College-educated workers in Maine much more likely to get jobs, but there are serious barriers, report says

By Abigail Curtis, BDN Staff

Posted Dec. 13, 2011, at 12:52 p.m.
Last modified Dec. 14, 2011, at 5:29 a.m.

BELFAST, Maine — A new report shows that while the high school graduation rate in Maine exceeds the national average, the percentage of students who go on to college is well below average, and college-educated workers are much more likely to get jobs than workers with just a high school degree.

The report from the Mitchell Institute, “ College Access and Persistence in Maine,” points out both the benefits of and the barriers to a college education for Maine students. College persistence measures the students who stay in college from one year to the next, progressing toward a degree, without dropping out.

“We hope it’s a useful tool to get a quick view but a clear understanding on what those education trends look like in Maine,” Colleen Quint, executive director of the Mitchell Institute, said Tuesday afternoon.

Among the findings:

• The Maine high school graduation rate has grown from 74 percent to 82 percent between 2000 and 2010. That is above the national average of 70 percent, according to the study. However, only 60 percent of Maine students enroll in college within one year of high school graduation, compared to 68 percent nationally.

• Jobs for college-educated workers in Maine are projected to increase by 15,000 by the year 2018. Jobs for high school graduates, on the other hand, are projected to grow by just 2,000 in the same time frame.

• Maine workers with a college degree earn wages that are more than 50 percent higher than their high-school-educated counterparts.

• The average cost of one year at a public university in Maine grew from 35 percent to 46 percent of annual per capita income over the last decade. But the cost of community college over the same period increased by just one percent of per capita income, from 9 percent to 10 percent.

The findings show that economically disadvantaged children are 25 percent less likely to be proficient in math than their higher-income classmates. Math proficiency is a strong predictor of college readiness, according to the report. Many Maine students — 44 percent of those in kindergarten through 12th grade — come from families considered to be economically disadvantaged. Those families earn less than $41,400 for a family of four.

David Connerty-Marin, spokesman for the Maine Department of Education, said Tuesday that the information in the study is “certainly consistent” with what Commissioner Stephen Bowen has seen.

“We know that too many of our students are not graduating from high school. We know that too many of them are entering college needing remedial courses before they are ready for college courses,” he said. “We know that we need to engage more high school students in rigorous academic experiences that will prepare them for college and career.”

He said that Bowen has been working very aggressively with superintendents and others to pursue a vision for high school education in Maine that will provide students with more options and more engagement.

“There’s a lot of excitement and exploration by educators and schools around the state,” Connerty-Marin said. “We need to press on with that, in order to keep the kids going in the system, ready for college and career.”

Quint of the Mitchell Institute said that the research brief is a precursor to a major report on college access and persistence in Maine, which likely will be released at the end of 2012.

The Mitchell Institute has a core mission to increase the likelihood that young Mainers will aspire to, pursue and achieve a college education. Each year, a scholarship is awarded from the institute to one graduating senior from every public high school in Maine who will attend a post-secondary degree program. From 1995 to 2011, the Mitchell Scholarship Program has awarded more than $8.5 million in financial assistance to nearly 2,000 Maine students.

To access the report, visit the website www.mitchellinstitute.org.

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Anonymous

When I graduated from high school in 1978 you could get a decent job with a HS diploma. Now you can’t even get a decent job with a college degree. Nope, there is nothing wrong with our country.
Anonymous

I was making more money at a job when I was in high school than I am with a college degree in my current job. Shouldnt have moved away for college!
Anonymous

I hear all these promises about the great life a college degree gets you. yet when I do a little research with my eyes around public parks I seem to be seeing the opposite. Maybe the problem is that too many high school kids are being pushed into college when they would be better suited to a trade school.
A top tier electrician makes almost 75k a year while a bottom tier job in business management makes around 30.
Expensive college attendance has somehow become a right, and it’s way too easy for kids with no financial knowledge to get themselves into massive amounts of unsecured debt buying these educations from prestigious schools instead of more affordable alternatives. of course an 18 year old will choose the buy now pay later method to get what they want, its because they have not yet learned how the financial system works and they are after all, kids. Take an 18 year old to a car dealer and give then 10 grand, do you think they will choose to outright buy an aveo or will they use the money for a down payment on a shiny corvette with a 50k loan. My point is that schools that cost 40k a year should not admit people who cannot afford it. Its the same situation as the mortgage companies that gave those exorbitant loans for houses to poor people.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_TJYZV7JWWJCPG7BX65EM6UOHZ4 Skowhegan Resident

” the high school graduation rate in Maine exceeds the national average”

I disagree. The other 49 states have a very high percentage of minorities with very high rates of dropping out of high school.

