Connecticut could learn from Rhode Island employer-led centers

By Scott Benjamin

The Daily Meal says that Connecticut's most iconic landmark features "soaring towers and ornate gates."

No, it's not hedge fund king Ray Dalio's Copper Beach Farm mansion.

It is the biggest taxpayer and the largest employer in a city that has less land than Brookfield.

Wikipedia reports it has an endowment of $30.3 billion, which is enough to retire a chunk of the Nutmeg State's long-term pension liabilities.

Its most famous graduate is not Watergate journalist Bob Woodward, but the fictional, but fabled, Frank Merriwell - who excelled at football, baseball, basketball, crew and track, solved mysteries and righted wrongs in a series of books.

Trouble is - as the unidentified members of the Scroll & Key Society say - you can't get admitted to Eli Yale's school unless you have an SAT score that makes Mike Trout's OPS look like a tiny fraction, you speak four foreign languages fluently or have captured a Nobel Prize in Economics by age 17.

Ned Lamont, who currently lives both in well-groomed Greenwich and among the upper crust of Hartford, got his bachelor's degree at John Harvard's school, where the entry standards are just as high and there is a library named after his family. He wrote his undergraduate thesis on former Louisiana Gov. Huey Long and lived in the same room where Tommy Lee Jones slept years earlier when he was All-Ivy League and played on the winning team in the most famous 29-29 victory in college football history.

It has not been confirmed whether Lamont ever visited the Lampoon Castle.

However, the 89th governor of Connecticut got a master's degree at Eli's elegant New Haven campus - where Garry Trudeau drew his first commercial comic strips, which mocked the quarterback on the losing team in the most famous 29-29 victory in college football history.

Lamont earned his graduate diploma from the School of Organization & Management, and after decades of making cable television affordable for college students he decided to put those skills to use at his current job where he works in a domed building near the insurance towers.

The Yale Daily News - which was once edited by Lamont's fierce 2006 U.S. Senate campaign rival, Joe Lieberman - reported in 2018 that Lamont is "an active [School of Management] alumnus who has taught at the school and served on its Board of Advisers . . Lamont said in an interview earlier this year that his Yale [School of Management] education prepared him to move between the private and public sectors and to understand the value of partnerships."

Since taking office, he has embraced both sectors.

CT Mirror reported last October that upon announcing the establishment of his Work Force Council, Lamont "engaged in two of his favorite past times . . . drawing boldface corporate CEOs, academics and philanthropists s into public-private partnerships and tilting at the silos he believes prevent government agencies from working effectively for the common cause."

Lamont might be worth more than all the prize winnings since Pat and Vanna started presenting puzzles on America's Game, but he has underscored that that only a tiny part of the Nutmeg State's population has ever been educated in the hallowed Ivy League halls and entered the velvet rope economy.

Well before the first No Tolls microphone was activated, Lamont was discussing all the jobs that are advertised in Connecticut but go unfilled at Igor Sikorsky in Stratford, Electric Boat in Groton and Travelers Insurance in Hartford.

It has been a chronic problem. Former Lt. Gov. Michael Fedele (R-Stamford) was saying more than a decade ago that there was a mismatch between job openings and the supply of qualified applicants.

In 2010 when he was seeking to win the coveted office on the second floor of the gold dome, former Gov. Dannel Malloy (D-Essex) kept reminding us that Connecticut was the only state other than Michigan that had fewer jobs than it had in 1989.

A February 21, 2018 headline at Patch.com - just five weeks after the current governor announced his bid for the Democratic nomination - stated, "Lamont wants to train workers for existing jobs."

At that time, Lamont told Patch.com, "A degree from a technical high school or a community college in advanced manufacturing will get you an initial higher paying job than if you had a degree in Sociology from Yale."

In July 2018 he added to Patch.com, "We have an incredible opportunity at our community colleges, because there are jobs available for their graduates. However, we have 8,000 fewer students graduating from those colleges than we did eight years ago."

When Lamont and Lt. Gov. Susan Bysiewicz (D-Middletown) - who earned her bachelor's degree at Connecticut's most iconic landmark, where she wrote a book about Connecticut's 83rd governor, Ella Grasso (D-Windsor Locks)- started their victory lap after garnering a 44,500 vote plurality, The Day of New London on November 9, 2018 quoted the then-governor-elect as saying, "We are the Silicon Valley of advanced manufacturing."

Lockheed Martin, which make the helicopters at Sikorsky, is the largest defense contractor in the United States and Raytheon Technologies, which recently acquired United Technologies in Farmington and manufactures military aerospace equipment at the Francis Pratt and Amos Whitney plant in East Hartford, is now second. Last year Wikipedia reported that General Dynamics was ranked fifth. That company operates Electric Boat.

Reports indicate that partly as the result of incentives offered under Malloy, Electric Boat could add 18,000 jobs by 2030, Lockheed Martin could have an increase 8,000 positions at Sikorsky by 2032 and Raytheon could expand the jobs at Pratt & Whitney by 8,000 positions before 2030.

Sacred Heart University Government Department Chairman Gary Rose, told Patch.com last year that, "The Pentagon budget will largely determine [Connecticut's future job growth] with so many defense-related industries."

Last October Lamont appointed former aerospace design engineer Colin Cooper as the state's chief manufacturing officer.

