Ohio’s Manufacturing and Economic Development Challenges

By Ned Hill

I think we have a national crisis in experiential education. I’ve seen it build up over the past 20 years. In my studies of economic development, here’s what we have learned.

Despite its decline in social prestige and learning expectations, vocational education holds immense potential. Vocational education can become rigorous and respected when it combines soft (or social) skills, hands-on applied STEM learning, high expectations and supervised part-time work. The journey of vocationally relevant hands-on education can start in secondary schools, with career-supporting offramps in a trade, or move on to community college to become an industry-certified technician or culminate in college with a bachelor of science degree in applied engineering technology. 

Instead, we face shortages of people entering the skilled trades and manufacturing workers who do not know algebra or systematic ways to solve problems, which are essential in a workplace that is moving from analog to digital operations technologies. 

Ohio is a manufacturing state. 

Ohio State responded to these observations by establishing the Bachelor of Science in Engineering Technology degree on our regional campuses in autumn 2020. We consulted with Ohio’s manufacturing employers who provided input on the curriculum, and employees of local companies serve as mentors who provide hands-on learning opportunities beginning with students’ first semester in the program.

The state’s government can help Ohio State service our manufacturers by ensuring funds to maintain the equipment and manufacturing labs and hire instructors, possibly in conjunction with neighboring community colleges and vocational schools that educate engineering technicians. 

We also need to figure out how to incentivize employers to create and train in-plant mentors, how to award credit for workplace learning, and how to pay the students. Conversations with our engineering technology students and recent research on apprenticeships show that they respond to at-work experiential learning better than in-class learning; much of that difference rests with the mentors. A large challenge is to find ways to compete or partner with industry to hire faculty and instructors.

A related problem is that public policy and research universities have an engineering funding problem that leads to an emphasis on research engineering, which is a matter of national economic security. The need for overhead and funded research to pay for equipment and salaries drives universities to emphasize research engineering over applied engineering. Both are required by an economy that invents and makes products. 

The dropout rates from engineering schools is a sign that many students learn by connecting their heads and hands and need a form of math and science that differs from the bedrock of research engineering programs. 

Broadly trained engineering technologists are the applied engineers who integrate digital and analog operations technologies, undergirding the next era of productivity gains. If the U.S. cannot educate engineering technologists who can translate newly invented technology into cost-competitive products, our technology strategy can be summarized as products that are “invented here and built over there.”

Despite its competitive significance, the importance of technology education to a university is a very hard sermon to preach because of its cost in relation to revenue. The National Science Foundation, the federal government and research universities focus on overhead revenue, equipment purchases associated with research and faculty off-loads to offset the cost of science and engineering education. However, engineering technology is tuition-driven and does not generate overhead revenue, research course releases are unavailable, and the cost of equipment is brutal. Compounding the fiscal challenge of educating engineering technologists is that faculty members are sought out by industry, which can offer wages that tuition charges cannot match. A related fiscal challenge is that many regional campuses are not permitted to charge students the lab fees needed to replenish equipment. 

Land-grant institutions, in particular, should be leading a charge to figure out a business model that works so we can put experiential learning into higher education. For most families, if experiential education extends their child’s tuition payments by a year, as some internships and co-ops do now, co-op education does not make financial sense. How are we going to make this work?

American engineering education must maintain excellence in research engineering while leading the way in applied engineering. Doing so is a matter of state and national economic competitiveness. 

Here in the Glenn College, experiential learning takes place either through internships or by participating in the Battelle Center for Science, Engineering and Public Policy’s interdisciplinary problem-solving teams. Students from across the university work together to address technological and social problems with a client. These students are better prepared to enter the workforce with because of the soft skills they develop as members of a team. They quickly find out that team and interpersonal skills are often required to put what they learned in their degree programs into practice.

The private sector can create and structure part-time work that teaches important soft skills of responsibility, initiative and teamwork. Providing meaningful part-time work will address the demand side of this labor market problem. 

The competition for admission into highly selective colleges and universities encourages students to pack their applications with a raft of extracurricular educational experiences that demonstrate leadership or a passion for a subject area. Do we ask applicants about what they learned through their part-time jobs? Have we asked what skills the applicant developed in customer-facing service jobs? 

I think STEM has hijacked American education. If you look at jobs that pay, STEM education makes a difference in occupational earnings. However, social and interpersonal skills are equally important and affect more jobs in high-paying occupations. Soft skills result from experiential education. However, developing soft skills does not need a formal internship and co-op. Get a part-time job!

Manufacturing companies don’t want to build their own workforce; in their perfect world, all manufacturers and most employers want to hire seasoned workers. The demographic cliff and disruptions in Ohio’s labor markets following the COVID pandemic have made Ohio’s manufacturers realize that looking for experienced workers is a hunt for purple squirrels. The founders of the Mahoning Valley Manufacturers Coalition formed a transformational manufacturing-sector-led workforce education and training effort that operates at the scale of regional labor markets. The Ohio Manufacturers’ Association used the Mahoning Valley’s model and has taken it statewide, recognizing 20 regional Industry Sector Partnerships. Columbus and Washington, D.C., have important roles in supporting these regional efforts. However, these sector-led efforts need higher educational institutions to listen and be servant leaders in responding to the immediate occupational demands and developing longer-term technical and business skills.

Mike Garvey, CEO of Youngstown’s M-7 Technologies, told the Ohio Manufacturing Institute that his shop floor is a place where the Flintstones meet the Jetsons. We must work with employers to build career ladders so that the Flintstones and their children can evolve into the Jetsons.