Report Finds U.S. Competitiveness May Suffer Due to Lack of Human Capital Development

Long-term U.S competitiveness is threatened due to a lack of progress in U.S. child development areas that are the best indicators of human capital development, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress — The Competition that Really Matters. The authors found that U.S. gains in education, health, family income and childhood poverty and pro-family workplace policies have remained stagnate while our competitors including China and India have increased significantly since 1980. If U.S. policymakers do not address these issues, the authors contend that the next-generation U.S. workforce will not be prepared adequately to compete in a global economy.

While the U.S. economy weakens, the U.S. share of the world economy fell to 19 percent in 2011 from 25 percent in 1980, China and India continue to increase their share of world economic output since 1980. The authors found that between 1980, China's share of world output grew from 2 percent to 14 percent and India grew from 2.5 percent to almost 6 percent.

India's and China's rapidly increasing competitiveness is connected directly to their willingness to invest in education, according to the report. China and India have focused their national economic strategies centered around a commitment to early childhood, educational and technological development. For both countries these numbers will continue to grow. By 2030, China will have more than 200 million college graduates, more than the entire U.S. workforce. By 2020, India will confer more than 8 million college degrees a year, compared with 2 million in the United States.

For the next-generation of U.S. workers to remain competitive in the increasingly global economy, the authors recommend that policymakers must develop a national strategy focused on holistic education and early childhood development efforts. These efforts must lead to increases in the quality of early childhood education and learning, parental involvement and teenage with work experiences (e.g., job-shadowing, apprenticeships and internships). The report provides several recommendations to achieve these goals including:

• Set realistic, yet ambitious national education goals that prepare students for college and careers of tomorrow;
• Improve teacher quality; and,
• Invest in early learning and increased parental involvement.

The report also calls for the U.S. to adopt best practices from across the globe, in particular European countries. These include increasing teacher quality (Finland), strong workforce apprenticeship (Germany) and strong national education standards. Read the report...