If the state of California fails to strengthen higher education opportunities for low-income residents, the state’s workforce could be severely hampered with a shortage of as many as 2.3 million college graduates by 2025, a new study released Wednesday says.
In “Working Hard, Left Behind: Education as a Pathway from Poverty to Prosperity for Working Californians,” a report released by the Campaign for College Opportunity (CCO) organization in partnership with the Women’s Foundation of California and the Working Poor Families Project, the organizations document the challenges California faces in moving its poorest families from low educational attainment to college completion levels that would ensure the state has enough college graduates in its workforce. The report also prescribes a list of policy recommendations that should help put California on a course to meet future workforce demands.
“While there’s definitely great opportunity and wealth in the Golden State, this success has not reached everyone and the California Dream is really in severe danger of slipping away,” said Michele Siqueiros, the CCO executive director.
“On the one hand we have millions of hard-working, low-income adults who have limited chances at upward mobility because they don’t have better education and on the other hand we have thousands of companies that are seeking highly-skilled and well-trained workers. So, I think our job is to figure out how to close that gap,” she said during a webinar conference call on Wednesday.
According to the report, California has the largest number of adults without a high school diploma or equivalent in the U.S. More than one out of 10 adults older than 24 have less than a ninth-grade education and, of the 24 million adults between the ages of 18 and 64, nearly one in five have not earned a high school diploma or its equivalent.
Other report findings noted that:
