Challenge for the Next President: Education

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had graduated from high school, the Alliance calculated, American households would have some $74 billion more in accumulated wealth. If African-American and Hispanic students graduated at the same rate as white students, more than $300 billion could be added to the U.S. economy by 2020. If every high school student earned a diploma, we would save money on health care, see crime and incarceration rates fall, and reap other benefits. We do these children and ourselves no favor by making it easy for our citizens to opt out of a basic education.

And we need to look beyond the basic education of K-12 students. Indeed, education has two necessary, complementary components: basic skills, including the ability to read, write, and use numbers to balance a checkbook or calculate miles per gallon, as well as job skills, those needed to excel at a trade or profession. And that's why we need to move away from the insular notion that a proper education culminates in receiving a degree from a four-year college. Many companies in many fields will soon be losing their most skilled and experienced workers as the Baby Boom generation retires. There will be a massive loss not only of people, but of critical knowledge and skills. In many instances the next generation has not been trained. Where will our electric utilities, mining companies, airlines, railroads, and manufacturers find the skilled workers to replace them?

To combat that problem, we should be encouraging more young people with strong nonacademic interests and skills to attend trade and vocational schools, as Germany does. Perhaps what we need is a "parallel" system of colleges where people receive specialized training, serve apprenticeships, take some college-level business and accounting courses, and are certified in their chosen fields. These schools would be more than trade schools or community colleges and different than traditional four-year schools.

Retaining Talent is a Must

This will help supply us with the skilled workers we will need in the future, including welders, electricians, plumbers, HVAC technicians, and others who build, operate, and fix things. Such careers can be challenging and rewarding and are something to be proud of. And such skills are necessary for the success of our country. The Germans have this right; we should learn from them. If we don't do this we could end up a country with an abundance of college "educated" people who don't know how to make things work, and don't know how to fix them when they don't.

As Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute writes in his new book, Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America's Schools Back to Reality (Crown, 2008), "The misbegotten, pernicious, wrongheaded idea that not going to college means you're a failure" needs to be discarded. Some people should not go to college, not because they are not capable of it, but because their passions lie elsewhere. We need to make it possible and rewarding for them to take this road less traveled."

Earlier this year, BCG, the World Federation of Personnel Management Assns., and the Society for Human Resource Management surveyed more than 4,700 executives in 83 countries and markets on future talent needs. BCG senior partner Rainer Strack, one of the authors of the ensuing report, "Creating People Advantage: How to Address HR Challenges Worldwide Through 2015," summed up the findings as follows: "It may soon be harder to find and keep talented employees than to raise money in an IPO."

Building a Skilled Workforce

Talent development, as we know, begins with education. Sure, the President needs to do everything he can to see that America's education system produces the teachers, doctors, engineers, scientists, accountants, and managers the U.S. will need to successfully compete in the era of freewheeling global competition. But he also needs to do all he can to see that America has a large and proud skilled workforce that can build and maintain the America of our future.

Harold L. Sirkin is a Chicago-based senior partner of The Boston Consulting Group and author, with James W. Hemerling and Arindam K. Bhattacharya, of GLOBALITY: Competing with Everyone from Everywhere for Everything (Business Plus, June, 2008).