In North Carolina, 85 percent of new jobs in the near future (many still unknown) will require education beyond high school.   Simply producing the numbers of graduates needed will require a major focus in recruitment and retention practices that spans the entire educational pipeline. Increasing the number of workers with a post-secondary education will require a three-pronged approach of 1.) plugging the pipeline 2.) increasing access in geographically diverse areas and 3.) targeting underserved populations.

While a focus must still fall on STEM fields (science, technology, engineering and math), more and more jobs are beginning to depend on a complex and creative set of “right-brain” skills – including problem solving, communications, entrepreneurship and collaboration.  It is not that the “left-brain” capabilities that powered us in the 20th century are no longer necessary.  Rather, these skills are not enough to power economic growth in the future.

• ∗By 2014, North Carolina will need over 400,000 new workers with at least a bachelor’s degree.
• ∗North Carolina’s colleges and universities (both public and private) are expected to produce only 254,000 of these workers.
• ∗Out of every 100 8th-graders in North Carolina only 58 graduate from high school, 38 attend college, 28 return for a second year, 18 graduate from college.
• ∗A study by the Pew Charitable Trust indicated that high-quality early childhood education programs reduce the high school drop-out rate by about 25 percent.
• ∗By 2017, 30,000 more students will graduate from North Carolina public high schools and 22,000 of them will be Hispanic.
• ∗Roughly 60 percent of available jobs in the U.S. require skills possessed by only 20 percent of the workforce.
• ∗One-third of students enrolled in the University of North Carolina system come from just four counties, all of them urban: Wake, Mecklenburg, Guilford, and Forsyth.