Aging Population
The Courant is reporting that somehow Connecticut managed to add 15,000 people according to US Census Bureau estimates of state populations. I’m going to assume that means net gain, because it would be interesting to know how many people moved out of Connecticut too. Slow population growth is usually another indicator of an aging population, and a short trip to Google reveals that Connecticut
Norwalk’s media age is 36.6 compared with New York City at 34.2. A median, for those that have forgotten means that half of a group, in this case population, is younger and the other half is older than the median. The national median age is 35. It is safe to say that an older median age indicates a population that is less productive in the workforce. Think retirees. Job growth does not come from retirees.
Here’s a stunning graph that I’m going to use as an example of what Connecticut, and more importantly any town in Fairfield County, is facing when it comes to trying to spur economic job growth.
The National Institute of Health (NIH) is largely a research hospital where all the important government funded medical and health research takes place. The graph comes from an article on whether there are too many PhDs. An interesting question for sure, since the ability of our global competetive edge comes from the realm of science, engineering, math and technology. But I digress, if the health care industry and bioscience are supposedly the leading industry categories of job growth, what does it say for employment of newly minted scientists when funding for research is creeping towards the the workers nearing retirement?
In the U.S., we are constantly hearing about how the country is falling behind in science. We need more scientists to fill all of those jobs we want to create. And the cure to that is to fund more PhD programs! Yet, when you ask graduate students and postdoctoral scholars what their individual experiences are, a science career is a very tough road with low pay and few career prospects.
The graph shows that despite the increase in number of PhDs and increased R&D budgets, the people who are getting grants to do project research are getting older on average. What does this mean? It means that young people aren’t getting the funding to do work in their research field and so increasingly seek other jobs. Jobs that somehow aren’t in the field they studied and trained in. Hoyt’s artcile even opened with the factoid that the guy who narrowly missed out on a Nobel Prize in Chemistry is working at a car dealer.
If young scientists aren’t landing jobs in science, just who exactly will be creating those 21st century jobs of the future? That is one scary implication.
In looking at Connecticut, the UCONN Connecticut State Data Center predicts that by 2030 there will be a statewide 17% decline in student enrollmnet k-12. Norwalk has laready seen a decline that should continue trending downward, here’s a link to how the state of Connecticut is regionally seeing student enrollment changes.
