"Retraining Workers Won't Work"

Rebecca Wilder:

Retraining workers won't work: From the NY Times, White House Plans Job Training Partnership (bold by me):

As part of efforts to address record-high levels of long-term unemployment, President Obama plans to announce a new national public-private partnership on Monday to help retrain workers for jobs that are in demand.

The national program is a response to frustrations from both workers and employers who complain that public retraining programs frequently do not provide students with employable skills. This new initiative is intended to help better align community college curriculums with the demands of local companies.

“The goal is to encourage community colleges and other training providers to work in close partnership with employers, to design a curriculum where they want to hire the people coming out of these programs right away,” said Austan Goolsbee, chairman of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers.

The White House has coined this program Skills for America's Future. The complication is, that lack of skills is not the problem for the 66% of the labor force aged 25 years and over without a bachelor's degree. The problem is the lack of jobs.

The chart illustrates the dynamics of employment by level of education through August 2010, as measured by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Note that the data are indexed to the onset of the recession, December 2008, where 100 implies that employment is now at its pre-recession level.

The only category to recover employment in full is that requiring a Bachelor's degree or higher. Furthermore, no material change in employment for BA's (or higher) has occurred since about a year ago, as indexed employment hovers around 100. No new jobs.

The levels of employment for those workers with the lowest levels of educational attainment, 1. and 2., are 3.4% and 5.4% below pre-recession levels, respectively. That is near 2 million jobs.

The White House program is targeted at community college students, or education category 3., some college or associate degree in the chart above. Employment for workers with a community college degree sits over 2.5% below pre-recession levels, or 1 million jobs. Retraining workers will not raise the employment level further.

The government needs to "add jobs", not "retrain workers", and stimulate domestic aggregate demand.