Advanced manufacturing consultant Rich DuPont of Branford, the president of Resource Development Associates in Watertown, told Patch.com in January that Cooper's appointment had immediate impact, as there is now a better collaboration between the state departments of Economic & Community Development, Education and Labor.

Fred Hochberg, the chairman and president of the Export-Import Bank under former President Barack Obama, wrote in his recent book, "Trade Is Not A Four Letter Word" (Avid Reader Press, 299 pages), that Gina Raimondo - the second-term Democratic governor of Rhode Island, who got her law degree on the campus where Hillary met Bill - has helped create new job training programs tailored toward the skills that businesses report as being the business needs.

Hochberg stated that the state has benefited by explicitly pairing up education and training programs with jobs that actually exist today and that companies expect to need very soon.

He wrote that in 2014, the year that Raimondo was initially elected as governor, the state had the second highest rate of employment in the nation. In five years it went from 49th to 27th as it slashed the joblessness rate almost in half. One of the biggest factors was strategic training.

"Real Jobs Rhode Island, which the state launched in 2015, engages the private sector to help shape skills education and guide government investment responsibly," Hochberg reported.

"In the seaside town of Westerly, the state worked with a century-old submarine manufacturer General Dynamics Electric Boat to coordinate resources; Rhode Island build a job center nearby, and worked with the company to develop a curriculum that would meet both the physical needs of General Dynamics - such as pipe-fitting and welding m- as well as the advanced IT needs that accompany modern vessels," he added. "In less than three years 1,800 locals have studied at the training center and been hired by General Dynamics."

Hochberg continued, "Real Jobs Rhode Island has been replicated this story across the state, creating thirty-two employer-led training partnerships that have engaged over 430 local businesses so far - helping ensure that the skills job seekers are learning are those that can translate into sustainable careers nearby."

He also lamented that there is too much emphasis on education and not enough on skills in the American economy.

"The fact is, nearly 70 percent of all American adults don't have a college degree - a credential that, while important, doesn't necessarily say much about current skills or their capacity learn new ones," Hochberg wrote.

"This sort of thinking limits the growth of these businesses, and it severely curbs the prospects of 70 percent of our population, who have plenty of skills to offer if given a chance," he declared. "This just isn't an American problem; in Mexico, for example, they require most bank tellers to have a college degree."

"Two-thirds of the job openings don't require an advanced degree," said Gary Cohn, who was the first director of the National Economic Council under President Donald Trump.

"The problem we have is we're sending too many kids to college," Cohn told Hochberg.

Former Obama White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, who now advises the Markle Foundation's Rework America Task Force, told Hochberg that three-quarters of the job offerings for construction managers require a bachelor's degree. Yet, only 25 percent of the current construction managers have a bachelor's degree.

Hochberg stated, "In the sectors that are poised for the most growth over the next few years - health care, construction and IT foremost among them- a six-week training program or apprenticeship could in many cases be just as (or more) helpful than a four-year degree, at a fraction of the cost."

He explained, "The American labor market is remarkably opaque; job openings often linger unfilled as qualified candidates are kept at arms length by our national obsession with credentials and pedigrees. In 2017, in fact, there were 6.6 million open jobs - and 6.4 million Americans seeking employment. Most of [the backlog] has to do with our deeply ingrained tendency to focus on degrees rather than skills."

The chairman of Connecticut's Work Force Council is Garrett Moran of Greenwich, the former president of Year Up, a program devoted to help young adults develop hands-on skills development that has been profiled on CBS' "60 Minutes, and a former executive on Wall Street with the Blackstone Group, a private equity management firm.

He told WFSB Ch. 3-Hartford's "Face The State" last November that there will be many job openings in information technology, advanced manufacturing and health care over the coming years that will require applicants to have more than a high school education but something less than a four-year college degree.

Hochberg wrote that when Raimondo took office in 2015 only one percent of the Rhode Island public school students had training in computer science. Under the CS4RI initiative by the 2018-2019 academic year, all grade levels have instruction in computer science.

Patch.com reported in July 2018 that Lamont wanted to extend robotics instruction to the middle schools in Connecticut.

Raimondo also helped develop Prepare R.I., which matches high school students with internships and apprenticeships in a wide range of industries. Rhode Island high school students to take college classes for credit at no cost.

The Connecticut Work Force Council has a membership ranging from NBC Sports President Peter Bevacqua, Electric Boat President Kevin Graney, state Sen. Tony Hwang (R-28), Connecticut AFL-CIO President Sal Luciano, AQR investment firm Managing Principal Cliff Asness, Indeed online job service COO Dave O'Neill and Bigelow Tea President Cindi Bigelow.

A report is due by January 1, and it seems likely that they will try to install some of the same initiatives that Rhode Island has established.

U.S. News reports that in 2017 there were 32,914 high school students seeking entry to Connecticut's most iconic landmark and only 2,285 were admitted - a 6.9 percent acceptance rate.

DuPont told Patch.com in July 2018 that there were currently 15,000 manufacturing jobs vacant in Connecticut and the number could grow to 30,000 by 2023 with pending retirements.

Talk about a diverse state.

The unidentified members of the Scroll & Key Society tell us that in the tradition of Frank Merriwell, Lamont wants to right some economic wrongs for the good of the common cause.