The 2010 Competitive Redbook is, well, a ‘red book’ that lists 60 pages of rankings in economic, educational, housing and many other sectors of society. It’s produced by the Washington Alliance for a Competitive Economy, a consortium of business interests including the Washington Research Council, Washington Routable, Realtors, Association of Washington Business.

Regardless of your politics or interest area, the data is extremely useful and insightful and I look forward to the report each year. I even admit to carrying around the little book for frequent review.

I plan to make a number of posts with my thoughts and reflections on interesting tid bits of data. For me it’s hard not to start at page 35 with “Total Fall Enrollment as a Percentage of the Population for public institutions of higher education,” (Fall 2006 is the latest available although I suspect the general percentages remain steady).

Washington state ranks 23rd in the nation in the combined percentages of students enrolled in institutions of higher education. Middle of the pack? Seem acceptable? Take a closer look.

We rank an impressive 5th in the nation, 2.92% of the population, enrolled in our state’s robust community and technical colleges. We rank 46th, 1.44%, in the number enrolled in four year undergraduate institutions. And–believe it or not–we rank a humiliating 50th, 0.31%, in the percentage of students enrolled in graduate or professional degree production programs. Our two year system is strong but our four year system is struggling. We need both of them–aligned, engaged, connected, coordinated–to unleash the potential of our state’s future. The political infighting between the two ‘subcultures’ is hurting us all. And yet there is a certain inevitability to this disfunction until state government decides to embrace both systems in a more strategic approach to their roles, missions, virtues and capabilities.

The irony is that everyone in Olympia knows the dark side of this picture: We are among the most educated states in the nation, with Seattle close to the very top of major cities with residents holding bachelor or higher degrees. So what gives?

We import folks with college degrees and we are falling behind, rapidly and forcefully, in educating our own citizens.

According to the little red book, we rank 6th in the nation in the ‘net (domestic) migration. We’ve learned that a very, very large number of those moving here are highly educated folks. And that’s good. But not to the point of our failure to educate our own children.

The serious public policy problem is that we don’t ‘feel’ the acute pain of this problem directly enough. It’s a long term, structural, systemic issue in a world of short term rewards. We are able to fill jobs with out of state imports and while business is deeply frustrated about this, they deal with the reality in which they live. But I know that parents are feeling this crunch more than ever as they see their own children struggling to get a post secondary education.

Until parents, K-12 advocates, community activists, teachers and others ‘own’ the cold, hard, ugly reality that we are failing to sufficiently educate our own people, we will continue to create a less educated ‘native’ group of future citizens. We will rely upon importing college educated citizens and a workforce until one day we hit the tipping point on our economy. That tipping point, like in global warming, is here. We just can’t seem to get our hands around it.

This is a symbolic representation of our lack of a top notch education system as a state. There is plenty of blame to go around. The Legislature has not funded higher education sufficiently, our K-12 system is not preparing students well enough to succeed, our higher education dollar is torn between a two and four year system that looks too much like another ‘silo’ rather than an integrated strategy, we have a top down model of regulating our universities. The list goes on and on.

Next week we will release the 2010 supplemental budget. Regardless of what you read into the funding levels and footnotes, I am confident you’ll agree that we are not being courageously honest about this extremely serious, complex and difficult systems challenge. My deepest hope is that one day we soon we will.

This is the work of our time in higher education.

We have a beautiful image of ourselves–our perception–as one of the most educated, progressive, entrepreneurial, innovative states. And in a very real way it is true. But the ‘real deal’ reason is that we attract the best and the brightest from other states who move to Washington to seek their fortune and to build quality of life. As for our own children and the dream of widespread access to higher education, that is the dark and ugly side of reality to this picture.

We are so much more than what we’ve become.

Your partner in service,

Reuven.