I bet if one compared the rate of the white high school graduation rate of our state —to the—rate of the white high school graduation rate in other states, our state graduation rate would be disgracefully lower.
Anonymous

Yup, try to find a plumber at 0200 or have an electrician come over on a sunday afternoon to fix something that you screwed up. Oh you’ll get one but try to give him only 20 bucks an hour for showing up.
Anonymous

or an appliance repairman for that matter.
Anonymous

When are educators going to learn that you can’t wait until high school to have a rigorous academic experience. It needs to begin in kindergarten.
StillRelaxin

I’m pretty sure educators know the importance of receiving a rigorous academic experience and are actually providing one to our children. Are WE supporting such efforts? From the looks of the comments here thus far, it seems obvious that we are not.
Anonymous

If the numbers provided are correct isn’t it true then that more Maine kids are going on to college than the national average?
Anonymous

It is the parents. They all want rigor until their child doesn’t have a straight average. Then they are on the phone to the schools. You can’t have it both ways.
Anonymous

I don’t understand…so Maine is supposed to tweak its graduation rate numbers because we are a predominantly white state?
Anonymous

we didn’t have alot of money growing up. But one thing that my parents,aunts,uncles and grandparents taught us was to love reading and learning. My brother and I devoured everything we could get our hands on. From Current events magazines to encyclopedias. Even old engineering textbooks from colleges. There weren’t any excuses made about being poor and how “the man” was keeping us poor either. Our parents were also able to understand and help with alot of our work because they also read alot. You are so right in that parents need to take a more active role in what the kids are doing in school. Of course you have parents in my generation that
think they need to be friends with their children and not parents.
Side note. I remember when I was a kid playing Battleship. My dad pulled out some graph paper and showed my brother and me how he did it when he didn’t have the actual game. I thought that was the most awesome idea ever.
Technology isn’t the answer for everything but I have a feeling that just the opposite is believed these days.
Anonymous

My grandfathers were also quite handy with fixing things as well. I guess growing up during the depression like they did, they had to find creative ways to get things done. We are a spoiled society now with the answer to everything available at the touch of a button.I wonder how may people there are that can’t even put in a simple electrical outlet. When I was in school, shop class was seen as the loser class. I think that it may still be that way.
Oh and I am pretty tech savey as well but there needs to be a balance.
http://pulse.yahoo.com/_7T3YNF6MG3FPEAVTFIJC44VQUI Dlbrt

A top tier electrician makes almost 75k a year while a bottom tier job in business management makes around 30.

Brilliant!

Compare the Bottom with the Top!

Absolutely Brilliant!

What a Fair and Equitable Comparison,

It’s no wonder you are in the 1 %!
Anonymous

Well Dlbrt the point of doing that is it highlights what happens to students after graduation, some kids are vey academically strong and benefit from the advanced education that college offers, these students are the ones who go on to become brain surgeons and CEOs. They have jobs because they are the brightest candidates.
Most kids are not as academically motivated. These students are much better suited to a technical job and in fact would flourish in a more blue collar setting. Yet they are being pushed into college because their parents can’t face the music. They go off to school racking up debt like their staying in a 5 star hotel, having parties and going to spring break at panama beach. They graduate and find the top tier students have already been recruited to the best jobs, now they don’t have work because millions of other graduates are in the same situation.
So in the end the less motivated students end up in sales, booking or doing low level business management jobs making about 30k per year. If they had gone to a technical school and been a top performer they could be looking at making top salaries in the trade they learned, like electrician, plumber, or hvac.

