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The following article was published in the Charleston Post & Courier's Business Major, a featured monthly column in the Business Review Section on October 16, 2000. Higher Education to Play Key Role in Lowcountry GrowthBy DOROTHY P. MOORE Special to The Post and Courier Business Major In a report released in September, "The State of the South 2000," the non-profit research group MDC made a number of important points about recent and future economic development. There are important implications for the South Carolina Lowcountry as our economic development needs raise important questions about investment in higher education. During the past 50 years, the South has moved from an economic disadvantage to a strategic opportunity and outpaced the nation in its rate of job creation. Job growth in South Carolina helped narrow the gap in per capita income in the state to 81 percent of the national level. While the gains in the past two decades have been impressive, most of the job growth in the South took place in the services and retail sectors and as a result of foreign investment. Did you know that foreign-owned branch plants today employ nearly one-fifth of the state's manufacturing workers? Considerable credit for past economic gains is due to the S.C.'s investment in education. The most recent data show that 29.5 percent of adults have a high school diploma, a figure only slightly under the national attainment of 30 percent. The 11 percent high school dropout rate is still too high, but is only slightly greater than the 10 percent national rate. A close look at developments in higher education during the past several decades reveals a mixed picture. Clearly, South Carolina is making important investments in higher education. During the 1999-2000 fiscal year, for example, state appropriations averaged $4,610 for each of the 176,278 students enrolled in public and private institutions at the undergraduate, graduate, and professional levels in South Carolina. The investment is some 15 percent higher than the national average of $3,909 in state expenditures. South Carolina's lower per capita income ($23,496 compared to $28,518 nationally) has an effect on who has an opportunity to go to college because tuition and fees in South Carolina's public colleges and universities average approximately nine percent more than the national average. But this is partially offset by the facts that tuition and fees at the state's 21 two-year institutions are about 8 percent lower than the national average and that tuition and fees at the state's 23 private four-year institutions are 27.7 percent lower. (Unless otherwise noted, the educational statistics cited here are taken or computed from tables published in the September 1, 2000 Almanac Issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education.) Today's economic development problem, the MDC research report suggests, is to take advantage of the opportunities and challenges in the new possibilities and rules of economic development presented by information technology. With a high-tech future bearing down, South Carolina is not particularly well situated. The state ranks 42nd among the states in high-tech jobs, a gap that reflects the fact that only 38.7 percent of South Carolinians attain education beyond high school, compared with 45.2 percent nationally. To make the shift from low-skill, low-paying work to higher-skill work, to a workforce predominately in knowledge-intensive jobs, the MDC report says, Southern states need to develop more new metropolitan cities, like North Carolina's Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill Research Triangle; Austin, Texas; Orlando and West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Atlanta, all of which have brought more than a half million or more jobs to their respective regions. Each of these regions is powered by one or more university systems that underlie today's fast growth economy. The North Carolina Research Triangle is anchored by Duke, UNC-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina State universities, all of which appear high on the listing of top institutions in federal research and development expenditures and also on the list of colleges and universities with endowments of more than $100 million. The critical problem for Lowcountry economic development is the fact Charleston is one of the few metropolitan regions in the nation that does not have the comprehensive research university necessary to provide the wide educational base needed for intellectual and economic growth. This suggests the importance of the Lowcountry Graduate Center, now in its initial planning stages, and its quick transformation into a major research resource. For Questions/Comments about this site, contact dot.moore@comcast.net. Site designed by Jackye Cocoros. |