Over the past decade, policymakers and business leaders across New England have been concerned that the region’s slower population growth and loss of residents to other parts of the country will lead to a shortage of skilled labor—particularly when the baby boom generation retires. Prior to the Great Recession, the concern was that an inadequate supply of skilled workers would ham...
A mismatch is brewing between the supply of skilled workers in New England and the increasing demand for such workers, according to a new report by the New England Public Policy Center at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston.The study by senior economist Alicia Sasser Modestino shows that, over the next 10 years, New England will face not only a shortfall in the number of workers it needs to pull th...
“About every two years someone comes up with this story. There is absolutely nothing to it—it's simply not true,” Peter Capelli, Professor, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, commenting on the Georgetown's college labor supply shortage forecast.
—“Prediction of Worker Shortage Has Critics,” The Press-Enterprise (Riverside, Calif.), April 10, 2010.
The recent response by Anth...
The notion of the "college labor market" as a fixed set of occupations is remarkably static. In contrast, we assume that job and skill requirements are dynamic.
(This lively debate over future demand of college-educated workers will continue in our Forum.)
Northeastern University economists Paul E. Harrington and Andrew M. Sum argue that in our recent report Help Wanted, we “radically over...
The Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce has engaged in a highly publicized campaign claiming that the nation will face a very substantial deficit of college graduates by 2018 if the American postsecondary system fails to rapidly expand the number of college degrees it awards each year. Indeed, the employment projections developed by Anthony Carnevale and his colleagues at Georgetown U...
The Federal Reserve Bank of Boston will host a free forum, titled "Mismatch in the Labor Market? Ensuring an Adequate Supply of Skilled Labor in New England," on Tuesday, Nov. 30, from 8:30 a.m. to noon.Alicia Sasser Modestino, senior economist at the FRBB's New England Public Policy Center will describe the misalignment between the number of workers employed and the mix of skills needed in the ...
The New England states, like the rest of the nation, are finally starting to show signs of a recovery from the Great Recession of 2008, albeit at different paces. Three of the states, however, still have unemployment rates that are about four percentage points above where they were before the recession began in 2007 (Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut). The smaller increases in unemploym...
In the past two years, the global financial crisis has wreaked havoc on businesses in America and abroad. But the gloom and doom seems to have had the opposite effect on business schools. The reason is that a recession often signals the perfect time for proactive students to sharpen their skill sets, shift their career goals (whether toward a different industry or role) and place themselves in a p...
