Dr. Diane Hirshberg, professor of education policy, was one of the experts tapped to provide some perspective on how cities can attract and retain a highly educated workforce as well as thoughts on the impact of COVID-19 on the education system. The article appeared in the online financial site Wallethub. Here are the questions and Hirshberg’s responses:
Should local authorities target policies and programs to attract highly educated people? If so, what works?
We do need to attract highly educated people to Anchorage and Alaska, but we have an issue of not having a diversified enough economy. We used to simply have the highest pay, but that’s no longer the case, especially in the area of education, where we’ve slid in both K-12 and higher education in terms of competitiveness.
We do still have a relatively affordable housing market for those who can buy. That’s hugely attractive. But our cost of living otherwise (food, energy), is higher than many places in the lower 48 and if you have family outside we are far away, especially in the current climate.
In your opinion, what is the most important step we can take as a country to develop a more educated and skilled workforce?
We need to break down barriers to higher education and postsecondary training. First, we need postsecondary opportunities, whether academic or vocational to be affordable to all, regardless of income. Second, for students who have not been adequately prepared by the K-12 system for pursuing these opportunities, we need to create pathways that scaffold them without punishing them for failures of the schools and/or coming from less privileged backgrounds.
That means that if students need developmental education courses, they should be able to get that without cost. We also need open access institutions that provide high quality preparation. Our university is that – the University of Alaska Anchorage is an open access institution that offers opportunities ranging from vocational certificates to PhDs, and we’re relatively affordable. But there are still barriers because so many of our students have to work full time while pursuing their degree, and the state has systematically been divesting in our system, forcing us to reduce programs and raise tuition.
What steps can local governments take to ensure that learning remains uninterrupted during the current COVID-19 pandemic?
Universities and colleges need financial support. This crisis is costing enormous amounts of money, and it looks like it’s not ending soon. For those campuses trying to teach in person, we have to restructure entirely how we do that, and it’s expensive, especially having to reduce class sizes and the numbers in dorms, and to implement new safety measures. For those of us going online, faculty need professional development on how to teach well, and we need to make sure our students have access to the online resources they need, from software to hardware to internet access. It’s especially hard for our low income students and those in areas not well served in terms of technology, aka much of Alaska.
Likewise K-12 needs support. Again, we do need to get children back into schools where possible and when possible, not just for learning, but for their mental health and emotional needs. But, how do we keep children safe, keep the teaching workforce safe, and make sure children aren’t spreading the virus? Most schools do not have the facilities to enable the kinds of distancing we need, and again the least wealthy communities generally have the poorest facilities already. We are seeing enormous inequities in the out-of-school learning experiences for children. We need a major push to support families and children where they are, and this probably means providing internet for free, supplying technology to families, and also having an army of counselors. And all that costs money. But the immediate investment will save a lot in the long run.
What measures can be taken to mitigate the short and longer term impact of school closures?
In the short run, we need to make sure those children dependent on schools for meals continue to have opportunities to receive meals. Frankly, I’m not as concerned about learning loss as many, because we are all experiencing these challenges, and also children can and do learn at home from everyday activities. But we need to scaffold families to be able to recognize this and take advantage of it. Parents need to know that there’s math and science in cooking and that storytelling is part of language development. And then teachers will need a lot of support in assessing where students are when they do return to school, and we need to stop worrying about standardized tests and measures of progress for a while as we instead focus on meeting the needs of students.
How can the US reform its immigration policy in order to attract and retain highly educated workers from abroad?
I’m not an expert, but I will say we have to stop making it so hard and so expensive for universities to hire talented faculty from outside. We need a thoughtful security system that can assure that talent we bring in will not be a threat in terms of stealing tech, but we have to stop assuming that this is the motivation for most immigrants… it’s not.
