Editorial: Make sure education matches the jobs

The unemployment hounding the nation is painful every day for the jobless, but it resonates especially on this day celebrating labor. Short-term unemployment is a result of recession-related factors, such as lack of demand for the products industry produces. But long-term unemployment is more about the gap between the education employers want applicants to have and the actual education of job-seekers. That's a gap that we must close, if our economy is to revive and stay strong.

The Brookings Institution's Metropolitan Policy Program examined job openings and educational attainment in our 100 largest metropolitan regions. The study focused on currently available jobs, advertised online. It created an equation for the average educational demand for workers in a given occupation and matched it with years of education completed by the average adult over 25. It found that, in regions with wide gulfs between the education employers need and the education potential employees have, unemployment averages about 2 percentage points higher than in regions with a smaller gap. As a positive example, the study cited Madison, Wisconsin's capital and home to a powerhouse state university campus. There, the gap early this year was minus 1.1 percent, and the unemployment rate was 5.3 percent. In sharp contrast, in Modesto, Calif., the education gap was 11.8 percent and unemployment 16.9 percent.

The New York metropolitan area, including Long Island, falls in the middle of those extremes. But this statistic shows we have problems: 46 percent of job openings advertised online this year require a bachelor's degree or more, but only 36 percent of adults older than 25 had that degree, as of 2010. There's also a gap in associate's degrees, conferred by community colleges. Early this year, 31.5 percent of the online job ads required an associate's degree or higher, but only 22.1 percent of the potential employees met that standard.

So we have to support vigorously our local colleges that do work consciously to align their course offerings with the job market. Nassau Community College, Suffolk County Community College and Farmingdale State College, a four-year institution, keep one eye on the classroom and one on the workplace. At Farmingdale, for example, each academic area has an advisory group of representatives from the business community -- the potential employers for the school's graduates. And the campus focuses on making sure the technology it uses in instruction mirrors what students will encounter on the job, such as new aircraft with the latest cockpit equipment. That emphasis on jobs seems to be working. This year, for the first time since it became a four-year college in the early 1990s, Farmingdale's enrollment has risen past 8,000 students.

For the long haul, we have to push state and county governments to invest in schools that understand the education-jobs equation, so we can make employment news brighter for future Labor Day celebrations.