I’ll add that financially I have a long way to go to be in the 1 percent, But I do have a good job a house and I can afford lots of extras on the side. My name ”theonepercenter” is because in the eyes of occupy protesters I can only be in the 1 percent to have these things so I must be a onepercenter.
Anonymous

You hit the nail on the head. I’m surprised that more libs haven’t commented on your post to tell you how “mean” you are.

Note, the report says that there will be 15,000 new jobs created for college graduates over the next 6 years. But with the present push for every one to go to college we will graduate several times that number. Most of which will have huge debts and no jobs.
Anonymous

Thank you, a prime example is EMCC setting up a program for table games at hollywood slots, they will probably sell this program to hundreds of people yet there’s probably 30 jobs to be had.
Anonymous

I have two degrees and a huge college debt. A decent job I hate, but am chained to because I cannot break away from the debt. If I could turn back the clock I would never have set foot on a college campus, instead I would have opened a business or learned a trade and worked for myself.

The quality of a college degree today is about half of what it was 40 years ago, however it costs much much more. College is mostly a scam. My advice to someone is to wait if you are not sure or perhaps seek out a trade school and learn a valuable skill. Do not saddle yourself with a mountain of debt with a useless degree because your mom and dad say you have to.
Anonymous

Ignoring your weird and unfounded tangent about parties and motivation or whatever, you’re still comparing two different things. You don’t get to compare an entry level position and then a position that takes decades to work up to and call it even. You’re kind of cheating in making this comparison in order to make your point. Even that kid in the low level business job will work his or her way up and within decades have a better paying job. Same goes for the electrician. You don’t just get to start at the top.
Anonymous

Ok so explain to me how a restaurant manager is going to ”work up to” being a heart surgeon or a wall street banker. The jobs with clear advancement paths are the ones that have already been taken by the students with a 4.0 and a internship.
That aside, please tell me you don’t think that all students have the same academic ability? The truth is that most kids going to college these days are mediocre students with average abilities and do not benefit from higher education, they end up being under performers in the fields that require the brightest candidates. If they chose a career that they could excel at then they would advance quicker or even own their own company.
Anonymous

Back when your mom and dad were young very few went to college, this meant that those few were qualified to do certain jobs. Nowadays there are millions going to college and that means millions are qualified to do the same limited number of jobs and are competing for them. Its a simple matter of humans using up recourses as we always do.
The occupy movement want government to create jobs for these millions to fit into but its the same as asking to create more oil after its all used up.
Anonymous

Why would a manager work up to a job in another field? That doesn’t even make sense. A manager might work up to a better and bigger restaurant — or maybe open their own.

I didn’t say aptitude didn’t exist. Your comments are unfounded though, “the truth is that most kids…” — that’s just your opinion, you should not present it as a fact.

I agree that kids should pick a career that works for them. You don’t have to make false equivalents in order to make that point though.
Anonymous

Back when my mother and father were young they could afford to pay for college with a summers wage. People attended college, but there were also opportunities outside of the academic landscape to make a profitable living.

Today, our devalued and near worthless currency coupled with student loans (guaranteed $$ from the government) have driven the price of college through the roof. Students who aren’t financially blessed can no longer attend school without going into debt. Now after four years and saddled with a mortgage young people are forced to work and most times do work not even associated with their field of study. Slaves out of the gate. Sad.

I don’t follow the occupy movement, but I do know this. The government doesn’t create anything- especially jobs. The government steals resources by force from individuals and redistributes those resources to other individuals. If a “government job” is created that means money is stolen from the private sector or printed (which causes inflation which is a hidden tax) eliminating or preventing job creation there. It is a zero sum game at BEST, usually worse, given governments inherent inefficiency.
Anonymous

They can get a job in Oxford too .
Anonymous

Many college degrees are useless.

Study a field like hard science, math, or such.

Or you will get stuck with huge student loans
Anonymous

How about a comparison of the salaries college-degree-requiring jobs in Maine pay compared to our neighbors in New England????
Anonymous

I agree completely (and holy cow, Governmentistheproblem, I’m even a liberal!), up to where you say that someone who “can’t afford it” shouldn’t go.

