Luis Uribe–EFE
California will face a shortage of close to a million university-graduate professionals by 2025, according to a new report that attributes the phenomenon to the retirement of baby boomers and the increase in the Latino population.
“California’s Education Skills Gap: Modest Improvements Could Yield Big Gains,” a study by the Public Policy Institute of California, reveals that many of those born between 1946 and 1964 will have retired by 2025, leaving a shortage of professionals.
Meanwhile the new generations of Californians include a high number of Latinos who historically have a low level of university education.
The California economy will need nearly a million more university graduates by 2025 than what demographic studies now foresee.
The state’s public institutes of higher learning currently produce a little more than 110,000 graduates per year, while private colleges contribute another 40,000.
California colleges and universities must increase their number of graduates by close to 60,000 a year, around 40 percent above the present level in order to fulfill expected demand by the year 2025, a very difficult goal according to the study.
“California faces a critical challenge,” according to PPIC Associate Director Hans Johnson, who co-authored the report with Ria Sengupta.
“But the good news is the state can dramatically improve the prospects for its economic growth and the futures of its young adult residents with relatively modest investments in the pathways students take to college graduation,” Johnson said.
In 2005 there were some 5.7 million university graduates between the ages of 25 and 64, and the PPIC analysis estimates that between 2005-2025 the state will produce 5.4 million new professionals with bachelor’s degrees, of which 3.3 million will come from California universities while 2.1 million will come from out of state.
In the same period, 3 million university graduates will retire from the work force because of their age, for a net total of 8.1 million graduates in 2025 aged between 25 and 64.
The analysis underscores that the California State University System has more than twice as many students as the University of California system.
But while five out of every six UC students graduate in a maximum six-year period, only about half of CSU students do so in the same amount of time.
The analysis shows that if CSU’s graduation rate is raised from 50 to 62 percent and if the UC graduation rate is increased by around 5 percent, the number of university graduates can increase by more than 200,000 by the year 2025.
“Increasing graduation rates is also a promising fiscal approach. The state has already invested in these students’ higher education, and keeping them in college a bit longer is less expensive than other options,” the report says.
Another opportunity suggested by the study is stepping up the transfer of students from community colleges to universities, since more than 70 percent of students in state higher-education institutes attend a community college, but only 20 to 30 percent of them ever transfer to a four-year college.
“Increasing the transfer rate by 22 percent would add more than 100,000 new college graduates by 2025,” PPIC maintains.
It also stresses the need to raise the number of high-school graduates who go straight into university in California, which is in 40th place among all the states in the country in that regard with 55 percent.
“Gradually raising the first-time college attendance rate to 61 percent — the national average - would increase the number of college graduates by more than 100,000 by 2025,” the study says.
It also mentions the need to offer greater economic aid to finance university costs — calculated at $25,000 per year for UC universities — as well as improving students’ grade scores and preparation.
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