Study finds that a higher percentage of North Carolina workers are prepared for jobs than those in Virginia are

Virginia often finds itself being compared with North Carolina. 

Tax rates and tourism can be debated, but here’s something less open to interpretation: A greater percentage of North Carolina workers are prepared for the jobs available in the Tar Heel State than their counterparts in Virginia are.

That’s one of the key findings in a Georgetown University report earlier this year that looked at the problem of “misalignment” — workers whose skills don’t match up with the demands of the workplace. This report has been circulating around financial circles since then; I discovered it when it was shared by both a banker in Wise County and the Federal Reserve Bank in Richmond. However, the issues it addresses are ones that Virginia workers and employers (and schools and policymakers) deal with every day, so I think the report deserves a wider audience.

The study focuses on the so-called “middle-skill” jobs: jobs that require more than a high school diploma but less than a four-year college degree. In other words, jobs where the ideal candidate has either an associate degree or a credential from a community college, or perhaps some other sort of institution.

Georgetown found that a lot of workers have degrees/credentials, just not in the fields where the jobs are. “In 283 of the 565 U.S. labor markets that we examined, at least 50 percent of all middle-skills credentials would need to be conferred in different fields in order for the occupational distribution of credentials to match projected labor demand,” the report said.

Georgetown also produced an interactive map that shows how much misalignment there is between the skills the workforce has and the skills the economy wants. The darker the blue, the greater the misalignment. (The black indicates no data available.)

You can see at a glance that most of Virginia falls into that darker blue, while very little of North Carolina does.

The data is organized by laborsheds — technically, commuting zones — so we can’t look up specific counties, but we can get close enough. In some parts of Virginia, the misalignment is rated at north of 70%. That means 70% of the credentials in those areas would need to be awarded in different types of programs to match up with the types of jobs available. 

We see this 70%-plus figure in parts of Southside (Halifax, Charlotte, Lunenburg, Nottoway and Brunswick counties) and Southwest Virginia (Dickenson, Wise and Lee counties), but we see it around Charlottesville and Harrisonburg as well, so this isn’t purely a rural phenomenon (although, nationally we do tend to see more misalignment in rural areas than urban ones). 

On the plus side, the most aligned parts of Virginia are the ones on our side of the Bristol-Kingsport MSA, although the misalignment there is still 45.5%. For those curious, in Hampton Roads, it’s 46.3%; in Roanoke, it’s 51.5%; in Richmond it’s 54.7%; in Northern Virginia, it’s 56.5%; in Lynchburg, it’s 60.8%.

By contrast, only two zones in North Carolina show up in the darkest blue and none approaches 70% (or more). The Hickory MSA comes in at 60.8% misalignment; two counties in the state’s western tip at 61.8%. Meanwhile, Charlotte comes in at just 39.7% misaligned, better than any place in Virginia. 

Let’s drill down into just what these statistics mean. In areas with high levels of misalignment, a laborshed’s middle-skills education and training providers may be producing credentials that don’t directly match the needs of the labor market. For example, in the Lynchburg and Martinsville areas, Georgetown found that the percentage of middle-skills job openings in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) is smaller than the percentage of middle-skills credentials awarded in STEM. Meanwhile, the percentage of middle-skills job openings in the health sector is larger than the percentage of middle-skills credentials aligned with those jobs. In the Roanoke Valley and the westernmost counties in Southwest Virginia, the share of credentials awarded in the education sector is higher, and the share awarded in the “sales and office” sector is lower, than the share of available jobs in those respective occupations.

One thing that’s consistent in every commuting zone in Virginia is that the share of credentials aligned with blue-collar jobs is lower than the share of middle-skill jobs that are in blue-collar occupations. That’s suggestive of something we’ve heard a lot in recent years: that there aren’t nearly enough people going into the trades. If you’ve ever needed a plumber, you know this to be true.

The Georgetown report doesn’t examine why we see certain regional disparities — other than to point out that people in urban areas have more opportunities to find jobs aligned with their skills — so ultimately we can’t explain why there’s such a difference between Virginia and North Carolina. I have to wonder if it’s because of the different origins of each state’s community college system — Virginia’s sprang up on the academic side as two-year branches of four-year schools, while North Carolina’s began as technical-oriented trade schools. 

Whatever the reasons, the challenge now is how to close this misalignment gap — and that ultimately leads us to a discussion of Virginia’s community college system and how it can do a better job of training students for the jobs available. Conveniently, that fits into the mission of Chancellor David Doré, who took the helm of the state’s 23-school community college system last year. “One of my No. 1 priorities is alignment with workforce needs,” he said during a recent interview. “I’m not running away from that study — I’m saying this is an opportunity in Virginia to really focus on alignment.”

