The Maine Compact for Higher Education held their annual symposium yesterday, and the news was grim in several ways. I'll get to the gubernatorial grimness in a moment.
Anthony Carnevale of the Center on Education and the Workforce led off with a study projecting much greater growth in jobs and sectors that require more effective (and quite different) workers than Maine is currently producing. While I can quibble that the focus on post-secondary education as the gateway to earning power rests on some tenets that I think are worth challenging - the data, both current and projected, make clear that Mainers are going to struggle to find jobs that support families unless a dramatically different set of trends prevail.