At The Apex: The 2030 Educational Attainment Forecast and Implications for Bay State Policymakers
October 2014
In partnership with MassINC, the UMass Donahue Institute’s Economic and Public Policy Research group published an educational attainment forecast, looking at the problems the Massachusetts economy will confront as the large and highly skilled Baby Boom generation ages out of the state’s workforce.
To help inform policymakers at this critical juncture, the report examines the drivers of recent gains in educational attainment and projects skill levels in Massachusetts out to 2030. The forecast suggests that the remarkable increase in college-educated residents buttressing the state’s economic growth over the past two decades is poised to slow through 2020 and stall completely in the following decade.
Questions raised by the authors about the implications of this finding intersect with more than a decade of prior MassINC research, from studies exploring factors affecting the retention of young adults and strategies to maximize the contribution of older workers to reports examining the efficacy of education reform and the employment difficulties of young college-educated residents.
