Inflection Point: Report Bolsters Case for New Pittsburghers
The Allegheny Conference on Community Development published a report this month, "Inflection Point" [pdf], which offers some profound implications for the role of the region's international students in the economy of western Pennsylvania. The report, which is the first extensive look at the region's workforce development in several years, draws attention to the unique challenges of Pittsburgh's demographic profile: a working-age population older than most US cities at a time when the Boomers are heading rapidly out the workplace door and into retirement.
One of the key conclusions of the report is that the Pittsburgh region will need 34,000 new workers each year until 2025, meaning the "region will need to focus on retaining students trained locally, and also increase inbound migration in order to meet workforce demand". The region simply does not have enough young people in the K-12 pipeline to fill this hole: with just 26,000 high school seniors each year, the Conference projects a deficit of at least 8,000 workers annually.
As might be expected of a region which has remade itself as an economy centered on education, health sciences and information technology, jobs requiring the baccalaureate are projected to grow here by 4.5%, but "Pittsburgh's retention rate of graduates is among the lowest of major cities in the country" and just one in three graduates from the region's "bachelor's and master's...programs remain in Pittsburgh five years after graduation".
In short, a key to Pittsburgh's future prosperity will be the attraction and retention of highly-skilled graduates. The report calls for employers to embrace a "collaborative effort to retain more college graduates" and that "to offset natural population decline, the region must attract skilled workers at a higher rate than is the case today".
Some of those needed workers will come from other parts of the US, but not enough. Inevitably, Pittsburgh must turn to the 15,000 international students already studying at the region's universities and colleges, a great many of whom are learning the very same skills which the Allegheny Conference report says will be in urgent demand here in the near future.
Much of the current national debate over immigration, nuanced or otherwise, posits the issue as a set of choices which policymakers are free to make. In the Pittsburgh region, as Inflection Point makes clear, there is no choice: the collaborative effort to retain graduates, which the report demands, must in substantial measure focus on retaining those students who have come to Pittsburgh from other countries.
Pittsburgh has no difficulty attracting international students. What Pittsburgh needs is to keep them.