that Missourians can only envy. Continuing to push for elimination of the individual income tax and exploring potential workforce development policies could work just as well in Missouri.

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But if the conversation about workforce development ends there, then it will have covered only the “seen” impact of public policy. Instead, policymakers should also consider the unseen consequences of oversubsidizing fields offered through our higher education system and neglecting other possible workforce investments. As the cargo-cultification of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) jobs has escalated in public policy circles in recent years, workforce development policy has increasingly emphasized professions requiring at least a bachelor’s degree, while other quality jobs that don’t require that version of education have been neglected—or even denigrated. 

Mike Rowe of Dirty Jobs fame, who’s become a fierce public proponent of jobs of all stripes, may have put it best in this response to a detractor last year:

To be clear—I strongly support education in all its forms. I have a college degree, and as I’ve said many times, it’s served me well. But I believe society is making a terrible mistake by promoting college at the expense of all other forms of education. For instance, the surgeon you reference (who I would indeed prefer to have graduated from an accredited university) will never make it to the hospital to successfully remove my appendix without a functional infrastructure, which depends almost entirely upon an army of skilled tradespeople. And yet, our society clearly values the surgeon far more than mechanic who keeps her car running, or the contractor who put in the roads that allows her to drive to the emergency room.

We need people with formal higher educations. We also need people in professions that don’t require such degrees. The perception—often promoted by four-year institutions seeking tax dollars—that high paying jobs require degrees is plainly wrong.

It certainly remains true that four-year degree holders tend to make more than those who don’t hold such a degree, but while the average salary might be higher, there is a lot of variance in those numbers when you get down to the individual level. I have countless friends in their early 30s with undergraduate and graduate degrees who are scraping by under the twin pressures of loan payments and compressed salaries in both STEM and non-STEM professions. At the same time, I also know countless blue-collar professionals in their early 20s who have been catapulted into life’s comforts with a rising middle class salary thanks to professions like construction that, especially now, have tons of jobs but hardly enough trained professionals to fill them. (We’ve talked about this issue before.) 

Policymakers who believe in limited government need to reassess what the state spends its money on—what the state subsidizes directly and indirectly—and this is as true in the realm of workforce development as it is in other parts of the budget. Surely, STEM industries and other higher education programs deserve attention, but policymakers should exercise considerable caution in treating those jobs as talismanic rather than as components in a much larger, and much more diverse, state jobs portfolio.

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But repeal of the state’s prevailing wage law won’t put Missouri’s tradespeople on the fast track to pauperdom. Indeed, in true supply-and-demand fashion, a shortage of skilled laborers in the construction industry is already driving up salaries there.

“I think that all craft professionals are in the mid-to-upper five-figures, and once you add in per diem and bonuses and incentives, it is not uncommon that we have workers making six-figures,” [Steve Green, vice president of the National Center for Construction Education & Research] said, adding that often accounts “for a lot of overtime.”

With a slew of good paying available jobs, why is the labor shortage so pronounced?

“Construction is not a sexy profession: we don’t attract the younger workers like other professions do,” NCCER president Don Whyte said, adding that his organization is trying to change public perceptions to show that through construction, families can earn a robust middle-class living.

There are a lot of layers to this policy onion. Americans have long placed a premium on a college education, viewing it as a proxy for eventual prosperity while, in important respects, stigmatizing professions where a formal education isn’t required. Certainly college-educated individuals, on average, make more than those who don’t have a college degree, but the rising cost of that education and changing contours of the modern economy have taken a toll on the economic slam-dunk that college once was. Complicating matters further is that as government has subsidized college educations, it has produced more college graduates who otherwise wouldn’t have chosen college — and who instead might have become skilled tradespeople, creating a workforce gap in an industry which, literally, builds our country.

That’s a long way of saying that Missouri probably needs to reassess the way it looks at its workforce policies. The state spends hundreds of millions of dollars every year providing Missourians the opportunity for a college education, but is focusing on college-educated professions a silver bullet for a balanced economic future? Probably not. And that’s why recent efforts to promote apprenticeship programs in the state are not only welcome, but necessary to the economic future of Missouri.

To be sure, the best way to advance that goal will require robust debate, but it’s long past time that the state looked at its workforce portfolio and recognized that a college education leading to gainful employment is good for the state—but so too is a debtless apprenticeship in an industry that will pay handsomely for those services. I hope this important workforce issue gets the attention it deserves this session.

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