The end of summer is near and the mass exodus of the 2008 cohort of El Paso graduates from regional secondary and postsecondary institutions will soon commence in a series of preliminary waves departing during the first weeks of August. Parents of all cultural backgrounds and entire social networks throughout our community are bracing for the strain in communication and the excessive costs for travel that our new graduates will catalyze as they move away into distant urban centers throughout Texas and the rest of the country. How many of these future El Paso expatriates in the making plan to come back to operate here during the immediate future?
Perhaps a better question is whether we are asking enough of them to plan to remain part of El Paso during the decades ahead because this region offers tremendous opportunities to create wealth while simultaneously benefiting the local community via new endeavors and enterprises available throughout the future development of every young El Pasoan.
Although most of the individuals who are about to depart plan to remain in semi-regular contact with their hometown of El Paso during their undergraduate and graduate degree programs at campuses far away or during the early phases of their professional careers, many of these young El Pasoans will eventually end up increasingly more disconnected from their community of origin as each year transpires. Unidirectional departures away from El Paso have become the norm for most graduates as local secondary institutions have swelled and graduation rates have risen. Additionally, while regional postsecondary institutions have provided a greater number of degree programs steadily, El Paso’s current economic landscape and organizational infrastructure still fails to provide adequate opportunities in many contemporary fields of employment for our residents with corresponding degrees from various institutions of higher learning.
Each new generation of El Pasoans are increasingly more aware at even earlier stages in their social development that the economic profile of our city operates in stark contrast to the rest of the state and lags behind most of the major cities throughout the greater southwest. In other words, many families have come to believe that because the majority of businesses operating regionally are offering an hourly pay as well as a salary scale that continues to be one-third less than what the majority of American cities with a population greater than 750,000 provide, their children should logically seek out greener pastures and never look back.
Only a fragmented minority, it appears, are seriously challenging their family members to consider seeking a career in the local community or to strive to create something new in El Paso during their early lives. Why should they when even the experts are in consensus regarding our bleak condition. Our economic profile, the current employment sectors, our current education attainment levels, and our ability to sustain community coalitions were heavily critiqued in a report prepared for the Paso del Norte Group that was highly circulated earlier this year on higher education and the economic future of El Paso. El Paso is currently unable to establish a new economy that demands high skills and provides high wages, they argue, due to a combination of internal factors, but particularly due to the longitudinal outcomes of our annual cohorts of new graduates.
The experts who configured their analyses based on an extensive investigation of El Paso’s unique demographic and economic features as well as the implications of its missing intelligentsia (i.e., the net loss of educated El Pasoans of every age) and asserted that the primary export of the El Paso region is talented people. Again we find ourselves passively observing a peculiar cycle repeat and refine itself here in El Paso as we watch our community bleed talent during another annual eruption. Meanwhile every other community in America but our own is poised to benefit in the long run from our annual investment in the public and private education of our local youths.
Myself and many others believe our educational administrators should work to construct greater opportunities for positioning students in grades 6-12 to investigate local histories, explore the contributions of their families to the local economy, review the scope of initiatives available to enhance greater levels of civic participation, and discuss leadership, stewardship, and ownership in the region in general and the local community in particular. Too often the top administrators and officials in these educational institutions are primarily focused on keeping their internal systems functioning, funded, and reducing the number drop outs. Time reserved for strategic and sustained discussions about what will happen to their successful students ten years or more from now as a direct result of their policies and practices is maintained at minimal levels. I assert this based on (1) the limited hours of coursework that our area K-16 students receive that contextualizes their direct relationship to the regional dynamics and multidimensional complexities of our community, as well as due to (2) the lack of funding reserved towards investigating the longitudinal outcomes of initiatives intended to prove that the application of particular curricula or learning strategies actually produces advancing rates of postsecondary degree completion across a full spectrum of local students.
Meanwhile, the myriad institutions that undergird the local economy and the current leadership base are simultaneously adjusting to the generational retirement and rapid departure of longstanding decision makers across multiple strata. Do the current leaders across these various fields ever wonder of these thousands of talented graduates, who and how many will want lead next as we look towards 2010 and beyond?
It is time for us all to take a moment as the end of the summer nears to think about how we can each work towards continuously cultivating stronger relationships with local students and new graduates so that they can individually discuss and contextualize their collective role in the future of our community. To me the PDN report is a tool that provides our organized sectors with a standardized basis and body of metrics to discuss where we are today and how we can work to actualize a new economic vision for El Paso. According to the report we should all be actively discussing a future El Paso with “high value jobs and a workforce that can handle the demands of those types of jobs,” but I believe we should not be solely looking to attract massive employers to consider relocating to El Paso. Instead we should be challenging the masses of young El Pasoans, current El Paso expatriates, and even our new graduates to become a burgeoning body of emerging employers who open and dominate a range of new professional fields that demand creativity and increased social connectivity.
Although it appears that entities such as REDCO and even a large contingent of our community’s elected officials believe that luring large companies to our area will provide the ideal incentives for recent high school graduates to seek employment locally, a critical review of the top levels of new companies as well as entrenched entities that operate throughout our primary sectors of employment (e.g., local government, private health care, public education) provides ample evidence that people not from El Paso frequently have a greater propensity to achieve greater levels of wealth and social mobility than area alumni from local schools.
