BY Keith Halliday Education: one of the critical drivers of economic growth It’s tough to quantify the numbers, but McKinsey & Co. just tried

Our territorial governments spend a lot of money on economic development, investing in reports, feasibility studies and infrastructure.

But recent research by McKinsey & Company, well-known advisors to CEOs and prime ministers around the world, shows that the most effective economic development program is the public school system.

We all know instinctively that a better educated workforce leads to a stronger economy. Workers with more training and education tend to make more money and suffer lower unemployment rates. But it’s been hard to quantify numbers.

McKinsey’s economic study tackles this challenge, and the results are striking. For example, if the U.S. had closed its public education gap with Finland, Japan and Canada, its economy would be $1.3-trillion to $2.3-trillion bigger than it is today. That would make America about 10 per cent richer. If the gap between black and Latino students and their white counterparts were closed, that would boost the economy by more than $300-billion.

This would have a huge impact on wealth, income distribution and government services. With more tax revenue and less unemployment spending, more money would be left to invest in social services or taxes could be cut.

Canada was one of the top countries in the McKinsey study, but the figures represent a national average, and the North’s students are not average. In the NWT, less than 20 per cent of the people in some communities had a high school diploma or more in 2006, versus two-thirds of the NWT population. The employment rate for those without a high school diploma was half the rate for grads.

In Nunavut, government estimates show that about 75 per cent of high school students drop out, and only half of Nunavummiut aged 25-64 have a high school diploma.

In the Yukon, the high school dropout rate is around 40 per cent, while in rural areas (where many First Nations students live) the rate is over 50 per cent. Only two-thirds of non-First Nations students achieve a 50 per cent or higher score on the Math 9 Yukon Achievement Test, while less than 40 per cent of First Nations students do.

I’ve heard people in my Northern hometown talk as if the economy has a fixed number of jobs. If people get “too educated” there won’t be jobs for them. This may be true for highly specialized roles (there aren’t many openings for nuclear physicists in Whitehorse), but generally it’s a myth.

If you took 500 young Northern dropouts (that’s roughly how many drop out each year) and transformed them into plumbers, accountants and database architects, they wouldn’t be unemployed for long. And a few years later some of them would own their own businesses and hire other Northerners.

The territorial governments highlight education as a priority, and many fine words on the topic are included in budget speeches and departmental mission statements, but in the classroom, not much seems to change.

But it’s not just the politicians’ fault. There is a broad acceptance in our society that not much can be done about education. The statistics come out with dreary regularity, with almost no one paying attention that another 500 kids have disappeared off the education radar screen.

In the Yukon this year, the plight of Trevor the dog (his death sentence, reprieve and court-ordered behaviour-management plan) received more attention from citizens, media and politicians than the release of the Department of Education’s annual report.

We’re all going to have to take education more seriously. Or we’re going to continue the old pattern, with large numbers of Northern-born workers watching as the best jobs in government and resource projects go to well-educated Outsiders. And worse, our communities, territorial agencies and aboriginal governments will lose enormous untapped potential from young people who could have been doing so much more to tackle the North’s challenges.

More companies need to think about education like Northwestel does. They offer ten scholarships to Northerners, including five to aboriginal youth, for pursuing studies in fields from business to computer science.

The good news is that educational leaders can make a difference. The McKinsey report shows, for example, that five systems – including New Jersey and Washington, DC – were able to shave more than 10 points off the math gap between Latino and white students in Grade 4. It took 15 years, but in the long run this will make a big difference to the potential of those regions.

Keith Halliday is a Whitehorse-based management consultant.