I’ve heard Doré speak several times — in interviews, in speeches — and each time he has emphasized the need for the system to adjust itself to a) more students who aren’t in a traditional college-age cohort and b) the job demands of a changing economy. He ticks off some of the high-demand fields — cybersecurity, healthcare, skilled trades among them. “We don’t launch any programs that aren’t in these high-demand fields,” he said.

However, the community college system isn’t the only actor here. Ultimately, students decide what to study and what not to study, and the Georgetown report suggests many are studying the “wrong” thing, economically speaking. The study says 28% of the certificates and associate degrees granted nationally are in “programs with no direct occupational match.” Especially, “credentials in liberal arts, general studies, and humanities, which collectively represent 26 percent of all certificates and associate’s degrees conferred — and more than 90 percent of credentials with no direct occupational match.”

To cite an absurd hypothetical example, if someone has their heart set on studying medieval poetry, they can probably find a place to study it — they just won’t be able to find a job in that field. (I once interviewed someone who had studied philosophy but went into a very different field because, as he put it, “the big philosophy companies weren’t hiring.”) 

Doré says there are at least three challenges here. 

One, our schools need to do a better job acquainting students with what careers are available and what they pay. “The biggest challenge is giving students the kind of career and financial literacy to demonstrate what they’re going to need to live on in Virginia — showing them the labor market data in terms of wages, so a student has a good understanding of not only the wages upon entry but what are the lifetime career wages and opportunity for progression.”

Two, sometimes parents need to be convinced that it’s OK for their child to go into the trades rather than go to college. “We have to convince them, and in case of high school students, work with parents about career pathways,” Doré said. “I’m on a mission to reeducate people on the skilled trades. The plumber of today or the HVAC technician of today is not necessarily what it was.”

Third, community colleges need to restructure some of their programs. “About 80% of people go to community college saying their goal is to transfer and get a four-year degree, but only 16% get a four-year degree within six years,” he said. He wants to make sure even those students who don’t transfer still wind up with some kind of credential they can take into the workplace. 

It’s also a lot easier to say that community colleges should offer more classes in high-demand fields than it is to do so: Many of those are expensive to run. 

Laura Ullrich, a senior regional economist with the Federal Reserve, authored a report that applied the Georgetown findings to the Mid-Atlantic region served by the Fed’s Richmond office. She pointed out that as an economist, all she needs to teach a class is a whiteboard and a marker. Health care classes aren’t quite so simple. “A high-quality nursing dummy costs $150,000,” she said, and classes need to be small enough that students have ample opportunity to work with that nursing dummy. 

Classes in certain trades also require expensive equipment and qualified instructors who often can earn more money in the private sector. A few years ago I was visiting Mountain Gateway Community College in Clifton Forge and noted how many students were there that day for instruction toward getting a Commercial Driver’s License. College President John Rainone told me he could serve more CDL students but had a hard time finding instructors. I know a truck driver who, by virtue of his personality, would be a wonderful teacher — so I thought I’d do a good deed by calling him up to advise him of the opportunity. My trucker buddy just laughed; he said he’d talked to Virginia Western Community College about a CDL instructor position, but it paid half of what he could make hauling freight. 

Same for nursing instructors. (Cardinal’s Megan Schnabel wrote about this shortage of nursing instructors in 2022.) “At many of Virginia’s community colleges, there’s a waiting list to get into the nursing program,” Doré said. “For us to increase the capacity in those programs, it’s not like an accounting class, where we can put 50 students in a class. There are ratio issues.” In health care classes, students need ample time to work hands-on with that “high-quality nursing dummy.” In welding classes, students need time in the welding booths; that’s not something you can learn from a book. There’s a bottleneck between the number of workers we need for certain fields and our capacity to actually train that many.

Ullrich also notes that the state funding formula for community colleges doesn’t always match the economic realities on the ground. A school gets the same amount “for someone in accounting as someone in welding or nursing,” she said, but the latter two programs cost a lot more to operate. “So saying we’re going to teach more welding or HVAC or nursing is more difficult because money doesn’t flow” that way. 

That’s where all these devilish details turn into funding requests in Richmond. If there’s a big misalignment between the number of people credentialed for certain trades and the jobs available (and there is), then we need to persuade more people to train for those positions — and the community college system has to be equipped to do so. There’s not just a misalignment in credentials, but a misalignment in funding, as well.