More effectively promoting these macro initiatives for economic development are part of the equation for achieving a more prosperous El Paso in the decades ahead, however I believe that we can coordinate the transformation of El Paso’s economic landscape through the strategic micro-cultivation of local talent. In other words, we have the means to systematically prepare and cyclically integrate greater numbers of each new cohort of degree holders from El Paso into the social and economic fabric of our community. Since the PDN report also challenges the organized sectors of El Paso to create a greater range of mechanisms that support start-up and entrepreneurial companies, then it also inherently requires these same sectors to collaborate during the long-term educational development and professionalization of our area graduates to comprehend the tenets of enterprise and the concepts as well as skills that ensure successful collective endeavors with local groups.
Opportunities to construct ‘circular pathways of return’ for various sectors of our new graduates exist and can benefit our community consistently, we simply have to coordinate them and connect their ongoing learning as well as their early professional development with more effective linkages to local initiatives, organizations, businesses, and a greater number of social networks. From that point we then need to articulate a vision of the future landscape we want these next generations to inhabit, such as an high skill/high wage El Paso, and challenge ourselves to prioritize their concurrent development accordingly. I believe our success will arm our community with not only the talent it was previously predisposed to lose, but also with a body of recommendations on how to alter the demise of similarly moribund mid-size cities that are imploding due to loss of their educated sectors and the simultaneous mass retirement of older generations of professionals.
In essence understanding how to capture our own talent throughout the end of this decade and into the next is not only the key to our future, it is also lightning in a bottle.
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Joseph Villescas is an independent consultant who operates Villescas Research, Media, & Instruction and a lecturer at the University of Texas at El Paso.
vatoman
August 3, 2008
Mr. Villescas makes total sense in trying to harvest our own "Creative Class" in order to create businesses that will employ more El Pasoans.
We are still having a difficult time breaking away from the economic model created in the 20's and 30's. This model endorsed by civic, business and educational leaders promoted cheap labor, low wage, and a low educated population thus promulgating a community of low expectations. Several generations down the line the efforts by some sectors to keep El Paso a cheap place to live inhibits those efforts to improve the quality of life. It is this quality of life that other communities have to offer for those educated and talented enough to be able to expect not only more amenities but more opportunities.
I applaud the City's efforts, particularly Joyce Wilson and Charlie McNabb in trying to learn how the economic theories of Richard Florida's "Rise of the Creative Class" may apply to our own border community. Nevertheless, the battle to keep El Paso a cheap place to live will be a major nemesis in making El Paso a better place to live. A better El Paso with more choices will keep more of the educated and creative talent than a cheaper place which is the preference of those who are easily satisfied and content.
coldrock
August 3, 2008
UTEP is a commuter school. Assuming that, to a great extent, alot of the students have not spent a lot of time outside of El Paso. So, they have been indoctrinated in the El Paso atmosphere. I don't say indoctrinated to imply weak minds, but at some point we have to acknowledge the environment's effect, especially when you consider the considerable factors involved in enforcing such a zeitgeist. For instance, when you consider the deep-rooted realities that because of our closeness to Mexico, our place in the Texas pecking order, our geographic isolation, the oppressive homogeneous nature of the population, and thus the culture, these things contribute to terribly powerful obstructions to the dynamism and forward thinking you espouse. Things that have very limited sway in our community, like the arts, respect for intellectual property, respect for labor itself, are essential to foster the kinds of environments that will attract, nurtue, and in fact be in the best interest of recent graduates.
Until you address these things which to me are so entrenched as to be a question of decades of razor-sharp leadership and deep community commitment, you (we) have no realistic chance to recreate these dynamic environments we would emulate.We are too busy surviving. It may be realistic and I agree very honorable, indeed worthwhile, to recreate them as petri dish enclaves in downtown high rises and upper valley mansions, East Side telecom contractors, but until you address the fundamental societal attitudes that place us at odds with the emerging age, it will just remain another question of haves/have nots, just another 350,000 dollar home that I have no idea who can afford. You are in fact espousing a personality transplant. I honestly and sincerely wish you LOL (lots of luck).
expat Al
August 4, 2008
Maybe that's the "El Paso thing" - - what coldrock is talking about.
Truth is graduates and students are inspired by real life, breathing, here and now opportunities - to work with so and so company, study in so and so's laboratory, become an apprentice to so and so. They don't make life plans to work in "sectors" or "macro initiatives" or "linkages to organizations, businesses, and social networks."
Bright young minds have gravitated to the west coast to work in aviation, to Hollywood to work in the film industry, to Bay area for the emerging computer/high tech boom, to Houston to work with Dr. DeBakey. Frank Lloyd Wright attracted young architects to Scottsdale (Phoenix). Once upon a time even, rockets scientists came to El Paso to work with Wernher von Braun. What solid unambiguous opportunities exist in El Paso right now, or will in the future? Social services? construction contracting? The family's maquila business? Does El Paso have even one thing that can be summed up as tidily as in the movieland exhortation "plastics?" Solve THAT problem and then El Paso will be on its way to something good.
The senitment is the right one, but the reality is just not there, and the bureaucratic, policy approach you suggest will not reap much results. The true reality is that the proudest teachers in town are probably the ones that can say their students made it out, accepted to a tier one school, or making it big somewhere else. Its like "sal si puedes."
C. Senor
August 6, 2008
Its like "sal si puedes." - Al
It's not like that. It's all about Big Business and attracting them to come here (Dell, Apple, IBM) and huge corporations, engineering firms, more government contracts, and more tourist attractions such as big named Six Flags, Sea World or something Disney would do it. More recreation would be good, too. Young professionals are actually currently making some good cash and doing big things in the EP. Many of the people we went to school with primarily left El Paso for a job. Create more jobs for those that are leaving and you won't have this problem. If you didn't realize it, UTEP is already doing tier 1 research, they are just not considered tier 1 for a couple other reasons.
pop
October 14, 2008
superb!