College needs to be re-framd as an investment in your future career, not as a place to learn about something that seems intersting at the time.

There are so many thousands of cases where a person from a very poor family has gone on to great heights and was able to easily pay back what they spent. And, of course, there are so many thousands of cases where a 20-year-old thought it was a good decision to spend 100k on a degree in 17th Century Yiddish Literature.
Anonymous

Real liberals agree with you.
Anonymous

I agree until you start ranting about the government stealing from hte private sector. The private sector would be a mere shadow of what it is now without the roads, police protection, economic development grants, etc that come from the government.

Also, there are dozens of cases where privatizing government services has led to both increased costs and decreased service. Yes, sometimes government is maddening and there are some really terrible government workers. However I can easily say the same about my experiences in the private sector.
Anonymous

So what exactly are you saying? That we should only be concerned with whites’ graduation rates? That somehow states with more minorities should have their numbers padded so it can match the “white standard”?

Aren’t all American (high school students) created equal???
Anonymous

My wife and I were both in the top 10% of our HS graduating classes, came from lower middle class families that couldn’t afford our tuition (even with our scholarships), graduated from UMO with degrees, and tried for the first 5 years post-graduation to stay close to home but just couldn’t make a live-able wage that allowed us to payback those necessary student loans. The report may say that jobs for college-educated individuals are being created when in fact the truth is that these are just “re-classed” jobs where the former pre-requisite was a HS diploma. I’d be interested to see how these jobs for college-educated individuals rank with regards to pay on the national average. We moved just outside the state and in less than 5 years, have both doubled our annual salary and made major headway at digging ourselves out of our educational debt. I know it will be a long time before we could look to move back, but kudos to LePage for trying to reverse the “brain drain” whereby the educated traveled south and those looking for Baldacci’s Mainecare headed north, passing each other on I95.
Anonymous

“The private sector would be a mere shadow of what it is now without the
roads, police protection, economic development grants, etc that come
from the government.”

-I disagree. Not only would police, roads and economic development exist without government. Those things would be funded without the threat of force and resources would be better allocated. To say without government roads, fire departments or police wouldn’t exist is not true considering all of those things existed before government- they were funded locally by way of donation, user fee or volunteers- and not by big government force.

“Also, there are dozens of cases where privatizing government services has led to both increased costs and decreased service. ”

I haven’t encountered a case like that, sorry.

“Yes, sometimes government is maddening and there are some really
terrible government workers. However I can easily say the same about my
experiences in the private sector.”

-Yes, but you can hold the private sector accountable. The private sector doesn’t hold a gun to my head. A business is held accountable by it’s customers. I can choose not to shop at Hannaford if they mistreat me, but I can’t choose not to fund the government if they provide me with terrible service or if they choose to fund a program I disagree with.
Anonymous

Thats a good point, it should be treated as an investment. Colleges should provide some kind of prospectus that identifies the future outlook of investing in their courses. I think schools should drop tuition prices though, it doesn’t matter how much you make unless you become truly rich, 100k and above is a substantial amount.
Anonymous

As someone in a restaurant owning family I can tell you that unless its a food truck or a place that caters to the wealthy nobody is going to be opening successful restaurants until the current business climate gets better, new restaurants are a deathtrap.
I’m really just going by what I see and hear, I have a lot of friends that are not happy doing academic work and would love the opportunity to switch to a more hands on job away from the fluorescents. But its a fact that most students are not 4.0′s.
Anonymous

You still can get a college education on a summer wage, waitresses at my families restaurants make around 9k a summer, thats plenty to go to school on. Or you can have a couple kids in high school which will qualify you for thousands of dollars in pell grants and yield about 8000 dollars in child tax credits every year.
a decent education can be had for around 10 grand in total but it does not come with the bragging rights and elitism surrounding prestigious (read luxury) schools.

If you have no money and you need a car to get from a to b then you buy a hyundai not a bmw. Then you save and get established using that cheap car to go to work and someday if you choose you can buy any car you want.
Anonymous

Your a free radical alright, thats for sure…
Anonymous

I think he’s saying we have more white trash than other states but less ethnic minorities.

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