Meanwhile, businesses are watching—and getting nervous.
“They’re looking down the pipeline to see where they’re going to get their workforce, the skills that those individuals are going to have, and what their success rate is going to be in postsecondary education,” said Karen Elzey, vice president and executive director of the Institute for a Competitive Workforce at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Businesses want to see policies in place that will ensure the future workforce is well-trained and educated. But, she warned, if they can’t find that workforce here, “they’ll go where they can find it” by hiring immigrants or going overseas.
Simon Rosenberg, president and founder of the progressive think tank NDN, believes that the nation has to find a way to make the necessary financial investment so they’re prepared for what will be a more competitive world and accept that it will likely have to shift some of the investment now going to an older, predominantly White population to a younger, more diverse one.
The challenge over the next few years, during a period of potential austerity, he said, will be developing policies “to make sure that we’re funding to the future and not to the past. This is a titanic battle on federal and state levels.”
But. as Brownstein pointed out, there’s a converging mutual interest that hasn’t been articulated in this debate before: seniors should want to help younger generations acquire the skills they’ll need in order to pay the payroll taxes that fund Social Security and Medicare.
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