Editorial:
Richer Because We're Smarter
By Steve Tuttle
It
was not some hype-happy local paper but the
eminently respectable British magazine The
Economist which concluded recently that the
Southeast has been the locomotive powering
the American economy during the nation's
longest and strongest economic expansion in
history. Such a conclusion, reached by eminent
economists from the dispassionate distance of a
few thousand miles, should have received more
attention in the national media. But because this
is the South, after all, it didn't.
Now the Southern
Regional Education Board (SREB) has analyzed a
host of statistics in the 16-state region and
produced a report which demonstrates that The
Economist, if anything, understated its
conclusion. The SREB found, among other things,
that between 1988 and 1998 about 9.4 million new
jobs more than half of all the new
jobs in the United States were created in
the Southeast. In North Carolina alone, 804,000
new jobs were created in that 10-year span, a 27
percent growth in employment.
A principle reason the
Southeast has garnered all those jobs is because
Southerners became better educated. From 1986 to
1996, the Southeast, which is home to barely a
third of all American colleges, accounted for 55
percent of the nation's total increase in college
enrollment, the SREB found. College enrollment
grew 12 percent in the nation in that span, by 16
percent in North Carolina and by 24 percent in
the region. North Carolina's population now has a
greater percentage of college graduates than high
school graduates in 1940.
But if it's now a given
that the South is a far wealthier, more educated
place than most people give it credit for, there
are some warning signs, particularly in the
affordability of higher education. In the region
over the past decade, state tax funds supporting
higher education, adjusted for inflation, have
grown only by about $70 per student. And in North
Carolina, as in most states, the percentage of
state taxes going to higher education actually
has declined from 18.8 percent of the
budget in 1986-87 to 14.6 percent in 1996-97.
Colleges are making up
the difference by raising tuition and fees.
Tuition accounted for 10 percent of colleges'
income in North Carolina in 1985-86; it's 15
percent now and climbing. Twenty years ago, a
year at a public four-year college cost the
equivalent of 13 percent of an average family's
income. It now takes 17 percent of that family's
income.
Education is the goose
that laid the Southeast's golden egg. We
shouldn't be starving that goose.
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