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Education & Workforce

Education and Workforce issues are critically important to the region’s economy and the New England Council has long played an active role in the effort to satisfy the need for skilled workers for our region’s businesses, both through our region’s world-class colleges and universities and through job training programs.

The ongoing shortage of skilled workers, especially in the fields of science, engineering and information technology, became so pronounced in the late 1990’s that it had the potential to stall the region’s economic growth. The New England Council undertook a collaborative project at the time with Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies that was the nation’s first regional approach to crafting new strategies for dealing with the skilled worker shortage.

The collaborative project assembled a Commission on High-Technology Worker Shortages that identified several keys to helping address the problem – skilled immigration through the increased use of programs such as the H-1B Visa Program, job training programs that will allow workers not currently in IT fields to received funding to attend school and become trained in this field, and programs to increase the amount of students who leave our region’s K-12 educational system with strong math and science skills.

In 2005, Council member A.T. Kearney prepared an analysis of the region's economic competitiveness. The report found that rising structural costs of housing and labor, and relative under-investment in public higher education are causing New England to lose its competitive edge to other regions of the country.

The Council continues to advocate on behalf of policies and programs that will help the New England region meet its employment needs and encourage attendance at our unmatched collection of colleges and universities.

On Capitol Hill there are two major pieces of legislation due to be reauthorized that deal with these two issue areas – the Workforce Investment Act (WIA) and the Higher Education Act (HEA).

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