State lagging in grads needed to fill new jobs

((Excerpt))

Ohio is not on track to produce enough college graduates to fill the anticipated 1.7 million new jobs that will be created statewide by 2018, according to new research.

Ohio has about 36 percent of working-age adults with a college degree. That number will need to increase to 57 percent within five years to meet market demands.

“To stay on track for Ohio’s future, we need to have more people with degrees,” said Jim Petro, chancellor of the Ohio Board of Regents. “We’ve got a lot of advantages, but we don’t have a workforce that businesses can look at and say, ‘Ohio can meet my workforce needs both now and in the future.’ ”

The gap between jobs and the people trained to perform them is not new in Ohio, but it has recently grown, said Robert Premus, an economics professor at Wright State University.

“Everybody’s trying to push higher productivity, which requires higher-skilled labor,” he said. “Those, in turn, tend to be those people who have gotten their college degrees and work experience, especially now in the more technical fields.”

Read more at DaytonDailyNews.com